With more & more companies/individuals requiring to market their websites in the organic search results, obviously there’s going to be a higher demand for on-page & off-page seo services. Many of us now can build a website, regardless of whether it’s developed as a relevant & search engine friendly resource or not… (i’ll move onto this subject at a later date!).

Focusing on link building services, the problem lies with how much people are actually willing to spend. The current trend tends to be pointing towards many of these affordable link building companies that are located in countries such as India. I am very aware that a good percentage of these companies are professional & reliable and also deliver a well executed service, but on the other hand some of these so called “affordable SEO Firms” can be a complete knightmare and a total waste of money. A few years ago I outsourced a small link building project to one of these companies & it ended up me having to re-do all the project at a loss. The links that they built were done so using a variation of black-hat methods, one of them being link cloaking. The over-all service was completely terrible.

This is really just one example of how these firms are giving the SEO industry a bad name, but as the old saying goes – “what you get is what you pay for”. I still continue to develop links myself, I don’t necessarily believe in link buying & always stress the importance of why it is important to develop links naturally, create great content & others will link to it.

When it comes to choosing a link building service, think of it as an investment that will grow your online presence. Link building when done properly is a very professional job, so be prepared to spend a realistic amount & in the long-term you can expect a good return on your investment.

For a good few years now we have been taking advantage of many blogs having the “nofollow” attribute removed from their comments section. I often visit many of these blogs, while it can be easy to fall into the trap of abusing this system I have always remained very disciplined when creating a blog comment. When I say disciplined, I mean writing a relevant & useful comment to compliment that particular blog post along with an anchored link pointing to an external link. The negative side of dofollow blogs is the high amount of link spamming, this just seems to be increasing on a daily basis & even with many blog owners taking action with spam filters, these mindless spammers are still getting the job done. This is a great shame & will probably eventually lead to the demise of dofollow blog comment link building. It’s just another reason for why automated link spamming software should be banned! But how? I hear you say…..

As most of you are probably aware, anchor text is an extremely important factor when building links. You have to determine how you use your keywords with the full effect, over using or being too aggressive can lead to potential problems with your Google rankings, but when it comes to Bing you can take that extra risk & step up your aggression level.

I think we tend to over-look anchor text on too many occasions, time after time I have seen poorly written anchor links, whether they come across too aggressive or just generally too spammy – it’s all good practice to go back to basics every now & then, no matter how advanced link building has become.

Creating Effective Title Tags

One thing that I come across almost on a daily basis is a website with a poorly written title tag. Some are keyword stuffed and separated with commas & others just include two or three words.

The Correct Approach:

When writing a title tag, it is important to bear two things in mind. The first would be the need to write something clear & descriptive about your website, this should ideally include your website/company brand along with a short description (make sure you do keep this short – save the more detailed description for the meta tag). Secondly, you need to make sure that your title is not just search engine friendly, but will also appear interesting and relevant to the human eye as this will be vital for getting the best possible click-through in any relevant search results.

If you want to rank high in the real world, you need people who say that you are good. On the Internet, if you want to rank high in search engines, you also need “votes”, just like in the real world. You need people to say that you are good. If you have enough people saying that you are good, the search engines will rank you higher. This is where backlinks come in. Backlinks are like votes, they tell the search engines that you are good. The more “votes” or, backlinks you get, the better you will rank in the search engines.

Also, many people think that all links were equal. This is not always true. There are some sites that are, in the eyes of the search engines more important or respected. Just like in the real world, if the President said that you were good, people would value that much more than if a hobo said that you are good. A good way to see how important or respected a site is in the eyes of the search engines is by looking at their Google Page Rank. This is a scale from 0 to 10 telling you how important a site is. Google is 10 and Facebook are Page Rank 10, other sites like Wikipedia, MySpace and Adobe are Page Rank 9 and so it goes.

The more links you get from high Page Rank sites, the higher your chances of good search engine rankings are.

The easiest way to get a lot of valuable backlinks is to hire a link building service. They can get you the links you need. Also, they will know where to find the high Page Rank websites where they can get backlinks that will help you rank better.

photo credit: jeanbaptisteparis

Here is where you get .edu backlinks - kind of

Let’s first look at why you want to have backlinks from universities and such. The major search engines assign a rank for any given keyword based in part on the number of links that are pointing to that web site. With major search engines I mean Bing, Google and Yahoo.

And when I say in part, that is true for Google and Yahoo. Bing actually ranks web sites mostly based on the number of links. But the sheer number of links is one side of the coin. The other side is the quality of your backlinks. It is commonly agreed that Universities and educational facilities are trustworthy (The truth is they are not, but that is a different topic).

Anyhow, Google & Co. “think” they are trustworthy. So they have programmed their algorithms to give links from .edu domains a higher value. Whether this is true or not: You are the judge. Do your own research if in doubt.

Here is how to get these fruits: Head over to Google.com and squeeze the information out of that beast with a customized search query:

site:.edu inurl:blog "YOUR KEYWORD GOES HERE" "post a comment" -"Comments to this post are now closed" -"you must be logged in”

Here is what this search query means:

site:.edu You are looking for web site that have .edu in the URL

inurl:blog You also want sites that are blogs. On .edu domains these blogs are very often in the directory “blog”

“YOUR KEYWORD GOES HERE” Part of the search should be your keyword, as you want to post your comments on related blogs only.

“post a comment” If a web site has a comment submission form, they usually have this or a similar wording.

-”Comments to this post are now closed” It is very annoying to read a post and come up with a nice relevant comment, only to find out after you’ve hit the submit button, that the comments on this particular post have been closed 2 years ago or so. So, we filter this out with the minus sign in front of it.

-”you must be logged in” I am a little lazy, so I try to avoid blogs where I have to first create an account and then I can post. If at all possible, I prefer blogs that allow immediate comment submission.

Sounds not to difficult, huh? Just go ahead and give it a spin.

Why am I writing this post? Well, I hope that you would like to know how it is being done, but that your time is beeter invested in other things and you decide to hire me for your .edu link building.

So, to make a long story short, here’s the deal:

I find .edu blogs related to your web site and post some nice comments there for you. Leaving a link back to your site with your keyword as anchor text.

One way to get contextual links is to cherry pick web sites

One method to get contextual links is to cherry pick potential link partners. You find a web site that would be a good fit and then you give the web master a call and arrange to get a link to your web site placed on that web site.

In exchange you can offer to write an article about that web site and publish it, or write a press release or design some kind of link bait grafic that they can place on their web site.

Basically you persuade or bribe the other web master to place your link. Make sure that you only do this very selectively. If you overdo it, one of your target web masters might get very annoyed and might decide to report you to Google for link buying effort.

While you basically pay for the link here with an article or something else, this would not exactly be considered to buy backlinks by Google. But if you do this on a regular basis with hundreds of web masters, you will get in hot water quickly.

The lightest for of contextual link building is to place comments on related blogs and web sites. You will get a link back to your site with your keyword as the anchor text. That the link is not directly within the blog post does not really matter. As long as the main content of the page is related to your site, you will be fine. You need to make sure that the link does not have the nofollow attribute, or it will not count as a real link in Google’s eyes. Blog comment link building is probably the most economic form of contextual link building.

Another way to get contextual links is to find blogs related to your niche or industry and do guest posts on these blogs. Sometimes you will find a link on these blogs for guest posts and some terms and conditions that explain the process. In other cases you have to contact the web master either via email, phone or sometimes by just writing a comment on the blog.

Guest posts will give you contextual links and if you pick blogs that have authority, you will not only get a good improvement in ranking, but you will also get direct traffic and in some cases some kind of indirect endorsement of your web site. This alone is probably worth a lot more than the contextual links that you got from the guest post.

To sum it up: Yes, contextual link building is definitely worth the effort. You will get links with the best possible quality plus direct traffic and indirect endorsement of your products and services.

1. You have to subscribe to Google alerts and other search engine alerts with relevant keywords so that you are alerted about any negative information that hits the search engine with relation to your brand. This is an ongoing process because even if you clear out negative results from the top 20 search engine results today, there may be fresh controversy or negative news coming your way in the next two months.

2. You have to track every negative piece of information and take corrective action: As a reputation manager, you have to track every blog post, website or information in social networking sites that are related to your brand. You have to reply to negative comments and clarify your situation, you have to spread good news about your site or brand in social networking sites, and you have to optimize your website or corporate blog so that you hit the first pages of Google when people write keywords that are related to your band. You have to make your presence felt in article directories, press releases and powerful blogs so that you are able to spread good, positive information about your product or service and push the negative news down. All of these are processes that have to be streamlined and followed.

3. Preparing ORM reports on a monthly basis: You have to prepare reputation management reports and present it to your client or the head of department so that he is aware of the work you are doing. If you have tackled with negative news and have replaced the top searches of Google with positive information about your brand, your next responsibility is to maintain that success rate and see to it that no negative information finds its way to the top 20 search results.

So, we see that online reputation management is an online process that goes on for months and even years.

If you put a video related to your brand, you can be confident that it will be viewed by hundreds or even thousands of people who will vote and even leave comments. Some of the comments may be blasphemous and negative in nature influencing the minds of others who are watching the video. There may be also users who upload a video that show your video in a negative light. Likewise some users may even start ‘hate community’ for your brand that can adversely impact your brand image in front of many people.

The youth usually likes to associate with social media sites and every bit of positive information and negative information posted there can influence his purchasing power. So, it is obviously a great idea to build your online reputation with social media profiles. Upload some good videos, reply to comments, start an official group or community for your brand and generate the positive vibe around your product or service. Having said that, building a social media profile is not the only way to fix your online reputation.

80 percent of users still use search engines like Google to find information about your product or service. You need to make sure that good news and positive information about your brand features in the top two pages of search engine results. So, we can conclude that both search engine traffic as well as social media user base is important and your reputation management should embrace both of these forms of online exposure.

Here is what Google says about paid links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank can dilute the quality of search results. If you believe a site is engaged in buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please tell us about it. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Google even has a form to report paid links that were bought or rented in order to get PageRank.

Now building lings or hiring a link building service is a different story. You can build as many links as you want and it is completely fine with Google, as long as you follow their webmaster guidelines. The truth of the matter is, that Google actually encourages you to build a better web site that is more user friendly and to build more pages and to publish articles and so build more links.

Building links, like building web sites and adding content is mainly a lot of work. You can reduce your work load by hiring a link building service. But make sure that the link building company that you hire knows what they are doing and that they know the rules and follow them.

To state it a little different: To buy backlinks is completely fine, if you consider hiring a link building service as your means of buying links. To buy links or buy .edu backlinks by renting links on other web sites is very risky business and should not be done. One report from your competition and you will see all your rankings tumble.