SEO Blog

In the old days, people spent hours spinning content endlessly in order to produce hundreds of versions of the same original document. This worked well, or at least it did until Google clamped down on poor quality content and handed down penalties to its hosts (most article sites). Consequently the idea of spinning copy for the sake of links was put to bed in many people’s eyes. But is there still a need for it in any other capacity?

One of the classic signs of a poorly spun article was the fact that none of the sentences matched up and synonyms were employed that clearly had a very different meaning to the original intention. This would make anything read like a poorly translated article or something that a 10 year-old child would be ashamed of. Essentially, it wasn’t great copy.

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Social bookmarking is essentially a way of making content easy to find for Internet users by bookmarking, storing and managing it online. By doing this you can categorise content, allowing users to easily find what they are looking for. However they don’t just help users, they’re also a great way of building links. There are a number of social bookmarking sites from Delicious and Digg, to Flickr and Reddit. Even some of the more common sites such as Twitter and YouTube can act as bookmarking sites. The whole idea is to make your information readily available for other people, so that you have more places and communities to share the information that you wish to promote.

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If you’ve been digging around for new ways to develop links and build the authority of your site(s), then you may have stumbled upon the idea of a blog network. Now this is nothing new. Plenty of people have tried, some have done so successfully, but it isn’t as simple as you might expect.

First of all, how many blogs are you going to create? The greater the number, the more links that you can build. However, you also have to fill the pages with unique content. To achieve this you will have to invest a significant amount of time or money, if outsourcing the writing duties. Plus, you will need to pay for domains and set everything up. It isn’t an automated process by any stretch of the imagination.
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When it comes to link building, as a rule of thumb you must consider the quantity as well as the quality of links. Unfortunately many people performing SEO delve into the black hat arts of unethical link building strategies. Whether they do so intentionally or unintentionally, it will eventually have a negative impact on your SEO campaigns. So what link building strategies should you avoid?
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More and more people are becoming familiar with how to use videos as a way to market their product. The rise of social media sites such as YouTube have had a dramatic impact on this contribution, as registered users can upload their content onto the Internet and share their videos with other users online. For those who work for small companies or large organisations, videos are another great platform for you to promote your services alongside existing, or shall we say more traditional and established methods.

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There are a number of link building strategies you can use in order to improve the ranking of your website and the press release is one of them. There are a range of other methods such as blogs, articles with links in the author bio, and hub pages too. The press release is slightly more effective in that it creates links to your site and also allows you to share current news with your customers – effectively doubling the benefit.

As a result of this, it acts as a unique platform to build brand awareness, gain more followers and share industry news. So how do you create a press release that is engaging and won’t cause your audience to lose interest after reading the first paragraph? Well here are some ideas you can use when writing press releases for your SEO link building strategies.

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The word ‘links’ has an important place in the world of SEO, as they are integral to where a site appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The more links you are able to generate to your site, the better. However, this only true if you source quality links from relevant sources and work within the parameters that Google has set out.

The decision to use these is ultimately down to you; however, for most, it is strongly advised that you build links yourself as you are less likely to run into any major problems further down the line. So how exactly will you be able to generate decent links?

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For a business, bad PR can cause critical damage. Maybe a national newspaper has exposed some bad practices, perhaps your CEO has been arrested for embezzlement or you’ve been found ripping off product designs from small businesses. This can attract a vitriolic hate campaign, started in the blogosphere and ending up all over social media sites.

This is a disaster in almost every regard. I say almost, because actually, in terms of SEO and link building, this could be just the ticket.
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When you’re involved in content marketing, you can get caught up in trying to produce as many articles and blog posts as possible but forget to do the marketing. Remember, even when you’ve finished writing and fired it off to a blog owner or article distribution site, your work is not finished yet.

Think of each bit of content that you produce as an individual page, associated with but not actually hosted on your website. Now you want that page to be optimised so that it will rank well, but you also want it to build strength so that this can be spread throughout your site. This is why you build deep links to your site and why you should do the same for your external content.
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There are plenty of people who will happily tell you that every page should be stuffed with internal links. After all, these link provide valuable context for the target page (assuming you use targeted anchor text) and help distribute link value throughout the site, right? Well, they do, of that there can be very little doubt.

However, as with all things online, moderation is vital. If you’ve got 250 words of on-page content and 25 internal links, your design, usability and link strength is likely to be impacted hugely. Your content and links are vital to everything in SEO. Without either your site would be uncompetitive in search engines and your traffic will suffer. However, by including content that is spammy and/or unreadable you aren’t going to be doing your site any favours. Equally, getting carried away with your internal linking strategy could negate the many benefits of a considered approach.

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