Saturday, August 16, 2008

SEO Meets Marketing: Link Building, Is It For You?

By Steve Nicel


The internet grows exponentially with every minute. Many businesses wanting to engage in the advertising wars played out online are hoping to win over a large portion of their target market. In the process, our goal is to work out the level of intensity of our competition so we can zero in on the most effective strategy to slowly increase the number of users and visitors.

In the hopes of gaining a steady traffic flow to your company Web site, some businesses utilise paid advertising on high exposure commercial portals of the Internet. If traffic volume is already established on these large portals with a proven advertising model, this can be a great way to launch your Web site and start getting traffic immediately. Pay per click (PPC) is another great way of getting instant traffic to your website because this requires no start-up costs at all. The big advantage of this model is that you only pay for the traffic that is generated from the advertisers Web site directly to your Web site.

These two means of advertising are aimed towards trying to be greatly accessible to a potential viable consumer market, because only then can profit be possibly made. These two methods of advertising, however, gain greater ground because they have the capacity to push up a website's ranking in the query results in search engines.

Query results in search engines, or the matches found by a search engine to the keywords entered by the user, are important because of the fact that these are the most effective tools through which users try to access information on the Internet. The volume of information existent on various topics is simply overwhelming, which is the reason why people make use of search engines to do for them the dirty work of going through Internet clutter and give them results ranked on the basis of relevance to what they are exactly looking for.

Google adwords utilize a proprietary ranking system within the advertising framework. The nature of this system is forcing advertisers to model their ads very closely to their advertised website. As advertisers move away from making their ads relevant, and therefore less useful to the keyword searcher, Google filters these websites and either charges a premium for their listing or positions their ad lower down the search results. This ensures a higher quality of advertised listings and more useful information for the searcher.

The primary aim should always be to provide quality information that is highly relevant and targets keywords that relate to your websites topic. Your seo marketing should always be focused towards studying just what keywords yield traffic and structure your website to meet this demand.

The third and best long-term strategy for increasing traffic to your website comes from the process of link building. Our goal with this method is to obtain back links from other websites that demonstrate to the search engines we have a web site of authority. Back links are simply the term used for getting other websites, preferably of high authority themselves, to provide a link on their site leading back to our site.

Link-building, and being in productive link exchanges, can make or break a SEO campaign to optimize the search engine. It requires a degree of experience and loads of interactive communication in order to make sure that the link does end up published in another website. When this does happen, your website can appear on the search engine more than once-the first is the direct page of the website containing it; the rest are outside access points from links by other pages.

If the primary reason for attaining back links to your website is to prove to the search engines that you are an authority site, then it stands to reason that you must also create the impression of expertise and knowledge with everything that you do. With this impression comes an increase in perceived value and trust. This trust and increased authority will as a result attract more web sites wishing to be affiliated with you. And so the cycle continues...

Another avenue for building your link campaign, is to review products, articles, and services offered by other companies on their website. This vote of confidence provides a very good reason for these companies to link back to your website, as in doing so, makes their products and services see more attractive to their potential customers. The mutual benefits of this technique can be highly rewarding for both parties.

Integral to the decision of building links with websites is the determination of the suitability of a particular website to become a link partner. Emphasis is placed on decent linking partners that more or less practice the same brand of ethical SEO as your own. Moreover, targeting possible link partners who will be amenable to the idea of exchanging links is very important. By targeting relevant link-building sites, the business gets a better opportunity to gain real link partners who will eventually link the business to their website.

Relevance, congruence, and even similar reputability are just some factors that can make link-building campaigns more effective. With effective links, a business's search engine ranking will increase.

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