I came across a good article on WebPronews.com that compares facebook new feature “likes” to direct traffic hence direct business.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
Los Angeles SEO Consultant
If you are looking for an SEO consultant in Los Angeles or southern California area drop me an email. Check out my contact page of my email should be there. I can assist you with both onsite SEO and link building as well as managing your SEO and Internet Marketing campaigns.
Getting Links From Directories…good or bad?
Michael Gray one of the well known SEO experts wrote a google article on if getting links from directories is valuable and if yes which ones?
Here is his article:
Is There Any Value in Getting Links From Directories?
Facebook Pushing More for a Social Web
Facebook is growing its domain to beyond a traditional social media website “building toward a Web where the default is social.” Read More.
I personally think this could be a direct challlenge and competion to Google and other search engines redefidnign how people find and interact with websites. Perhaps soon instead of “google it” we can say facebook it.
Google’s SEO Card
Google did an analysis of their own website’s SEO and see if they have actually done all the necessary SEO’s they need to do for their main websites and the called it an SEO card. Below is a video by Matt Cutts, from Google
SEOs, Dump the PageRank
Google has admitted many times that “webmasters” shouldn’t worry so much about PR any more. And I recommend all SEOs to follow that advise.
Getting a link from a high PR website doesn’t really mean much any more. It could very well be a useless link and whatever efforts and resources you put to get that link could very well be a waste.
Let’s say you have a payday loan website and you are trying to get a link from two other payday loan websites with PR of 5. The traditional SEO thinking would say that both links should carry the weight juice to your website but the reality is that they may not.
Google seems to be putting a lot of weight on trust nowadays more than anything else. They have a system that they Google keeps internal that unlike the pagerank, doesn’t make visible, which puts heavy focus on trust and authority of the domain.
Generally links that don’t sell links and have a few outbound links, that are relevant to your industry are the best link to get. For example for a payday loan lender such as Solomon Finance, getting a link from a financial online news site is a great strategy but getting a link from forbes.com with PR of 5 will do the lender much better than another PR 5 news website simply because Forbes has better domain authority and trust with Google than another domain.
From experience I have seen the following to be some of the trust factors you should consider when getting a link from a domain:
1. Domain Age: The older the domain and website the better. In fact Google admits to that
2. Website age: Asides from domain age, there is also website age. The longer the website has been around the better
3. Branding: Google tracks branding, it keeps a lot of data to find the brands in each industry so yes if you get a link from an industry brand then that link will carry more weight.
4. Site Traffic: Most sites have Google analytics installed on their websites and there are a ton of other ways for Google to know a websites’ traffic. So getting a link from a high traffic website with relevant traffic to your website is much better.
5. Less Outbound links:Google is dead against buying links so it devalues links from websites that have a lot of outgoing links because it suspects they are selling links. So if you are investing time and resources in getting a link from a website, make sure that website doesn’t have a lot of outbound links. Of course many websites have advertising on their websites for sake of traffic but those advertising banners should not be a direct link and go to another page with that website that is blocked from the search engines.
6. Website’s ranking for your target keywords: If the website you are getting a link from has good ranking for the keywords you are targeting, then that website defiantly has Google’s trust, at least for those keywords. So getting a link with that keyword anchor text should help your website signifactly.
These are some but not all the considerations you should have when you are looking into getting high profile links. Remember that it is no longer a number game with Google and it is matter of quality game when it comes to linking. Don’t look at a websites PR as Google is slowly phasing it out (I wouldn’t be surprised if they have done that already and just showing the PR to distract us) and try to understand its authority and rating from Google.