I admit getting good quality links is hard. Links are also a lot harder in some industries that lack true editorial value. For example one of my clients has a resource website for payday loan industry that puts a considerable amount of time into writing original and well researched content. Also they are one of the first websites where they break out the latest news about that industry.  Their content strategy includes latest industry news, opinion articles, educational articles, and even videos.

They are also very active in their own community as many know about them and go to their website for resources. But due to nature of the industry, they are not getting enough voluntarily links. And that is why they have to invest in artificially making links.

Of course one way to do that is to contact other websites for link exchange. But overdoing that could go against Google’s link scheme guidelines.

Another way people do link exchange is what they call 3 way linking. You do a link exchange with another person but instead of him linking back to you from the site your linking to, he will link to you from another website he owns. For example if your website is A, and you are doing a link exchange with website B, then owner of website B will link to you from his or her other website C. (see below)

This way of link exchange is slightly safer because it is harder for search engines to figure out your doing a link exchange but since you aim is to manipulate the search results (SERP), overdoing a three way linking could be noticed by more advanced search engines such as Google and Bing. Specially Google’s search quality team has been able to write some advance algorithms to figure out such linking schemes. So my advice to not overdo it.

Another link scheme is link buying. Search engines in particular Google really dislike it and they can penalize your website to the point you can completely disappear from their search results based on your targeted keywords (anchor text of the links you are buying), and in some cases, they can ban you completely. So understanding the consequences of link buying, if you attempt to do so, you must be extremely careful. As a professional link builder, I don’t recommend buying links unless you know how to do it so you bypass Google’s radars.

Below are some guidelines I can provide, from my own experience (both errors and successes), which I would like to share:

-  Websites relevancy to your website: Make sure the website you are buying link from is relevant to yours.
- Other websites they are linking to: If they are linking to too many websites or linking to irrelevant websites, chances are Google knows they selling links.
- Websites Traffic: There are many websites that have high page rank but they don’t’ really have any traffic to them so they don’t’ have much value if you get link from them. In fact in many cases, those websites tend to sell links and Google knows that and as the result that could be troublesome for you. If you have to buy links, but it from high traffic websites. I usually look at Alexa Ranking to find out about how much traffic that website has.

- Website back links: Take websites back links into account;  Both quantity and quality of the back links. Stay away from buying links from those websites with poor back links.

2. Websites Linking Method: Sid- Navigation and header and footer links still work but only if Google trusts the website.  For example if NYTimes has a side navigation links, Google will consider those links very resourceful and editorial and as the result,  those links will help significantly in your ranking. But unless you are buying a link from a highly trusted website (which is not likely because trusted sites don’t’ sell static links), then the side-navigation or footer links will not be as effective and could even hurt your ranking if the site ranking. I recommend you buy inlinks which are links within content on the main part of the website. For example the link in this post to Google guideline page is considered an inlink. So as long as the website and content are relevant, links are normally considered editorial  in Google’s eyes and will help you.

3. Beware of anchor text: If you are buying links, I’d recommend you stay away from exact match of the keywords you are targeting. For example if you are targeting “Los Angeles SEO Consultant”, I would just do “SEO Consultant” , “Los Angeles Consultant”, “Los Angeles SEO”, or even long tail synonym phrases like “Search engine optimization expert in Los Angeles”.  That way it looks natural to Google. Or simply put your site name and let the page rank pass through your website, then optimize your content targeting keywords you want. For example, if I were to buy links for this site ( I don’t buy links for this blog by the way), I would probably pick “Sefati” which is my URL just to pass some PR to my website. Then I would focus on keywords I am targeting and their density, making sure they are stated on my website’s content in natural way.

4. Stay away from link brokers: If you need to buy link from a website, stay away from link brokers because chances are Google is either aware of their inventory or their method of linking. Contact the website owner directly, and make your language as if you want to work with them rather than you want to buy links from them.  (be politically correct)

5.  Slow Down: Don’t buy too many links in short period of time. Specially if you are in one of those industries (e.g. adult, payday loan, debt consolidation, etc.) where people are less likely to link to.  For example no one wants to brag about taking a payday loan or consolidating their debt and Google knows that well.  So if you build too many links, especially if you buy too many links in short period of time, then you can cause all sort of flags with Google.

As an SEO specialist, you must understand Google categorizes each website based on their industry and fully understands its editorial value. It can find out patterns of artificial link creation and link buying, and will discount the artificial and paid links accordingly and can panelize your website.  So an effective way of creating links is to make it as natural looking as possible, and if you need to do link exchange, three way linking, or even buying links, do it in moderation with extreme caution so can bypass Google’s radars without getting our links discounted or even worse, get your website penalized or banned.

If you would like to improve your ads and improve your CTR (click through rate) in Google Adwords, you want to make sure your ads as target landing pages are as relevant as possible to what users search when looking for your product.

As Google is driving itself and its business more toward users, search marketers should consider that having a campaign that is user friendly is very important. There is a great article on SEJ on how to avoid google slap on your adwords campaigns.

The author focuses on user. Advises you to make sure your ads are relevant to your keywords, and the landing pages are relevant to your ads. And your products and services on your landing pages are what are advertised.

SEJ is a great website that covers all aspects of search marketing that includes both organic and paid search engine optimization and marketing topics. But if you are specifically looking for a PPC blog, it seems that SEO book has a nice PPC blog that I find very useful.

As an SEO consultant in Los Angeles and Hollywood area, I have a few clients that are in the entertainment industry therefore they create many videos and multimedia that make them available for their users online. Of course they want to make sure they are indexed and search able by Google. Well one day to ensure that can happen is to make a video site map.

Google webmaster central has released some information on this I invite you to check it out.

Keep in mind you don’t have to be in entertainment industry to make videos. Many companies are now producing videos to promote their companies by informing and educating their users about their products and services. The way they do that is by making testimonial videos, educational videos, or even advertising videos to grab users attention.

For example, a client of mine that is a payday loan lender, Payday Loan Trust, is currently in process of making videos to educate their users about payday loans. That can also help them to gain their users confidence, educate them, and it should also help them with organic search ranking and increase traffic to their website as Google and other search engines love content that is geared toward users. And we all know videos are considered good content as long as they are build with user in mind.

I consider myself an SEO expert which is why I do SEO consulting with various small and large businesses. I don’t want to name all my clients and certainly don’t want to brag but I have had some big clients in particular in credit check and payday loan industry such as Experian, FreeCreditReport.com, and Solomon Finance.

Having worked with these clients, I have realized that organic search engine optimization should not be considered as “the solution” but as one of the many venues to bring in targeted traffic.

There are other Internet Marketing Methods such as PPC, Email Marketing, and other lead generation methods that work specially in not so exciting industries such as finance industry. Researching and understanding consumer behavior is important but doing something about it is even more important.

The challenge is that these industries change fast mainly due to as the financial reforms, new rules and regulations, these type of companies often can’t afford to wait months until their organic results to take into effect. They want result and they want it now, before they are further restricted. That is why I recommend them to also invest in PPC, not as a short term solution, but as an ongoing Internet Marketing Campaign. However many advertisers specially the new advertisers often end up paying high costs for PPC which is why many are turned off. See data below: (I copied the table from Search Engine Journal so all credit goes to them.)

So I find it very imperative that as a Search Marketing consultant, I have also invested time into mastering PPC and keep up to date with latest techniques in order to help my clients the best.

There are courses and certificates I have been taking that I would like to recommend. In fact I found a good article on Search Engine Journal on 13 Online PPC Marketing Courses I recommend you to read.

Google dance is refereed to sudden changing of keyword rankings. You can rank on a keyword in top 10 results one day and another day you can go back to top 50 and sometimes even not appear in top 100 results which most SEO rank tracking tools show.

Why does Google dance happens? The correct answer is growing number of online web spam filters to fight artificial link building. Google is against excessive artificial link building and is dead against link buying. (See Google guidelines regarding link building)

So Google quality and web spam team(s) have created all these “filters” that are supposed to detect any aggressive or unnatural behaviors in link building which is the reason you may see your Google ranks changing all of the sudden. For more information on this, Coping With GDS, The Google Dance Syndrome.

As an SEO consultant, I help many of my clients to learn how they can do some things themselves so they can see results faster and also save a few money. Again I like to refer myself than an SEO consultant, who trains my clients web developers to become SEO specialists following simple white hat search engine optimization techniques.

There are really three major parts to a successful SEO campaign for a website:

Onsite Optimization: These includes fixing meta tags, title tags, al tags, internal linking, the basic stuff.

Quality Content: A good quality content that has your targeted keywords in it, yet it is written for users. The idea is that if you write a good quality content, users will link to it. And it’s a good idea too in my opinion, if you read this blog, you see I link out to others all the time based on their content and what their site offers.

Quality Links: You can’t just write quality content and wait to get links, you need to get out there, involve in your online community, and build some of those links yourself. Self promoting is an essential part of SEO, so as long as it is done according to Google and search engine’s guidelines. There are a ton of places on the Internet you can get links from. GetfreeLists.com puts a list of website and resources where you can get free links and I recommend you check them out.