Quality Content is King

Google and other search engines love content. Content is what drives their business and brings them their revenue. Online advertisers want relevant advertising solutions and nothing is better than relevant content. Google makes millions of dollars just from their content network advertising alone. Also they use website’s content to make their search more relevant which helps them make billon of dollars. (See Google Revenue). But the key is that they deliver high quality content. As content is their best tool promote their relevancy of search, they put a lot of emphasis on quality of content.

What is a high quality content?

In theory, quality content is what users like and find helpful and useful. But since Google cannot read people’s mind, about whether they like a particular content on a website or not, Google has a few methods to determine the usefulness and quality of content in their algorithm;

Some of these are factors such as proper spelling and grammar, relevant information to the site, natural position of keywords (Google doesn’t like keyword stuffed content), content and webpage load time, number of words,  and whether it carries any useful picture or graph.  Some search experts even suspect Google looks at analytics information or information from webmaster tool looking at things like time spent reading content, bounce rate, etc.

But the most important factor is back links to your content. If you content has natural back links to it, then Google values that content more. The more relevant and high quality links you have to your content, the more important the content becomes to Google.

The question is that with so much content on the net, how do you make your content stand out in order to get links to it?  Below are some of the ways I have been successful submitting my website content

• Write Unique and informative Content: The idea is that if content is unique and informative, users will find it easier and will link to it.
• Promote Your Content: You can do some self promotion by submitting an excerpt of it to article submission sites, press releases, and other blogs linking back to it. You can also participate with your online community such as forums, blogs, to promote yourself and your website or blog.
• Encourage Users: Act as an online sales person who is selling his content. Find ways to ask your users to link to you or to subscribe to your blog rss feed. (Email marketing has been an effective way for that)
• Be creative: People do creative things to get links and traffic to their websites. Vblogging, embedded videos, audios, nice catchy pictures, very unique headlines can help.

SEO Tools and Resources

Effective Search Engine Optimization will not be possible without having effective SEO tools. As an SEO consultant I rely on various SEO tools to help me with my keyword research, competitors back links, link popularity, blog pingers, duplicate content checker, keyword density tools, and other SEO and PPC tools.

You can check out SEO tools page of this blog for a very incomplete list of SEO tools I use on day to day bases.

Please forgive me for the lack of organization in that page, I usually just dump a link there once I find it. I will soon organize them and update that page with all the tools I use frequently.

In addition to SEO tools, I have also put list of other SEO and PPC resources such as blogs and other relevant search marketing  resources.

Matt Cutt’s Hidden Link Building Tip; Write Great Content

In last Google Webmaster Video Marathon, about a few months ago, Matt Cutts from Google was asked what would be the best way to make new links that didn’t violate Google’s guidelines.  And Matt said “write quality content for your website”.

Of course he probably meant write great content and people will link to you but well know that is not very likely specially if you are a brand new website and not that many people know about you. If you wait for links to come, they may never come. So that is why you need to build links yourself but how do you engage in a link building campaign that doesn’t violate Google’s guidelines and also helps you improve your ranking?

Let’s look at Matt’s advice again. He said “write good content for your website” but did he really say you have to put that great content on your website?  I like to think there is a subconscious hidden message there;

The hidden message points to contextual links. If these links come from non spammed or trusted websites, are the best links you can possibly get because they boost traffic to your website and improve your ranking. Contextual links boost traffic to your website, because unlike the links on side navigation or footers that are often ignored by the users, contextual links are followed because users like to read good content and follow the links in them. The tip is for both content and the links in them to be relevant and favorable for the user. And if user likes it, then Google tend to link it because Google is striving to improved search quality by improving user experience. So if you write content that user likes, then Google will love that content.

So back to Matt’s advice; “write great content for your website”. And I like to add, submit that great content, and the relevant links in them, and promote them to self promoting sites; whether you have written articles, news and press releases, manuals,  or videos. There are a plenty of both free and paid version of such sites available.

For example, whenever my client has some press releases, I submit them to PRNewswire, which is my favorite.  They blast your press release to hundreds of online. Or they make great articles that I help submit to various article sites. But that is not the only places where you can submit your content. There are many blogs that allow guest posts because they want more quality content on their websites and they are tolerant for contextual links so as long as they are relevant and useful to their users. Just search for blogs within your industry and see if they allow guest posts with relevant links on them. And of course there is Youtube and other online videos where you can promote yourself which helps build traffic and bait for links.

So Matt Cutts gave the best link building advice there is when he said to focus on quality content for your website and I like to add, that quality content that was made for your website doesn’t have to be on your website.

Have fun link building.

Important SEO Factor: Link Age

We all know links are what make our websites popular. And active website owners and webmasters spend (or should spend) good portion of their time building links to their websites to increase their websites popularity and ranking.

So most search engine optimization consultants, put much of their focus on two major factors
1. Quantity of links
2. Quality of links

It is observed that a well ranked website needs to have good number of good quality links but also as part of natural link building strategy, each good quality link should naturally go with a few low quality links. And with low quality I do not mean spam links I mean links from low PR websites or sites with few or no back links including a few nofollow links.

But another important factor that unfortunately doesn’t get enough attention from SEO consultants is link age;

Link age is important for two main reason:

1. It can show Google (and other search engines) the freshness of your content; It makes perfect logical sense that new links could mean new fresh content. So if you have a website that you update content often, you want to make sure you match your fresh content with fresh links.

2. Link age shows trust: Search engines in particular Google care about age of links to your website because that shows the links are legitimate and it is editorial rather than artificial.

Google in particular puts good focus on website trust and authority hence the longer age of a link the better trust ranking you get from that link.  Keep in mind that currently trust ranking is not public by Google but you can try to figure out your websites trust ranking by checking your keywords ranking. If your ranking is relevantly stable, with exception of a few drops, then Google trusts your website. But if you your ranking keeps dancing, then you need to keep working on establishing trust with Google. I wrote an article on Google authority and trust rank back in May you may find interesting.

So don’t forget to take link age into an account when you are optimizing your website. Yes you do need links, because fresh links mean freshness of your content and vote for those content but you also need to consider link age so put your link building efforts into links that last.

Don’t buy links unless…

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.

Planning on a Productive Weekend.

Living in Los Angeles can always be distracting. There is just way too many things to do here. There is downtown LA which is becoming very popular specially after LA live and Staple center being built there a couple years ago, then there is Hollywood, where all the crazy stuff are happening.  There is old town Pasadena, downtown culver city, old town long beach, Of course my favorite hangout spots are West LA near UCLA and Santa Monica.

But this weekend I am going to take it easy and focus on getting some studying done. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I am trying to get a bunch of search marketing certificates, so I think I am going to take this weekend to get some studying done.

Also I have a few small SEO projects  for smaller clients, and also wish to do some reading in addition to all that. One of my good friends, Josh Nolan, recommended me read this book delivering happiness which is one of the best sellers to help me stay motivated and learn from other successful entrepreneurs.

And lastly I need to get some exercising done.  I am trying to get back in shape and its going to be a Sunny weekend and I love doing outdoor stuff. Maybe I hit Malibu and get hiking done or go to Santa Monica Beach and jog to Venice beach. Defiantly need to get tanned too.

So it’s going to be a productive week. I need to plan it right so I can get some studying done, some reading, some SEO side work, and definitely exercising.  So to all distractions in LA, Stay Away!

Google Adwords Tips

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.