Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is a necessary part of getting any website noticed. These days, the internet is so huge that without a well thought out strategy for getting your website ranked. Without it, it is like opening a shop in New York or London and saying ‘come and visit my shop, it’s in New York’. What are the chances of anyone finding you? The key of course is to make your site feature for the keywords which you are targeting. It must all be part of a coherent and well thought out strategy.
Back linking is a key strategy to getting your website ranked for certain keyword phrases. Without the keyword research, you are blundering around in the dark as to what to aim your site towards for the purposes of SEO, of course. However, once you have aimed your site at a certain keyword you know is searched for, you must maximise your efforts towards that keyword phrase as part of your SEO campaign.
As a start, I go to Google and type in the keyword phrase I am targeting my site or page towards. I then work out what makes that site great and key to that is to research their backlinking strategy.
This can be done in a number of ways. If you find www.no1inGoogleforyourphrase.com as number 1, enter the full URL into Google with ‘link:’ at the front (but not in the inverted commas). This will tell you which other sites are linking to that site. If you have the Google Toolbar installed, make a note of the Google PR too.
You must then perform a similar search with ‘allintitle.
However, I find it much easier to run such work through software like SEO Equalizer as this automates the process for me. I can look through MSN and Yahoo as well. It will tell me the Google page ranking as well of the sites and the whole search takes a matter of a minute.
However you do it, the key information is to find out what sites are linking to your competitors and whether they are well regarded sites by Google. You need a list.
This will tell you to some degree how many backlinks and of what quality you may need to compete with in order to compete. You then set out to have more backlinks of better quality.
If your competitor site has, for instance, 12 backlinks , 3 of which are Google PR of 2 and the rest none, you know this site will be quite easy to compete with.
However, a key ingredient is what anchor text is being used in those backlinks.
Many people use ‘Click Here’ for their links to sites, but for SEO, this is a disaster. If I want my site ranking well for ‘SEO Equalizer’, for instance, I ensure my backlinks have the link that is clicked to connect to me as ‘SEO Equalizer’ and not something else.
This is key because Google will associate my page with those keywords and my site will go up a few points accordingly. If a lot of sites point to my site using this anchor text of SEO Equalizer, Google will associate my page as an authority for those words.
This is why it is essential to have your keyword research done before you begin optimisation of your site.
Key also is to link your site to as many other sites as possible. Hence, linking your site to a blog or a forum through signature posts improves your score. Setting up separate blogs and Lenses for instance also makes Google think your site is an authority site and improves your ranking accordingly. Google may not know you also control or own those sites . . .
A key strategy here is if you set up satellite sites to create good anchor text backlinks to your main page, you can also then optimise those sites by back linking those to other sites. If you can push your satellite sites and improve their scoring, these will raise the score of your main site.
If your competitor site has links to various places (and check them out), you can also email them and ask them for links as well. If you have links for the same sites as they do and your own back links form other sources, your page will eventually outscore that one and get to the top.
Researching these links is quite time consuming but it worth it. However, using SEO Equalizer will dramatically cut the time down as you can email those sites your competitors backlink to directly from the programmed ask for your own backlink.
Also useful is that in programs like SEO Equalizer, you can set up auto compete and look for relevant link sites to add your site to. This will also in the long term allow your backlinks to really flourish and doing this with SEO Equalizer is a real time saver.
It is surprising how vulnerable many sites are for even competitive keywords when you look at their overall SEO Strategy. By putting some of these tactics into play, you can do a lot to exploit those vulnerabilities or perhaps to look to see how vulnerable your own site may be.
