The birth of black hat SEO
Link building was an easy way to manipulate the search engine algorithms and many spammers tried to take advantage of this by building link networks which gradually lead to the creation of what is generally known as black hat SEO.
Link building was an easy way to manipulate the search engine algorithms and many spammers tried to take advantage of this by building link networks which gradually lead to the creation of what is generally known as black hat SEO.
Google has become very intelligent in recognizing black
hat techniques and with the introduction of Panda and Penguin, they have managed
to solve the problem and protect their search engine from spammers. Of course, there are still exceptions but they are doing advances in every new release of
their ranking algorithm and very soon none of these tricks will work.
To “follow” or
“no follow”
In addition to the above and in order to give webmasters
a way to link to a website without passing any ‘link juice (for example in the
case of ads), search engines introduced what is known as the “no follow” link.
This is a special tag you can add to a link (for example: “<a
href=http://www.somesite.com rel=”nofollow”>Some
Site</a>) that tells search engines not to count the particular link as a
‘vote’ to the referenced website.
This was done so that you can link other websites from
yours without taking the risk of being caught selling or exchanging links.
As a rule of thumb, you should add the nofollow tag on
all your external links (within your pages) that go to websites you cannot
trust 100%, to ALL your comment links, to ALL your blogroll links, and to ALL
banner ad links.
What is a good link?
So, if the above links are not useful, what is a good
link?
First, you should understand that link building it’s not
only a matter of quantity but is a matter of quality as well. In other words, it no longer matters how many links are pointing to your website but it is more
important from where these links are coming. For example, a link from a normal
blog does not have the same weight as a link from the New York Times or a link from
Matt Cutts blog (head of the Google Quality team) is not the same as a link from my
blog.
The obvious question is how do you get these links?
If you ask Google they will tell you that any links
pointing to your website has to be natural links. Natural links are exactly
what their name implies. A website owner or blogger likes another website or
blog and naturally adds a link to his/her blog.
Does this happen in reality or is it another myth?
It certainly does but you have to try really hard to get
to this point. Take for example this blog, there are many incoming links
because other webmasters find the content interesting and I also link to other
sites in my articles because I find their content interesting and want to
inform my readers about it. This is a natural link building where a link has more
value from the readers’ point of you rather than the search engine's point of
view. The best way to attract links is to publish content (text, images,
videos, infographics, etc) that other people would like to link.
If natural links are what I have just described above, in
which category do all other links belong?
They belong in the category of artificial links and by
adopting such techniques you increase the risk of getting a manual or an algorithmic penalty by Google.
Is guest blogging a valid way to build links?
Guest posting can be a valid way to get links back to
your website provided that you don’t do it just for links and that you don’t
overdo it. You can read these 2 articles to get a complete picture of when to accept guest posts
on your blog and when to guest
post on other blogs.
Social Media
Social media is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and if you think
about it, it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all
of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow” but this does not
mean that they do not have any value.
Social Media mentions are gaining ground as ranking
factors and proper configuration of social
media profiles can also boost SEO.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is not as popular as it used to be in
the past but it is still a good way to get traffic to your website. Depending
on your niche, you can find websites like reddit.com, digg.com,
stumbleupon.com, and scoop. it and delicious.com (to name a few) to promote your
content.
2) What's the difference between organic vs. paid results?
Organic results are the results that come by performing manual SEO* i.e. building authority in the eyes of search engines and then getting the output whereas Paid results are when you initiate the campaign through some budget, possible examples are Google Adwords.
3) What are Meta descriptions and do they still matter?
A Meta description is a Meta tag used in the head of the code that is basically shown in the search engine results to the user. It still matters a lot as more the compelling statements you write, the better will be the CTR (Click through Rate) for the website.
4) Should I optimize my domain name to include keywords?
The primary domain should not be having any keywords as it’s not good for the overall optimization process and will hurt your site badly because of the EMD (Exact Match Domain) as well. So, it’s good to have the keywords separate from the primary domain.
5) How do I know when I’m using the right number of keywords on a page?
You simply can’t give a number for that because it’s not the right way to strategize your SEO campaign on the number of keywords on a page. Neither, there should be a target set for Keyword Density, your content should always be user-centric and should focus on terms like user-friendliness and readability so that the user benefit and thus will result in a healthy SEO campaign.
6) What’s the difference between internal and inbound links?
Internal links are the links on your website that take the user from one page to another page via an anchor tag whereas Inbound links are the links coming from other websites to your website.
7) How many internal links do I need on each page of the content?
There aren’t any minimum or maximum number of internal links defined anywhere but your web page should have only the desired number of links that help users navigate through the different pages.
8) Do I need to know the code to do SEO myself?
You do not require a thorough understanding of the code to do the SEO at the basic level but at the advanced level, you need to have a basic understanding of HTML.
9) What is robots.txt?
A robot file allows you to allow or disallow a particular search engine to crawl the website. This file lies in the root directory of the website.
10) What is the sitemap.xml file?
A sitemap.xml file helps the search engines quickly crawl your website and understand the navigation and structure of the website, i.e. a quick reference or an index for your site.
11) What is the difference between indexed and crawling?
Search engines crawl through the content of the website and index them according to certain guidelines and the relevancy needs of the user. It is not necessary that search engines index every part of your web page, certain things that do not get crawled at all are iframes, JS, and more.
12) How can I see what pages are indexed?
Just type in site:www.DOMAINNAME.com in the search box and hit enter, you will get to see the number of pages indexed right at the top.
13) Why do you need alt text on your images?
The search engine bots are text-only readers, they cannot see images, and therefore the ALT text comes into the picture by giving a reference to what the image is all about. Important keywords can be used in the ALT text to enhance the SEO campaign.
14) How long does it take to see results from SEO?
There are certain factors that can let you know the timeliness:
a) Quality of Content
b) Number of inbound links
c) Number of no-follow links
d) The frequency with which content is updated
e) The frequency with which your site gets crawled
2) What's the difference between organic vs. paid results?
Organic results are the results that come by performing manual SEO* i.e. building authority in the eyes of search engines and then getting the output whereas Paid results are when you initiate the campaign through some budget, possible examples are Google Adwords.
3) What are Meta descriptions and do they still matter?
A Meta description is a Meta tag used in the head of the code that is basically shown in the search engine results to the user. It still matters a lot as more the compelling statements you write, the better will be the CTR (Click through Rate) for the website.
4) Should I optimize my domain name to include keywords?
The primary domain should not be having any keywords as it’s not good for the overall optimization process and will hurt your site badly because of the EMD (Exact Match Domain) as well. So, it’s good to have the keywords separate from the primary domain.
5) How do I know when I’m using the right number of keywords on a page?
You simply can’t give a number for that because it’s not the right way to strategize your SEO campaign on the number of keywords on a page. Neither, there should be a target set for Keyword Density, your content should always be user-centric and should focus on terms like user-friendliness and readability so that the user benefit and thus will result in a healthy SEO campaign.
6) What’s the difference between internal and inbound links?
Internal links are the links on your website that take the user from one page to another page via an anchor tag whereas Inbound links are the links coming from other websites to your website.
7) How many internal links do I need on each page of the content?
There aren’t any minimum or maximum number of internal links defined anywhere but your web page should have only the desired number of links that help users navigate through the different pages.
8) Do I need to know the code to do SEO myself?
You do not require a thorough understanding of the code to do the SEO at the basic level but at the advanced level, you need to have a basic understanding of HTML.
9) What is robots.txt?
A robot file allows you to allow or disallow a particular search engine to crawl the website. This file lies in the root directory of the website.
10) What is the sitemap.xml file?
A sitemap.xml file helps the search engines quickly crawl your website and understand the navigation and structure of the website, i.e. a quick reference or an index for your site.
11) What is the difference between indexed and crawling?
Search engines crawl through the content of the website and index them according to certain guidelines and the relevancy needs of the user. It is not necessary that search engines index every part of your web page, certain things that do not get crawled at all are iframes, JS, and more.
12) How can I see what pages are indexed?
Just type in site:www.DOMAINNAME.com in the search box and hit enter, you will get to see the number of pages indexed right at the top.
13) Why do you need alt text on your images?
The search engine bots are text-only readers, they cannot see images, and therefore the ALT text comes into the picture by giving a reference to what the image is all about. Important keywords can be used in the ALT text to enhance the SEO campaign.
14) How long does it take to see results from SEO?
There are certain factors that can let you know the timeliness:
a) Quality of Content
b) Number of inbound links
c) Number of no-follow links
d) The frequency with which content is updated
e) The frequency with which your site gets crawled
Conclusion
Off-page SEO is as important as on-site SEO. If you want
your SEO campaigns to be successful you have to do both. When thinking about
link building don’t take the easy way, but try to get links from hard-to-get
places. The more difficult it is to get a link, the more value it has.
In the past, you could easily get thousands of links and
rank higher but nowadays you have to do more than that. My advice is to
forget about link building altogether and put all your efforts into making a
great website, promote
it correctly and
everything else will follow.
