Chad Fisher of Pyramid SEO will be speaking at the Epik DevCon on the morning of September 16. His talk will be part of our Acquire-Develop-Operate-Sell series. Chad is an SEO veteran. He regularly consults with Epik Developers and also manages one of our content sourcing relationships. In this guest post, Chad shares some thoughts on SEO.
The SEO Universe
Your newly-minted website is just one of millions. In the universe of websites, it starts out as more or less insignificant. Moreover, with web publishing tools making it easier than ever to produce content on an expanding array of top level domains (TLDs), the competition for top ranking by search engines is getting tougher. So, how exactly does a web developer, stand out in all this vastness we call The SEO Universe?
Looking the part
For openers, you must have a professional looking site to effectively perform link building. If you have an amateurish site featuring AdSense ads plastered above the fold, you are going to suffer a horrible bounce rate and no one is going to want to link to you. Moreover, if you start ranking on competitive keywords you might get a Google manual quality review. If that happens and your site looks like it was built solely for an AdSense click, you could suffer a manual penalty.
Assuming your site looks professional, you now need to acquire unique and authoritative content. You can either write this content yourself or hire a professional writer. For example, in the financial services category for which I build sites, I often hire writers through Craigslist or use my own in house team to locate industry-specific expertise. In addition, you can encourage user generated content – a forum or a blog (where you allow comments) can help you tremendously in creating a lot of user generated content.
Once the site looks good, and has a base of original content, you can begin the process of securing organic backlinks.
Domain Diversity is Key for Backlinks
The number of root domains linking to your domain is a huge quality signal to Google. Ideally the majority of your domains are in the same theme, for example if you have a site about personal injury law, many of your inbound links should also be from other legal sites. However, it is important to remember that there are a number of indirectly related niches you should be considering. To improve your overall domain diversity, you can look for finance, insurance and other business sites that may not be 100% topical but still increase the overall number of domains linking in — a key SEO metric. For more insight on how to improve domain diversity, take a look at this post on the SEO moz blog.
Anchor Text Diversity is Important
Diversifying the anchor text of the links back to your site is very important. For starters, if you are trying to build links with this anchor text: “picture frames” and everyone one of your links uses exactly the same anchor text, you have a very good chance of tripping an automated Google filter. Once you do this your rankings will drop and typically only come back after a set amount of time, likely measured in months.
Even more important, if you fixate on just one set of anchor text, you are missing out on the SEO value available from related phrases. Consider our example of “picture frames”. By adding the words: “cheap”, “discount”, “low cost”, or “buy” you have greatly expanded the number of phrases for which you can rank. You will also get some credit for the root phrase, “picture frames”. This concept is explained in more detail here.
Diversity in the Types of Links Is Critical
It’s easy to get caught up in one link building method. For example, there are some article marketers that only build links through writing content and submitting to the popular directories. There are others who just submit their site to free or paid directories as their preferred method to build links. In reality you should be combining many different link types. Here are a few examples:
– Article Submissions (Ezine, Articles Base, etc)
– Paid and Free Directories
– Press Releases
– Guest Posts
– Forum Profiles
– Forum Posts
– Blogroll Exchanges
– Link Exchanges
– Content Aggregator Sites (Squidoo, Hub Pages, etc)
– Infographics
– Viral Pictures, Images or Content (Linkbait)
– Affiliate Programs
– Blog Comments
If you hit 90% of these link building techniques you will greatly improve the diversity of your links with a resulting dramatic increase in the organic traffic to your site!
Interesting comment on how design affects link building efforts and even manual reviews. One would think Google is a machine and that design would be more an issue for visitors but not search ranking but this article makes some interesting points.
Thanks for the comment Leonard. Google’s algorithm is most definitely a machine at heart, but there are human components that come into play, especially as you consider ranking for serious phrases. If you take the time to get a top 10 ranking for a commercial phrase with more than 10K monthly visitors, then I would say take the time to design a proper looking sites that converts those visitors and doesn’t make Google look bad for ranking you.
In addition, a professionally designed site will encourage other people to link to you and make the entire link building process much more effective and efficient.
I think it is a great refresher to mention the need for the diversity of the backlinks. It seems for a site to be successful you need that. If all your backlinks are the same type with exact same anchor text then it can not be good. It shows how the SEO process can be very complex.
Thanks
Chad, thanks for the informative post. As one who owns both types – auto-sites and ecommerce-sites, I appreciate the perspective.
The link exchange issue has bothered me. There are people who say outgoing links will penalize the site’s serps, and others who say a moderate amount of outing links will not hurt the site’s serps. Do you feel there is a point at which to many outgoing links can penalize a serp if the site h as an equal amount of incoming links?
I hope to see you guest post more. Todd