Link Building: Why Should You Build Links Today?

Webster's Dictionary defines link building as... it doesn't actually.

Why is there no standard definition? It isn't like link building is a secret. According to a recent survey, 80 percent of companies engaged in SEO are spending more than $1,000 a month on link building.

The lack of a standard definition leads to a large amount of confusion within the industry itself. I've met other SEOs and marketers who had a tenuous grasp on link building at best. It's not like there's an SEO college. Forget that: SEO is barely taught in universities at all.

So what is link building exactly? If you're asking me for a bare bones definition, I would say it's the process of going out of your way to find great links.

But I don't think that definition truly does link building justice: it ignores the importance of link building. It ignores the crucial role it can and should play in any online marketing campaign. In my opinion, the true definition of link building doesn't come from just asking what, it also comes from asking why.

Link building isn't just the aforementioned process of acquiring backlinks that point to your site: it's also a proven marketing tactic that increases brand awareness and conversions.
The Why

So why should you build links today? You should do it for the same reason you should have built links last year. And the year before. And every year since Google dominated the search market.

You should build links because links are still one of the most important ranking signals in Google's algorithm, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

You don't have to take just my word for it. Listen to Matt Cutts, who emphasized the importance of links at the recent SMX Advanced conference.

Danny Sullivan: Is link building just dead? You keep saying a new tactic is dead, or must be nofollowed, is it really you just don't want people to try to build links at all?

Cutts: No, link building is not dead. And a very small percentage of links on the web are nofollowed. There's a lot of mileage left in links.

Even though it seemed Sullivan, the founder of Search Engine Land, was trying to bait him into saying link building possessed little value, Cutts rebuffed that idea.

It's not just about increasing search visibility and brand exposure, however. Link building can help drive other marketing strategies. There's a lot of talk about content marketing being "the new link building." I believe this to be a falsehood.

The two are completely different. Content marketing has ambitions beyond building links; it's primarily focused on disseminating a brand message.

If you launch a content marketing initiative solely for links, your content will likely suffer. Content marketing and link building may not be synonymous, but they complement each other nicely. Link building can help you to build relationships that can serve to benefit you in other endeavors as well.

Link building is a crucial component to a comprehensive online marketing campaign.
The Ghost of Link Building Past

I can't accurately provide you with the year when link building started, but I can tell you that link building has existed for a long time. Eric Ward, who is known as the godfather of link building, helped Amazon.com create a link building strategy all the way back in 1994. That's four years before Google even existed.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2356174/What-is-Link-Building

Future-proof Link Building Techniques for 2014

Since Google’s recent updates, link building by spamming does not work anymore and that’s a good thing. To succeed with your website in 2014, you have to do the right things.

1. In 2014, link building is more alive than ever

You’ve probably seen some “link building is dead” theories on the Internet. People who say this usually engaged heavily in link spam activities.

Automatically creating backlinks in bulk does not work anymore. Faking social network profiles to get backlinks does not work anymore. Spamming forums and article websites with fake or low quality content to get backlinks does not work anymore. Automated link networks do not work anymore.
In short: spamming does not work anymore.

Link building, however, is still the most important thing that you have to do if you want to get high rankings on Google. Google’s Matt Cutts made that clear in an interview:

“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover [how relevant or important somebody is], and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

2. Relevance has become even more important

“Things, not strings” is one of the most important concepts that Google introduced last year. The context of a link has become even more important.

The links that point to your website should come from pages that are related to the topic of your own website. Google has been saying this for years but now they are serious about it.

If all of the links that point to your website contain exactly the same keyword, you can be sure that this will trigger an ‘unnatural links’ filter. If the links to your website contain keywords that are related to the topic of your website, Google will find your website relevant for that topic.

3. Once again: spamming is risky

Some people still think that they can trick Google’s algorithm with the ‘brand new secret method that will get your site on Google’s first result page with just a few mouse clicks.’ These spam tools do not work anymore.

Google does not like link schemes and you should avoid these link types:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank.
• Excessive link exchanges.
• Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links.
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.
• Text advertisements that pass PageRank.
• Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank.
• Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.
• Low-quality directory or bookmark site links.
• Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites.
• Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites.
• Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature

If you use these methods to build backlinks, it’s likely that your website will be penalized.


Read More: http://blog.seoprofiler.com/2014/01/future-proof-link-building-techniques-2014/

SEO News: Matt Cutts Say "A Little Duplicate Content Won't Hurt Your Rankings"

Duplicate content is always a concern for webmasters. Whether it's a website stealing content from another site, or perhaps a website that hasn't taken an active role in ensuring they get great unique quality content on their site, being duplicated out of the Google index is a problem.

In the latest webmaster help video from Google's Matt Cutts, he addresses how Google handles duplicate content, and when it can negatively impact your search rankings.

Matt Cutts started by explaining what duplicate content is and why duplicate content isn't always a problem, especially when it comes to quoting parts of other web pages.

It's important to realize that if you look at content on the web, something like 25 or 30 percent of all of the web's content is duplicate content. … People will quote a paragraph of a blog and then link to the blog, that sort of thing. So it's not the case that every single time there's duplicate content it's spam, and if we made that assumption the changes that happened as a result would end up probably hurting our search quality rather than helping our search quality.

For several years, Google's stance has been that they try to find the originating source and give that result the top billing, so to speak. After all, Google doesn't want to serve up masses of identical pages to a searcher because it doesn't provide a very good user experience if they click on one page, didn't find what they're looking for, and then go back and click the next result only to discover the identical page, just merely on a different site.

Google looks for duplicate content and where we can find it, we often try to group it all together and treat it as of it's just one piece of content. So most of the time, suppose we're starting to return a set of search results and we've got two pages that are actually kind of identical. Typically we would say, "OK, rather than show both of those pages since they're duplicates, let's just show one of those pages and we'll crowd the other result out," and then if you get to the bottom of the search results and you really want to do an exhaustive search, you can change the filtering so that you can say, "OK, I want to see every single page" and then you'd see that other page. But for the most part, duplicate content isn't really treated as spam. It's just treated as something we need to cluster appropriately and we need to make sure that it ranks correctly, but duplicate content does happen.

Next, Cutts tackles the issue of where duplicate content is spam, such as websites that have scraped content off the original websites or website owner suggests republish a lot of “free articles” that are republished on masses of other websites. These types of sites have the biggest problem with duplicate content because they merely copy content created on other websites.

It's certainly the case that if you do nothing but duplicate content, and you are doing in an abusive, deceptive, malicious, or a manipulative way, we do reserve the right to take action on spam. So someone on Twitter was asking a question about "how can I do an RSS auto blog to a blog site and not have that be viewed as spam," and the problem is that if you are automatically generating stuff that is coming from nothing but an RSS feed, you're not adding a lot of value, so that duplicate content might be a little bit more likely to be viewed as spam.
There are also cases where businesses might legitimately end up with duplicate content that won't necessarily viewed as spam. In some cases, websites end up with duplicate content for usability reasons, rather than SEO. For the most part those websites shouldn't worry either

But if you're just making a regular website and you're worried about whether you'd have something on the .com and the .co.uk, or you might have two versions of your terms and conditions, an older version and a newer version, that sort of duplicate content happens all the time on the web and I really wouldn't get stressed out about the notion that you might have a little bit of duplicate content.

Cutts does caution against local directory types of websites that list masses of cities but serve up empty listings with no true content about what the user might be looking for, as well as sites that create individual pages for every neighborhood they service, even though the content is the same as what's on main city web page.

As long as you're not trying to massively copy for every city in every state in the entire United States, show the same boilerplate text which is, "no dentists found in this city either," for the most part you should be in very good shape not have anything to worry about.

Bottom line: as long as your duplicate content is there for legitimate reasons (e.g., you're quoting another website or you have things like two versions of terms and conditions), you really shouldn't be concerned about duplicate content. However, Google certainly can and will take action against sites utilizing duplicate content in a spammy fashion, because they aren't adding value to the search results.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319706/Googles-Matt-Cutts-A-Little-Duplicate-Content-Wont-Hurt-Your-Rankings

3 SEO Tips: Way to Increase Website Traffic and Business

3 Sustainable SEO Tips: Why Recover From Google Updates? Don't Get Hit!

We've all been there at one point or another. Shoot, you may be going through one of the five stages of Google grief right now.

This summer was a tumultuous one for Google algorithm updates. Since the beginning of May, we've gone through seven of them, each varying in severity, but the public outcry has been consistent: A group panics, some remain calm, and the Interwebz explodes with "How to Recover" posts.

Wouldn't you love to be in a place when you laugh in the face of Google algorithm updates? These tactics could help you get there.

1. Focus On Your Branding, Not Your Ranking

Look at the results for "flat screen TV" and tell me what the listings have in common. Do it. I'll wait.

They're all brands.

That's where search engines are going. They're favoring real company stuff over stuffed keywords and one-way links, and you don't have to be a household name to do it. It means doing things like:

•     Sponsoring local events and community involvement.
•     Giving away content (and maybe the occasional iPad) for free.
•     Paying attention to what your users want and giving it to them.

Perhaps the big brands do have it easy, not because they have the household name, but because they were around before everyone started freaking out about links, title tags, and keywords. They were doing things the right way that got them exposure – well, most of them anyway – and when things went online, that did too.

2. Give Users a Good Experience

It's impossible really hard to have a good website that ranks well for a long period of time if it doesn't give your users a good experience. If people like your website, they come back. They share it.

We know Google is making a push where a site's quality is more important than the number of links pointing to it:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.

While that's still largely subjectively – How exactly do you define "high-quality sites," Google? – and I hate giving guarantees when it comes to search, there's one thing I'll rest my laurels on: Your website will always be "quality" if it gives your users a good experience.

Incorporate user experience consulting into your search and digital engagements. This includes things like:

•     User research.
•     User testing.
•     Split testing.
•     Conversion rate optimization.

Visual Website Optimizer is a great tool for split testing because it allows you to make layout styling changes without needing a developer, which, if your agency is like mine, is harder to get your hands on than Google's actual ranking factors. You can also set up usability testing through there if you don't have in-house resources for a full user test.

But this isn't just about giving users a good experience on your website because, before they even make it there, they're likely interacting with you someplace else first. Think about the links they're seeing of yours, how you look in SERPs, your Facepook posts, your graphics, everything: If you were a user, would you click on them?

3. Preserve Your URLs

Outside of breaking news, old URLs will rank the best. While 301s and canonicals are heaven sent for SEO professionals, they strip out a fraction of equity, and in this day and age, even the smallest amount can make a huge difference.

Unless absolutely necessary – like you're dealing with a site architecture that's been picked apart and puzzled together so many times that it's one hot mess – keep your URLs the same. When you add new features to a product or update your service offerings, do it on the same URL.

Apple does this with each new release of the iPad or iPhone. When they launch an update, it goes to /iphone/ or /ipad/; they don't create entirely new URLs for the product they're promoting and instead shuffle the old version to a new URL. This means you're launching a product with some equity already built up.


Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289835/3-Sustainable-SEO-Tips-Why-Recover-From-Google-Updates-Dont-Get-Hit