As you should know link building for seo is very important. I want to talk about link reputation and link popularity. When we think of links getting fired to your website, there are two factors that we need to take into account, link reputation and link popularity. Link popularity has to do with how many links, or how strong the links are. It’s important to have high link popularity. The other thing that is important is reputation. We can have lots of links pointing to the website, but unless they’re pointing to the website with the right word, they’re not going to be that important.

What is a reputation? Reputation is what people say about you. What the links are saying about you is the link reputation, whereas link popularity has to do with how many links we’re getting. It’s important to have good link popularity and good link reputation.

Let’s consider ways to get inbound links. We’ll start with what I consider to be the best and easiest way. First there are articles. Articles are fantastic because there are articles directories across the internet and there are websites that collect people’s articles, almost like a repository of articles where people will go and submit articles. For submitting the article, you get to put something in what is known as the resource box. At the bottom of all articles there is a resource box, and usually it is something that points back to the author.

You can point your articles back to your website. You might go off to an article directory, and one of the best ones is EzineArticles.com. You publish your article and the resource box you link back to your website. You would make sure you have your keyword in the resource box and link it through and also you might have the url. It varies depending on the site. Some sites will let you have more links in there, and other sites will let you have fewer links there.

Articles are the best thing to do. You can get articles written- there are article services out there. You can go to rentacoder, you can go to needanarticle. You can get articles written for you, keyword optimised already and then you can publish them. An important point is that it is better to have these articles keyword optimised, and here’s why. First, you might be able to get that article to rank itself off the back of ezine articles. You might get it to come up in the search engine and rank for the keyword you are optimizing for. That’s why it’s important to have it optimized.

The other reason builds on the idea of link reputation. A link that comes from a page, if that page is on topic, is important. Let’s say we had two articles, one on dog’s health and one on the best wine. The link about wine is coming from a page about wine, so it is more important. But the real reason is, if you optimize you might get ranked in the search engine and you also might come up higher on the article directory itself. The article directory has its own search features. This can be a key feature of your link building for seo strategy.

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A ‘How to SEO’ session must look at the longtail. There is another thing to keep in mind when talking about keywords that people are searching for. Let’s say person 1 types in Sony camera into the search engine. Person 2 types in Sony camera handycam xpf250 hybrid. What do we know about the difference between these two people? Person 1 is getting a variety of Sony cameras because they’re probably doing research. Person 2 is a buyer.

Think of someone heading down a sales funnel, towards the sale. Each step they go down they are getting more qualified as they go through. When you go for longer tail keywords, you’re further down the funnel because you’re getting someone more qualified because they know what they are looking for now. I’m no longer a browser, I’m now a buyer.

It would be great to rank for Sony camera because you would get lots of traffic. Sony camera would get a lot more than some of these longer tail keywords. You need a balance. Going for the longer tail keywords can be more profitable on a per user basis. The benefit is for Sony camera we’re going to get a lot more traffic, and with the longer tail we are going to get less traffic but chances are they convert higher because they are buyers. For Sony camera we get 550,000, but for other ones like Sony Erikson k8001 camera, using free Google keyword tool, we get 590 searches. In this example we’ve got 590 versus 550,000. We’re talking a big difference in the number of searches. But the person searching the longer tail keyword is going to be a lot more qualified and it will be easier to rank for that. It’s going to be extremely competitive to rank for Sony camera especially when you think of some of the different websites you are going to try to rank against.

I think there is a good chance the Sony website will be ranking for Sony camera. Why? There are lots of people out there all over the internet linking to the Sony website with the word Sony.

This leads me to another point. When you are starting up a domain name, it’s a good idea to have your primary keyword in the domain name. For example, let’s take a soccer drill website. I probably went for soccer drill is because I think soccer drills, plural, is probably taken. The reason you have the keyword in there, is when people link to our soccer drill website, they link in a variety of different ways. People may link with just the keyword in the anchor text and they’ll link to other people who’ll link to our website with the URL.

When they’re linking to our website with the url. What are they doing? The keyword is there. It’s like they’re voting for our website and they’re also saying what our website is about by the keyword. There is speculation that, by having the keyword in the domain name, you will rank better than someone who doesn’t. It may or may not have a small increase but I think the reason the domain name with the keyword ranks better is not because the keyword is in there, but rather people are linking to the domain name and it has the keyword in it.

It is better to have the keyword in the domain name. Consider the Sony camera example. We can have many websites such as forums and camera forums, they might say I bought the Sony handycam and the Sony website is sony.com. They’re shooting a whole lot of links all over the internet and because that is a big brand name there are going to be hundreds of websites all linking back to the Sony website, all saying Sony. So there’s a pretty good chance it is going to rank for Sony camera. I’m sure people will be linking to Sony camera. So the Sony website is probably going to rank number one.

That’s why we&’re going to have a better chance if we go for the longer tail keywords. If you remember back to the way Google works, Google will rank your website based on a few things. First, what the web page says, so you want to do all the on page optimisation and second what other people say about your website. We might be able to rank for Sony camera handycam xpf250 hybrid because there may not be too many people linking to the Sony website with that keyword. But I think we could try and rank for that because we could build a page that optimized specifically for that keyword and then also via a link to that to say exactly what we want it to say. Keep a look out for more How To SEO articles in this series.

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