Link Building Every Little Helps

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , , — Felipe @ 30 Oct,08

A while back I wrote about the importance of Link Building for a successful SEO campaign, I gave a brief description about inbound links and talked about relevancy, authority and anchor text in inbound links.

Link Building is most time consuming part of a search engine optimisation campaign, it involves various techniques in order to actually get other sites to link to yours. In this post I’ll go through some of the most common techniques used to build links for a website.

First I would like to talk about an obsolete link building technique that many SEOs don’t use it anymore but it can result very effective from time to time. Sending email to relevant sites asking webmasters or site owners to link to yours can be time consuming and results are not as rewarding as they should.

Most of the emails sent are never replied, but the ones that are can result in a good and relevant link to your site.

Another technique that SEOs not given too much attention nowadays but it can also help, is submit your site to Directories, the internet is flooded with directories you can submit your site to, if you pick 4 or 5 every time you are link building, that should do the job, the good thing here is that many Directories let you put the title of your link, so make sure you use your target keywords there.

Joining forums where you can add links to your signature are a good way to build links, because every time you post a reply or start a new thread, the link to your site will be there in your signature, the trick here is to choose relevant forums to your targeted niche and be careful not to be seen by other as a spammer. Take it easy, don’t go mad in posting threads and replies or you will end up getting yourself banned from the forum.

Blog comments are also a good way to build links, the problem here is that almost every blog has a no-follow attribute in those links so you they don’t let the link juice flow to other sites. These links might not help your rankings but they can direct relevant traffic to your site.

Articles are another good way to build links, write an article about the main theme or you site and submit it to articles directories for approval, with articles there are two places where you can add a link to your site, first is in the author signature and second in one place in the article itself, most article directories only allow you to do that once in each article, so pick one of your targeted keywords and link back to your site.

And last but not least social bookmaking, this technique is only good if you have a blog on your website, if you don’t already, THUK’s web development team can assist you with that problem. With social bookmaking you can submit your posts to a variety of social media sites, these submissions will have a link back to your site and in most cases these links are the title of your post, so make sure you include your targeted keywords in your titles.

If you follow these guidelines pretty soon your site will have hundreds maybe thousands of links. Remember when it comes down to link building every little helps.

advantages vs. disadvantages of seo

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , — Felipe @ 24 Oct,08

Following our last post on the advantages and disadvantages of paid search (PPC) we now look into the advantages and disadvantages of SEO (search engine optimisation).

Search Engine Optimisation is an on going practice of enhancing websites internal and external aspects to ultimately achieve marketing strategies laid down by the client, and the criteria dictated by search engines algorithms.

This quote from Wikipedia explains in a much simpler way what SEO is:

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.”

The benefits generated by a well planned SEO campaign are numerous. It gives your website exposure and visibility by improving its rankings organically without having to pay the Search Engines, SEO ensures your site is easily navigated and ensures the website is geared towards your visitors to turn them into customers, and there is no point in getting your customers to the site if they don’t want to stay.

Search engine optimisation services are not expensive if compared with PPC ads, when you hire an SEO company you will pay a monthly fee and nothing else, while with PPC costs could vary according with the numbers of hits and competitiveness of you targeted keywords.

A well planned SEO campaign seeks to connect your products/services/ideas to people who are already looking for what you have to offer. That is done by an extensive keyword research aimed to find the most profitable and appropriate keywords to be used within your site.

Probably the biggest disadvantage of SEO is that results don’t come over night, it can take a few months before your site will start to move up the SERPs. Success isn’t guaranteed or instant unlike PPC.

Search engine optimisation is a time consuming process, the techniques used by an SEO specialist can take hours when done properly; Competitor Analyses, Link Building and the initial Keyword Research are on the top of that list.

Some times it can be very hard to write about things you believe in and enjoy without taking sides, so why don’t you help us complete this post.

What do you think are advantages and disadvantages of search engine optimisation campaigns versus PPC?

advantages and disadvantages of paid search

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , , — Felipe @ 22 Oct,08

PPC versus SEO is probably one of the most controversial, talked about questions in the search world – marketers and SEO experts have been debating this for years.

This post will highlight some advantages and disadvantages of running a PPC campaign on your site.
Let us start with some advantages of a well planned PPC campaign. If you have just launched a new product or brand, PPC is a great way to increase brand awareness by targeting the right keywords.

Your brand/product will be in front of your targeted market by getting instant results in rankings to encourage traffic to come instantly and not in a few months time.

PPC campaigns are ideal for short term, for example, seasonal marketing campaigns like Halloween, if you sell Halloween costumes this is a great time to have a PPC campaign up and running.

You have total control of your expenses, PPC campaigns can be edited any time you like, change your target keywords, stop and restart at any time you wish.

PPC allows you to bid in large number of target keywords, including misspellings, competitors and keywords variations you may not want on your site.

Unfortunately, that is when problems begins, if the calculation of the maximum bids are not done properly, PPC campaigns can become very expensive and you will end up loosing money instead of making it.

One the biggest problems with PPC campaigns is click fraud, not all clickers are buyers. A way to avoid this situation is to use a ROI tracking tool to ensure you don’t waste your money.

Using irrelevant landing pages or very generic keywords can increase minimum bid as high as £3, elevating the costs and again you’ll end up loosing money.

Another problem with PPC adds is that searchers don’t tend to click on them because they don’t seem to trust those sponsored links at the right hand side or the ones highlighted at the top of the SERPs.

To learn more about SEO, visit our website blog for the next post on advantages and disadvantages of SEO/organic search so you can decide what will be the best marketing tool for your online business – paid search (PPC) or natural rankings with a well planned search engine optimisation campaign.

Search Engine Optimisation and Small Business

Filed under: SEO — Greg @ 15 Oct,08

The number of small companies seeking search engine optimisation is growing by the day in the UK.

Almost every large and small company or business has a website, but what is the point in having a website if costumers can’t find it?

That is when SEO (search engine optimisation ) comes into play, search engine optimisation or online marketing services are services aimed to improve the performance of your website,  putting your services or products in front of the right costumers without having to pay the search engines (using PPC Advertising) for it.

In times like this, small companies need to get the most ROI from their websites, and that is exactly what search engine optimisation does.

But be careful there are a lot of charlatans out there, promising instant rankings, or first page rankings in weeks, search engine optimisation results don’t come over night.

To find out more on how your business can benefit from search engine optimisation services contact THUK Media.

microsoft’s new browsing algorithm

Filed under: SEO,Technology,hedgehog digital,online-marketing — Felipe @ 08 Oct,08

Microsoft has revealed details of its new browsing algorithm, developed by a collaborative work between Microsoft researchers and various Asian Universities.

The new browsing algorithm is called BrowseRank and it is meant to compete against Google’s controversial PageRank.

BrowseRank calculates how often and how long users visit the site to determine the rankings; Microsoft believes that will give more control over page relevancy leading to a more democratic Internet

The researchers said

“The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important,”

This will give more control to web users emphasising the concept of a more democratic rankings systems.

Compared to PageRank the main difference is that BrowseRank uses a continuous-time Markov process while PageRank uses a discrete-time Markov process also know as the Markov Chain.