You””ve heard about them. You get emails from your family and friends telling you about them. There are news articles and blog postings about them. People Facebook and “Tweet” about them all the time. It”’’s the web site that has something so interesting, funny or useful that you can””t help but tell everyone you know about it. Link building can be a long and tedious process. I often think that people approach it completely backwards. Why not invest time into creating truly compelling and relevant content for your web site instead of “buying” traffic or getting people to list your site in a directory where it will soon be swept away into “pagination purgatory”? Here are a few ideas in building show-stopping content that will bring people to your site in droves: (This is in no way meant to be a comprehensive list but something to get your
creative juices flowing.)

• Spotlight Lists – Find something interesting related to your web site that you can spotlight every week to keep people coming back. One of my personal favorites is Communication Arts”” Webpicks where they highlight a new web site for it”’’s design and usability.

• Comedy/Humor – Nothing spreads like wildfire more than a link to something funny on a web site.
  This can be a YouTube video, FLASH game, or comic strip. Get to someone”’’s heart (and pocketbook) through their funny bone.

• Useful or Interesting Tools – How many times have you searched the web for a mortgage calculator or currency converter? Offering someone a useful tool will most likely get you a bookmark and a repeat customer.

• Contests – Organize something that adds an element of competition and you””re likely to get an increase in traffic and some good word-of-mouth advertising. Don””t forget to offer a good prize for the winner!

• Community – Everyone wants that sense of belonging. Adding community features will add a certain element of “stickiness” to your site. People will most likely add a link to your site on their blogs and web sites.

• Useful Articles/Tutorials – Pick something you””re passionate about and related to your site and write a good informational or opinion-based article about it. People also love tutorials – especially when they””re FREE!

Using these and many other techniques to generate truly useful and interesting content is the best approach to getting relevant links pointing back to your site. Try it out! What other techniques have you used to generate “buzz” (and links) for your site?

If there’s something you want to make sure to do right with SEO, its keyword research. It’s essentially the foundation of your SEO campaign. Choosing bad keywords initially will inevitably doom your entire campaign. In fact, the right keywords will mostly likely be the cause of your campaign’s success. There are 3 basic criteria to look at when coming up with keywords.

-Relevancy
-Competitiveness
-Traffic

Relevancy refers to how appropriate a keyword is to your website. Obviously, you want to choose appropriate keywords. You don’t want to be optimizing a site devoted to telephones for the keyword “computer”. While this example may be somewhat extreme, it does illustrate that you want to optimize your site for keywords relevant to your site. If you’re optimizing for telephones, use telephone-ish keywords. Use common sense, basically.

Choosing appropriate keywords isn’t always enough. Some keywords are more competitive than others. The more competitive a keyword, the more difficult it is to rank well for it. Consider the term “real estate”. According to Google’s allintitle tool, there are 74,200,000 sites with that keyword in their title tags alone. That’s a lot of websites to compete with! Choosing a keyword a bit more conservative would be much wiser.

The number of people searching for a given keyword is also important to your research. A keyword that is searched for by a lot of people is a good keyword to go after especially if it’s a low competition keyword. It’s always good to look at the ratio between the competitiveness and search volume of the keyword. You want high search volume/low competitiveness. Google’s Adword keyword research tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) is great for finding the average search volume per month for a given keyword.

Remember, when doing keyword research, take time to find good keywords because they’ll determine the success or failure of your campaign. Choose appropriate keywords with minimal competitiveness and high traffic at first and build from there.

Social media is increasingly becoming a more important part of an SEO – link building campaign. Social bookmarking is one component of social media and it makes it possible for users to join interesting communities and have interactive conversations. Social bookmarking sites make it easier to find relevant information by making it possible to share and search web pages that others in a community have already found useful, entertaining or interesting, and then bookmarked. They are also a convenient way for you to access your saved bookmarks from any computer anywhere. Before joining a social bookmarking site you will need to determine what you want to accomplish and then research several of social bookmarking sites available. To receive the most benefit from the different sites make a list of questions and features you need, while focusing on your desired results. This can make the social bookmarking research less daunting.

A few of the more popular social bookmarking sites you can use to promote your website are MyBlogLog owned by Yahoo, Digg.com, Kaboodle, Shpinn, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Twitter, and Furl. A few of the lesser known are Claim ID and Open ID, Zimbio, business-planet.net, Blurpalicious, and Veryhotlinks. When using these sites a few simple things to keep in mind so that you do not get banned are:

• Be authentic – join the communities you are genuinely interested in. Make acquaintances you can relate to and give back to the community by submitting others content and giving them credit.
• Follow each social network”’’s rules – Don’t abuse the sites or try to work around them. Your time and efforts will have better results than the “quick in and out”.
• Submit your most unique and relevant content page of your website. Others want to be informed, entertained or helped.
• No matter how tempting it is, don’t spam (self explanatory!)
• Don’t try to manage too many social media tools- this can give poor quality to your posts, comments, etc. Pick a few, and stick with them.

Remember that the whole reason for doing social media is to be involved. The more involved you are away from your website, the more people will come to know you and possibly what you have to offer. You slowly build credibility with everyone around you all the while building traffic and brand awareness.

Submitting to social bookmarking sites can be extremely effective for your link building campaign. It helps you to develop quality back links to your site while also driving relevant traffic. It can be very time consuming if you let it, but also enjoyable if you find sites that interest you. At the end it always seems to be well worth the effort.

When optimizing a website for specific keywords, it”’’s important that you create themes for your keywords in order to maximize your effectiveness. Our experience has shown that a themed website will typically do much better in the search engine rankings than a website built with similar pages, but lacking definitive themes. Below is a graphic that shows the basic structure of a website theme (click the image to enlarge):

Themes consist of several elements.

1. Landing Page: The landing page is the page at the center of the theme. This page should be the most relevant page on the website for the keyword you are trying to rank for. This page should also have a disproportionate amount of incoming links pointing to it from support pages, pages on the website outside of the theme, and other websites.

2. Support Pages: Support pages are pages that are on topic with the keyword you are trying to rank for, but don””t necessarily emphasis the actual keyword in their content. For example, if “search engine optimization” were a keyword I wanted to rank for, the landing page would be extremely relevant to the keyword: “search engine optimization,” but the support pages might be more centered on subjects such as link-building, content optimization, image optimization, etc.

3. Website Pages Outside of the Theme: These are pages that point an incoming link to the landing page from outside of the theme. These pages can be off topic, and for that reason, sometimes don””t add a lot of keyword relevance to the theme itself, but they do pass page rank to the landing page, creating artificial importance. If done right though, they can add relevanceby having optimized anchor text in the link pointing to the landing page.

4. On-Topic Websites: One of the best ways to create importance and relevance is by getting links to the landing page from similar topic websites, with optimized anchor text. The anchor text from this impartial source will tell the search engines what your site is about, and the link will pass page rank.

There you have it. The perfect formula for a well themed website!

If you don””t talk in terms of things that people actually search for then you are going to struggle to rank well. Keyword research is often hard to sell to people that just “don””t get it”. We seem to have an abundant amount of potential clients, who are price sensitive, and try to get by without keyword research. You know the ones: “I know what I want to rank for. ””BlahABCblah”” is what people are searching for, I don’t need anyone to tell me that.” What most people don””t understand is that keyword research gives you insights that you can””t get any other way. Experience can often slide over these fairly simple cracks of information, but if you can advise clients from an early stage of conversation, the importance of knowing the “best” terminology to use on a website, then the SEO and content writing job becomes a whole bunch easier.

I’m not only talking in terms of keywords, but the information and content structure of your website. I honestly believe that many SEO issues come as a result of a poorly themed and un-organized website structure. At Netmark Essentials, we call these “silos”. Eric Enge over at Search Engine Land talks about how information architecture is crucial to SEO.

This is obviously related to technical issues. If the search engines can””t spider your page or read your content then it doesn””t matter what the content says that you have on the website because it isn””t going to help… and by that, I’m talking about flash websites.

This relationship is the difference between having a website passing content information to the search engines, and a website talking in the right language; that has decided the best way to make something look like a header can””t possibly be to use the header tags. One of the things I love about SEO is that the majority of suggestions given to improve “optimization” also improve your website to users. It’s just plain common sense. If it really makes sense to do it, it will probably help. I””ve found that SEO done well often brings users and search engines together more than people like to admit. That way we can avoid the common argument of “the website should be written for search engines and not for the end user.”

Keep you eye on Netmark Essentials Blog… I know we’ll be discussing more about “silo’ing” in the future.

Link building is the most daunting process of any SEO strategy. Link building is not as easy as some SEOs make it sound. Often, the truth is that many SEOs that promise thousands of links in several days get these links by buying them. Buying links will get you a good amount of links way faster than organically building up the number of inbound links to your site, but the truth is that it isn’t a good idea, because Google considers buying links in order to pass/get page rank to be a link scheme. According to Google “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”
Of course Google wouldn’t penalize your site if it does not find out that you have been buying links to get your page rank up. It’s almost inevitable. In every situation that we’ve tested, they seem to know. Eric Enge, who explained why he doesn’t buy links wrote a good entry on how Google can find out that you have been buying/selling links.
For those who do buy/sell links but for only for advertising purposes you shouldn’t really worry since Google considers this as a valid reason. However, you should make sure that the links are properly designated as links for advertising only (no passing of page rank) by…

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag; or
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

If you have been buying links as part of your link building campaign or has been doing so for your clients this is a good time to rethink your strategy.
When building links for your website or any out there – you need to have a plan. Think about it. How long would it take you to build 250 “good” links if you are asking websites one by one? How long does it take you to find 250 websites that are even generally relevant to your website’s theme? After you’ve asked each of those 250 websites to link back to you, how many actually will? There really is a good solution to all of this, but you have to start to think outside of the box.

• Many companies use a “link baiting” technique. They come up with a neat tool or a neat informative article and people just start to notice it and link to it
• Companies will also produce press releases stating something cool and neat for what they do in the market. This always seems to grab some attention.
• Articles written about a similar subject to your website and submitted to news sources are always to great way to capture people’s attention.
• Directories are almost always a sure thing. Most directories are happy to have a link to your website. All directories have the hopes of becoming the next big place for people to go to search online.
• Blogging. What a great way to help keep people up to date with your latest news. If you can write compelling statements that keep people’s attention, you are sure to get a following, and some linking.

Above a just a few of the many examples of ways that you can grab some of those much needed links. My advice is to try out as many things as possible. You never know what you will get. What’s the worst that can happen? They will tell you “No” or you just don’t get the link. Then, it’s back to the drawing board and try-try-again. How creative can you be?

Here is how Netmark Essentials does some of the basic link building for their clients.