There are many businesses on the internet that are not being found period. One of the main reasons this is the case is because most businesses don’t have a website optimized to get Top Google Rankings. Google’s specific algorithm in ranking websites from #1 through thousands or even millions consists on many factors. The two largest factors (and fairly broad) are how relevant and how important are you when it comes to a specific keyword.

Better Google Rankings is one way that will substantially improve the amount of business that you will see from solid search engine optimization. Google has reported that 42% of searchers will click on the #1 ranking which makes the #1 spot for a keyword very coveted. It is critical however that you have top Google rankings for keywords that are relevant to your industry as well as have quality monthly internet users searching for those keywords.

There are many companies out there that claim that they can get you top Google rankings, but be leery as to what they are promising. Good quality Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires patience. Any company that has a selling point on getting you to the #1 ranking in 30 days might be something to strongly beware of. There is no question that the right technique and strategy can potentially make that happen, but it usually comes at a major financial cost. It’s true, most of the time getting you to have top Google rankings takes time and energy.

To get better Google rankings, my first piece of advice is to search for the right company. Just like any other industry, there are many who will make large promises, but ultimately fail to deliver results. There are some key questions you should ask. See this earlier SEO blog post about questions to ask.

Look for companies that are reputable and can show you results with case studies from previous and current clients. These companies are ones that can show you results that are expected without over promising and under delivering. Your website is a critical part of your business in the online world and getting Better Google Rankings can show your customers that you are a leader in the industry and you can deliver to their needs.

For more information on SEO and other forms of internet marketing, check out the rest of our informative website. Most of our tips and tricks will help you to get those top Google rankings you’ve been dreaming about

What is link building anyway? For those of you who may still be unsure of the term “link building” let me give you a quick definition and an example that portrays link building in its simplest form. Link building is a third party endorsement. For example, if I were to walk into Olive Garden and ask them which restaurant provided the best Italian food, Olive Garden would obviously promote itself by saying that it was the best. But, how can you trust such a biased answer? However, if I were talking to a random person off of the street, and I asked him the same question and he answered: “Olive Garden has the best Italian food around,” his answer would be a lot more valuable to me because it wasn’t a biased response. It was a third party endorsement that was not trying to endorse any particular company.

Now that we are more familiar with the definition of link building, what is the most efficient and cost effective way to build links? There are many sites out there that will build links for you, but they tend to cost a lot of money and often they do not add your URL to the best of sites. The most cost effective way to build links is to do reciprocal linking. This means that you add a link to a different site’s URL onto one of your own pages and they will, in return, add your link to their page for free. This works pretty well to help build traffic to your site. When you are doing reciprocal linking try to find sites that have a solid page rank. This will help to add more value to your own website.

Reciprocal Link Building

While reciprocal link building is the most cost friendly solution, the best links are one way links. Google gives more value to one way links. It sees them as the most significant links because a site out there is providing a link back to your site for nothing in return. Google can’t figure out why a site would do one way linking unless the site he is adding a link to is extremely valuable and contains useful information. As a result, Google will give your site better page rank. One way linking is the best method to help bring traffic and value to your site. However, it is extremely tough to find a site that will agree to do one way link building. Usually, you have to offer something in exchange for it such as a payment.

Link building is one of the most important factors in SEO; however, it also proves to be one of the most difficult tasks as well. I’m not trying to put down On Page work because On Page plays a huge role in successful SEO. On Page work is what makes a site relevant and link building is what makes it important. The two work hand in hand with each other, and must be used for any site to be successful in SEO.

Here are some common myths about submitting your website manually to search engines:

1. Search engine submissions requires a lot of research
2. Almost every search engine and directory has a link labeled “add a site” or “submit url,” which will take you directly to their submission form. All you have to do is just follow their rules and enter the information correctly and carefully.
3. Websites should be listed in all search engines.
4. If you list your website with some top tier search engines, it will eventually find its own way into the second tier and beyond. In fact, you don””t even have to submit your site at all for it to be listed. Search engine spiders are constantly crawling and combing the web and will eventually find your site on their own if your site contains any links at all to any other site.
5. Websites should be listed on a weekly or monthly basis. Continually submitting your site can be classified as spamming and result in your site”’’s banishment from a search engine”’’s database. As a general rule, don””t resubmit a new version of a page unless you have an unfavorable ranking or unless you””ve made some drastic changes.
6. Good submissions are costly. The truth is that you don””t have to pay a submission service to submit your website to the search engines. Believe it or not, submissions to most major search engines are free. Not all of them are free, but there are literally thousands of places that you can submit to.

Recommended Search Engines and Directories to Check out:

• http://dmoz.org
• http://dir.yahoo.com
• http://www.joeant.com
• http://www.skaffe.com
• http://www.bluefind.com
• http://www.zeal.com
• http://www.goguides.org
• http://www.gimpsy.com
• http://www.wowdirectory.com
• http://www.sevenseek.com
• http://thisisouryear.com
• http://search.looksmart.com

How Long Does it Take to Get Listed?
Here are some estimated waiting periods for some of the more popular search engines:

Bing: up to 2 months
Google: up to 4 weeks
Alta Vista: up to 1 week
Fast: up to 2 weeks
Excite: up to 6 weeks
AOL: up to 2 months
Hot Bot: up to 2 months
iWon: up to 2 months
DMOZ: up to 2 months (and good luck)

To learn more about our techniques about how to do submissions and where, take a peek at our Link Building page.

Did you know you can use pay per click advertising to test your keywords? Not a lot of people do. I am actually surprised to talk with many of the high status firms who are still in the stone ages with their PPC campaigns.
When I get on the phone with many of these account executives, a question I often field is “Would you recommend that we run a PPC Campaign in conjunction with our SEO?” For those of you who are reading this – here’s your answer: Absolutely*.

You might have noticed that little “*” after. Because we deal with so many people from so many different companies and lifestyles, I do need to make sure that I explain this out a little bit. For us, SEO is always a sure thing. We’ve been able to do so well with everyone. All of our clients (yes ALL of them) see positive results. For us, we can certainly kick it into high gear with our clients if we can find the niche traffic keywords for our clients websites.

Let me explain. We actually can use the analytical information that we get from our clients PPC accounts to help determine what keywords are drawing attention, and what isn’t. Now if the PPC campaign becomes monetarily successful immediately, that’s a bonus. Even if it doesn’t the information that we can glean with in the first 60-90 days is almost priceless. I’m sure you are all aware that statistically you’ll se almost 70% of your search engine traffic from your “other than regular” keywords.

I’ll give you an example. In the last 30 days, it appears that we’ve had 47 unique visitors to www.netmark.com from the keywords “Idaho Falls Internet Service Provider”. There was actually one time a while back where we mentioned it one time in a blog post. Let me ask you: “Is that a key phrase we are looking to optimize ourselves for”? Nope. We often see visitors come to our website from many of the odd and crazy terms that we really haven’t spent too much time specifically optimizing for.

So again, should you run a PPC campaign at the same time as SEO? Not only can you, but you should. It’s a great way to determine if your keywords are profitable.

Everyone knows how to find the popular keywords for their industry. Have you ever heard something about a KEI – keyword effectiveness index. The KEI of a keyword is a way of determining which keywords are right for your website based on popularity and competitiveness. The problem is that it doesn’t measure how profitable those keywords may be for your website. While this might be a decent place to start to find good keywords, I certainly wouldn’t end there.

A good pay per click campaign around the best keywords for your market can tell you which keywords might be most profitable for you. If you get a lot of click-throughs for a certain keyword, that should be an indicator that you can attract traffic for that keyword. The conversions are up to your landing page. Landing pages are kind of a whole other topic that we’ll visit soon. Once you find your most profitable keywords, plug them into your ads and don’t forget the landing pages. Watch your analytics and grab this useful and important traffic information, and put it to work!