The obvious basics

First, you need to do something that is free and simple. Get yourself setup with Google Analytics. GA is a hugely powerful (and did I mention free?) online suite of tools that can easily be installed on your website to track visitors, and pages, and keywords and all manner of sortable information that is highly useful.

To install GA you simply sign-up for an account, acquire the small line of code that they provide and then paste it into the footer of every page that you have on your site. If you’ve built your site in such a way that the footer is contained in one file (as I love to do), that will make your life even easier. At a minimum you need the code to be on your homepage. Then, after a couple hours GA will start playing big brother with your website and know more than you could ever want to know or care about. True spies would be totally jealous.

Design a great landing page

Now that you have Google Analytics up and running and watching over your site’s shoulder, the easiest thing to do is setup a custom landing page for your campaign. To keep things simple we’ll use the example of an online newsletter or any other kind of email marketing. Setting up an landing page is easy and once you have the code installed on the page, Google Analytics will be able to tell you how many people came to that specific page from your newsletter. The hard part – that’s unrelated to this discussion – is how you’re going to design an effective landing page that converts visitors to sales or subscriptions or clients. But that’s a story for another day.

Now, down to the good stuff. How do we know where people have come from? This is the big question and one that is very important if you’ve spent time and money on a marketing initiative or advertising space. We obviously want concrete proof that our efforts and big spending have paid off, right? Here’s how you do it.

Google URL Builder

Google has provided us with the perfect tool, their URL Builder. The UB Tool works directly with Google Analytics and tracks every time someone arrives from that URL. So, what you can do is build a URL for every link within your email and you’ll know exactly how many people clicked and arrived at the site. Most importantly,  you’ll know exactly which link they came from. It’s a pretty cool trick but if you use a good email marketing tool (like Sanctuary’s Subscriber Manager) you’re able to get these stats anyway. But the coolest use of the GUB tool comes when you’re advertising in someone elses email marketing campaign or on their website.

Building a custom URL

Google provides some pretty simple instructions about how to build your URL but let me give you a down and dirty rundown here. You’ll notice as you use Google Analytics that there are many “dimensions” to most of the stats that you see reported. When building a custom tracking URL there are three basic dimensions that you need to care about: Source, Medium and Name.

1) The source is where this link is located. This is where you are doing your advertising. Examples might be Google, Newsletter, Website, etc.

2) Next comes the medium which is essentially the type of advertising. Some popular mediums are pay per click, banners or static links

3) Lastly you need to give your campaign a unique name so you can refer to it in the future. So when you’re done, you’re URL will track (again in the case of email marketing) Newsletter, link, August 2009 Apple Newsletter. You might also setup a separate URL for a parallel campaign that’s something like Website, banner, Apple website Aug 09-Sept 09.

The last piece of the puzzle is to just ensure that this link is used in the proper place and you’ll have all the information that you need to know about your visitors and where they came from. Most importantly you’ll have concrete data about whether your advertising is really returning on your investement.

Need one last tip? The URL created for tracking could tend to be long and complicated, so simply visit a site like tinyurl.com and make it nice and lean. It will take something like the URL below and turn it into the simple version you see at the bottom.

Standard: http://www.eventticketingsystems.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=August%2BGoogle%20Campaign

Tiny: http://tinyurl.com/m9lmqt

Experience and Relevant Services

The company that you choose should first and foremost be a company with a long history of developing and marketing websites. You can ask them straight up about how long they’ve been in business, what experience their key employees have and how this experience will benefit you.

The services the company offers should also be considered because there are many companies that dabble in “web site design” but are not experienced specialists. At Sanctuary Media Group we specialize in website development and online marketing – this is what we do. This is all we do. Our services encompass everything you need to succeed online from the point where you register your domain name to making sure that you have a plan in place to market your new website. We are simply a one-stop-shop for your online marketing needs.

Talent and Relevant Skills

Building an effective website is more than just designing a pretty presentation. Of course the look-and-feel of your website is important in making a good first impression but there is more to it than that. Talent is intertwined with experience and it encompasses everything from having a flair for design to knowing how to write valid html code and how that code should be optimized for the search engines.

A good website design company should also have knowledge about how to market your new website online. That includes the basics like proper search engine optimization, but it should also encompass concepts like on-site factors to make sales and retain customers, how to leverage new technologies like social media and how to maximize online marketing tools like email marketing, pay-per-click campaigns and ideally a strong working knowledge of how to get you properly ranked in the search engines.

Service and Support

Getting the support and service that you need from your web developer is very important. Everyone has heard stories where a company outsourced their website overseas or they had Bob’s son-in-law design the website in his spare time. Usually this type of relationship ends in hassles and delays – possibly, you find yourself left in the dark as the developer disappears off the face of the earth.

Sanctuary Media Group has been around for a long time and we support over 100 clients – some very large local and national companies. So, we’ll be here for you, now and into the future. You’ll have direct email and phone numbers to the people that do the real work.

Affordability

Price is always a concern for every business owner – especially if you’re just starting out. Searching for the best price is important but be aware that you’ll usually get what you pay for – especially in the web development industry. There will always be someone out there that will work for less money. But will they have the experience, services, talent, skills and service that you need to properly support you online?

At Sanctuary Media Group we try to provide the best service, the highest quality design, an all-inclusive marketing plan, consulting and the best support possible at a price that allows us to do great work for our clients. We want you to succeed online. That is the bottom line.

Social media can be summed up in a few powerful words (The five pilars): Community, Conversation, Participation, Openness and Connection. It is the new way of speading the word about your company. It’s not the only way for sure, but, the effective use of social media tools has become an important and effective tool for any company that operates online or off. The concepts are simple, but the opportunities are broad.

In the search for the perfect definition for social media, I must refer to the opening statement of Social Media on Wikipedia:

“It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.”

Getting right to the point, here are some tools that you should investigate first if you’re interested in exploring online marketing and business growth through social media.

1) Get a blog

A blog is a large part of the puzzle. It provides you with a casual platform to publish information and interact with the public on your website. It fulfills all of the 5 pilars of social media mentioned above by allowing you to be open and share information directly on your website. It allows you to have a direct conversation with your customers as well as create community, provide support and put a face to your business. It allows you and your customers to connect immediately and it allows them to participate and contribute to the conversation. Most of all, a blog allows you to be open about your thoughts, policies, plans  and potenitally the inner workings of your company – therefore breaking down the barriers normally created between a company and the public. In addition, a blog is a great place to combine all aspects of online marketing into one place. (search engine rankings, subscription, email marketing sign-up, the building of your brand and reputation as a leader in your niche, as well as a place to offer other ways to connect through other social media such as Twitter, delicious, video, photos, etc.

One note of advice on blogging – Don’t use one of the free blogging services. The blog is not on your site, it is not customizable and it disconnects users from your main website. We use Wordpress – free software that allows us to setup completely custom blogs for our clients that reside on the same server as their website. This is the only way to do a blog if you’re serious about it.

2) Microblogging

Microblogging is the practice of provding useful information to the public in 140 characters or less. The leader in this field is Twitter. Twitter is a powerful tool because it allows you to build a list of followers – people who are interested in what you do – that recieve short bits of information from you at the moment you publish. As you can probably imagine, Twitter can be highly effective if you use it correctly. Imagine having several thousand people following you that are really interested in what you do or say. At any moment you can decide to give them advice, throw out a special promotion, remind them about a special event or simply pass on a recommendation from a fellow follower. Twitter is free to use, and when it’s used on a regular basis, it can fulfill all the pilars of social media with participation/conversation (tweeting back and forth with your followers), Openness (offering advice and information), Community/Connectedness (Only your followers see your tweets and your followers decide if they want to stay connected to you). Follow me on Twitter here.

3) Social Networks

The concept of social networks is continually evolving. In the near future I believe the landscape will be completely different than it is today. But for now, to illustrate this concept I’d like to explain Facebook. There are other services out there like MySpace and Bebo but Facebook is the clear leader at the moment. Facebook essentially allows you to build a network of followers who are essentially accepted into your inner circle. The concept is similar to Twitter except that it’s broader. Facebook allows you to microblog so your “friends” can see what you’re doing and saying, but it also allows you to do many more things that help others to understand what you like and what you’re all about. How to use Facebook to promote your business is up to the individual but there is no doubt that there is a lot of opportunity to connect through this popular network if you handle it properly. Currently I don’t use Facebook for business purposes as I choose to keep it for social connectivity with old friends, current friends and family. It’s going to be an experiment of mine to roll out a Facebook page for my business to explore the opportunities. Facebook definitely fulfills all 5 of the social media pilars. Even if you don’t use it for promoting your business, it’s an extremely fun way to stay connected.

4) Content Communities

In addition to written advice and microblogging, there are other opportunites available to connect online these days. Depending on your business, people can find you in ways that you’d have never dreamed of a few years ago. Post some pictures of your products or events on Flickr and tag them with keywords or by your location. There’s a good chance that someone will search for an image and find their way to your site. Post a video on YouTube and embed it into your blog. Again, YouTube is searchable and people will find you. Encourage people to bookmark your site on Delicious. Do this enough times and people will find you as a reliable source within your niche. The opportunities are endless and so are the ways that you can drive people to your site if you’re creative. Again, all of these services allow you to fulfill the 5 pilars by encouraging participation (ever made a comment on a Flickr photo?), being open, connecting in creative ways… on and on. The best part is that they’re all free. (Did I mention this?)

5) Forums, Podcasts, Vblogs, Wikis, Chat, oh my!

I’m going to lump some things into the closing of this post. Not because I think they’re any less important, but because there is just so much to cover. Hopefully I’ve made my point about the concept of social media by introducing you to the top concepts, but your opportunities are endless. Depending on your company, your industry, your niche and many other factors, you might benefit greatly from putting a forum on your site to help in customer support. You might consider publishing a podcast (an audio download) of your CEO discussing a new product release. You might post a video of the same thing so people can put a face to a name or demonstrate your new product so people can see it in action! Or, you could add online chat to your website where you can immediately connect with your customers in an anonymous way – therefore promoting honest communication.

Really, the effective use of social media in business is constantly evolving. But the concepts are simple. Connect to people, form relationships, make it personal, let your story be known, and grow your business online. This is what social media for business is all about.

As most of you know, Google PageRank is a good way to guage how important and respected a site is. It’s mostly based on how many links a site has pointing to it – among other things I’m sure. PR usually influences how high you rank in the SERPs, so, the higher the PR the better when you’re looking for links. (You can download the Google Toolbar to see a site’s PR btw) Our site has a PR5 out of 10 which is pretty darn good I must say. (Even sites like Facebook only have a PR9) But it’s important to know specifically that just because you can get linked to from a page with high PR, it may not improve your own PR that much. Here’s why…

Let’s say that a site links to your blog and it has a PR of 3. Not a bad link, but the link that you received appeared on their “links” page. There happens to be 100 other links on that page pointing to all manner of other sites that may or may not related to what the site is about or what you do. Now, across the aisle, you have a friend who has offered to link to your site from within their blog and they have a PR5 site. You will be the only link within that blog post AND it’s related to what you do.

In the first example, what this link means for you is that the value of your own PR has only increased by a small fraction because you only get 1/100 of the “PageRank value” flowing from that page. (Or “link juice” as Greg Boser from Web Guerrilla called it.) In the second example, you’ll get close to 100% of that PR value and possibly even more love if the link has your target keywords in it.

Now, link juice is not something that you can purchase at the local quick mart, but rather the weight, or value of the link in regards to how it improves your own PR. Essentially each time a page links out to another page it’s going to pass a little bit of it’s PR value on to that page and hopefully contribute a little bit of it’s overall PR to your PR growth.

So, back to our first link example. Adding more links to a page (such as external links) also means that each link receives less of the available passed PageRank value – or PR juice. In a nutshell, this is why it’s better to get mentioned within someone’s content where you might be one of two or three links on a page related to your site’s subject matter vs. getting linked from some random links page or directory.

So, in summary, links are very important to why you rank within the SERPs but not all links are created equal. Keep this in mind when you are building links to your site and if you have an opportunity to control your link’s placement. Don’t include it on a page that has many other links. It’s simply not as valuable.

Googlebot is not stupid. It knows that it’s simply harder to get linked from a relevant page where there are only a couple links out vs. getting on a links page or directory where there are many other links. In Google’s mind this is equal to referring someone to a friend vs. throwing your address book at them and telling them to figure it out. That referal has value and so does that one link to your site.

“In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins–not through strength but by perseverance.”

I was at a client reception yesterday evening. It was for their company’s 50th Anniversary. 50 years of continued success, happy clients and customers AND blood, sweat and tears. It’s a great achievement that we should all deeply admire.

At first I wasn’t really phased about this achievement as I had had a very bad day and needed a drink, some cheese and some good meat on a stick. So my wife and I made our way to the Hors D’oeuvre table.

After making our selections we settled at a table, and soon after, another couple joined us and we engaged in light conversation. Soon though, the subject turned to business and work and I found that this gentleman has a successful business of his own, with three offices in three states. We chatted about life and children and nursing (my wife is a nurse and so is their daughter) and later at the bar the subject came back around to business. By this time the drinks were sinking in and our moods were improving to the point where we felt a little more comfortable with each other and the man gave me some welcome advice – being that he has been in business 28 years and I’ve been at this for much less.

It was weird, almost as if he was sent to deliver the message that I needed to hear that day. My day was terrible and at one point I laid on my bed talking to my wife about actually giving up on one of my pet projects that we’ve been toiling over now for several years; it’s just not going well. So the man says to me “To succeed in business you simply need to persevere. It doesn’t matter what today brings, you need to simply focus on your quarterly and yearly results and you’ll continue to be successful. You can’t let the bad days stop you.”

To remind himself of this he told me that he used to keep the word “Persevere” taped to his desk.

After that it was like a lightning bold him me; it was one of those moments where you put things in perspective and know that you now have a better way to get through those bad days. It’s like Richard Carlson’s great book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”. You MUST not let the little things and the day to day grind derail your plans for building your business, being a better parent or spouse, becoming healthier, or even enjoying life more.

I think about giving up often. It’s simply the easy way out and I could easily go get a job somewhere and have half the worries and work that I deal with on a daily basis. But I really do enjoy what I do. I help people and provide an affordable and valuable service to my clients. I really do have it good and I need to remember that when I have bad days – we all do and that’s the simple point of this post.

Going forward I have pasted a note on my desk to remind me of this day and that we all should not sweat the small stuff, the bad days, and the daily hassles and troubles – It simply says “Persevere”.

To rank your website in the search engines you need a plan. That plan includes (but is not limited to) all of the above:

• SEO Knowledge (what to do and what not to do)
• Real world keyword and competitor data
• Great content
• Lots of high quality inbound links
• Analytics integration
• Realistic Goals
• A timeline
• A budget
• Patience and the knowledge that your investments WILL pay off if you allow it

The last four items on the list are the topic of discussion today because I think it’s important for people to know that there is no secret magic trick to SEO. It simply takes planning, work, analysis and time and there is no way around this like there might have been in the old school days of the internet. Google never will release the details regarding how or why sites rank above others. We obviously have a good idea based on our experience and that experience shows that you need to create great content (lots of it), get other sites to link to it, analyze your traffic ongoing, continue to optimize your site based on the current data and hit the “repeat” button over and over and over.

I’m saying this because the last 4 items on the list above require you to have some kind of expectations. You want to rank your site, within a certain period of time and within a certain budget. I think this is all valuable to have for obvious reasons, but again, there are no magic tricks. Regardless of your desired goals, wants and needs, these goals are severely affected by the amount of time and budget that you have available to reach those goals. Depending on your target keywords and market you might need a lot more time and budget than a company in another category to overcome the following:

• The size of your target market
• The number of serious competitors online
• The age of your competitors sites
• The current visibility and rankings of your competition vs. your own
• The amount of content that your competition has created, or is creating ongoing
• The quality of the competitors website, content, and brand
• If your competition is expanding into social media marketing in addition to SEO
• If your competition is spending money offline and online to increase rankings
• If your competition is paying for links and to build inbound links ongoing
• How big your competition’s budget is. (They might even have a full time SEO staff in house)

My point is that you have to have realistic expectations that involve a realistic budget (that relates to the amount of time spent on your campaign) and realistic goals (that relate to the amount of time you expect to rank well).

I say this because it takes work and work takes time – Search engine optimization and high rankings take time, experience and most importantly realistic goals and expectations. Those goals usually require patience. If you’re not willing to accept the last bullet point then you’ll probably never succeed.

“Our patience will achieve more than our force.” – Edmund Burke

Whenever somebody asks me how long search engine optimization takes, I counter by asking them, “How long does marketing take?”

Here are some reasons why SEO takes time and requires an ongoing investment:

1. Starting and running an SEO campaign involves a lot of tasks

Many people think that ranking properly in the search engines involves some big secret that can be manipulated – if only we knew what it was. Unfortunately that is not the case and the secrets and tricks that we’ve used in the past are becoming rarer. To get started ranking in the search engines there are many, many things to do but they involve work, knowledge, experience, research and experimentation – not tricks. That work includes (but is not limited to) keyword research, setup of a sitemap, solving domain name and hosting concerns, website design and coding concerns, architectural/navigation concerns, content optimization and creation, analytics setup and integration, reporting, meetings, consultation, planning etc. (Just to name a few) Just the initial start of your SEO campaign can involve months of planning, research, setup, improvements and content creation just to get you ready to roll.

2. Search engine optimization must happen gradually and look natural

Google can be suspicious and easily spooked. For example, one of the most important parts of an effective SEO campaign is growing the number of high quality relevant links pointing to your site. Getting links to your site is important, but you can’t get them all at once. Manipulative link building is often temporary, while high quality links are hard to get and stand the test of time; Google knows this. If your site suddenly comes on the scene and immediately has hundreds or thousands of links, Google may sideline your site for an indefinite period of time. But, if your links grow organically and over time, your growth will look much more natural in the eyes of Google. Plus, to gain quality links it really does take time and a lot of effort. Link building is a very hard part of the SEO process to manipulate and Google likes it that way.

3. New sites don’t show up right away in the SERPs

Google and other alternative search engines can reward older websites with higher rankings in the SERPs. If you have a brand new site it’s rare that you will rank immediately. There may even be cases when your site will be placed in what has been called the “Google Sandbox“. This is a place in Googleland where sites go to await their birth on the scene. Google may do this to control the quality of their search results and to ensure that new sites are high quality before they show up in the results – although this is only a theory.  Doing things that look unethical and unnatural can also get you banned to the Sandbox so there is no value in trying to do things that are not natural and organic to get a “jump” on the competition. The words “natural and organic” themselves describe a process that requires patience.

4. Older sites tend to rank higher in the search results

As mentioned previously, there might be times where – if all things are created equal – you simply can’t initially rank above the competition because their site was created in, say, 1998 and your site came on the scene in 2008. Not to mention that chances are good that they’ve spent more time creating content, getting links etc. and it just takes time to catch up. Overcoming this obstacle can be one of the toughest hurdles in search engine optimization and it requires a big investment in time, research and experimentation.

5. Local, national or global?

Depending on your target market, your SEO campaign goals might be much broader than another site; therefore taking more time to achieve results. Does your website target local customers or national? How about a possible world-wide audience? Do you have one niche product or hundreds of unrelated products or services? The answers to these questions will decide how much work is in involved, how much competition you’ll have, and ultimately, how difficult it’s going to be to rank. The more competition, the longer it’s going to take to overcome everyone in the rankings and rise to the top.

6. SEO Involves ongoing analysis

There are millions, possibly billions of total searches every day on the internet and Google has said that a majority of those searches are completely unique from day to day. That means that people are always finding completely unique ways to reword their searches and find what they’re looking for. Part of SEO involves analysis of how people arrive at your site. What words are they using? Are there ways that people are finding you that can be capitalized upon? Integrating analytics software into your site and constantly reviewing the results is essential to finding ways to improve your rankings. Taking the time to really digest what’s going on and then making the necessary changes or improvements takes time.

7. It takes time to develop content.

10 pages is not enough content to provide value and authority on any given subject and Google knows this all too well. So, by default, Google loves sites that are continually updated and improved. Many sites are basically online “brochures” that contain a certain number of pages and that’s only going to get you so far. This is one of the big reasons why blogs are so popular since they allow you to continually – and easily – add new content to your website. Developing new content takes creativity and skill and you can figure about 2 hours for every 500 word page that’s created on your site. Then, once the content is posted there is time involved with waiting for the engines to re-crawl your site and index the new content.

8. Do you want to rank for niche terms or broad terms?

Just like your target market, there are also concerns about your goals when ranking for broad terms or long tail niche terms. Let’s say that you sell exterior lighting and you ship your products world-wide. Everyone in the world is a potential customer, every lighting site is a competitor and the possible keyword combinations that you can rank for when targeting a broad category like this are endless. Now, lets say that another company sells Tiffany lamps instead of every type of lighting possible. You might still have a world-wide target market and many competitors, but now you’re operating in a specific niche that is much more targeted. A targeted niche campaign will yield faster results than a broad product or service campaign. It all depends on your goals. The bigger your goals, the longer it will take.

9. Competitors are always popping up and improving

I truly believe that SEO is a GREAT investment. As I’ve said before in my posts, you can equate PPC and SEO to renting vs owning a home. If you invest in improving your organic SEO rankings, you’ll be investing in a position in the search engines that will stand the test of time – you’ll own that position. That said, things are always changing on the internet. New and old competitors are always appearing and rising and falling and there is no guarantee that you’ll always keep your current rank. Over time, competitors will force you to raise the bar higher and keep improving. Just like we try to rise your site to the top of the rankings, other competitors are trying to do the same so we always need to keep working and improving.

10. The web is constantly evolving

The competitive landscape is always changing, but, the world of search engine algorithms and SEO is changing even faster. I personally spend many hours each week trying to keep up and keep learning. It’s a never ending process to keep up with the news, tactics, changes and theories that surround the science of SEO and why sites ranking better than others. What might work this month, might not work at all next month so the way we practice search engine optimization must evolve as well.

At Sanctuary Media Group we believe that you should have complete control over your website so you can easily add and modify your content anytime you want. The last thing we want to do (unless you need us to do it) is spend time updating your website. We would much rather see you spend that money on something that makes your business grow.

With that said, we have several affordable options available for you that will give you complete control over your content – ranging from our easy-to-use Site Manager service to a robust custom content management system. Don’t be fooled by the competition that wants to sell you their content management system for $5000-$20,000. We want to make your website “hands on” at the most affordable price possible. Please feel free to shop around and you’ll find that what we’re telling you is true.

Below is a short summary of the options available if you’re interested in gaining control over your website.

Wordpress

Wordpress is the defacto, best-of-the-breed system for blogging. I’ve used it since it’s inception and it’s become a pretty powerful content management system over the years. This is the only solution we recommend for blogging and we’re now building entire sites using Wordpress on the backend. In fact, we think it’s so great that we use it for all our company sites – even though we know how to build websites from scratch! Wordpress allows you to easily add content to your site, upload images, create new pages, format your text, create links and much more. It’s simply a great solution. The costs involved can vary depending on how you want it integrated into your site. One thing that’s great about Wordpress is that the software is free. So the only costs involved are for us to set it up and integrate your site into the software. It’s a great solution.

Site Manager

Ok, so lets say that you have an existing site that you simply want to maintain. You don’t want to blog, you don’t need to add new pages or get real “techy” (not that Wordpress is overly technical). You just need a simple way to make changes to your existing website.

Let me introduce Site Manager. Site Manager is our latest and greatest solution for updating your site. It can be integrated into any existing website where it will allow you to update your pages with ease. Like Wordpress you can easily add text, images, formatting, links, etc. and you can duplicate existing pages to create new content plus much more.

Site Manager is provided to our clients for a small monthly fee that can’t be beat. Depending on the size of your site there will probably be a small setup and integration fee to get started but we like to get you up and running with as little fuss and investment as possible.

As you can see from the screenshot below, your website appears as the rest of the world sees it and all you have to do is point and click to make edits in a very “Microsoft Word-like” environment. Simply select text and click the bold button or click the image button and upload and place an image. It’s that easy.

Custom Content Management System – Website Publisher

Ok, so lets say that Wordpress and Site Manager are not quite up to par – you need something that will allow you to manage a large site, create many categories and sub-sections of your site, manage user’s permissions and access to areas of the site, etc. Well, we have a solution for that too. Our website publisher platform will take you to the next level. Please contact us for full details and features if you’d like to know more.

What’s great about all of our suggested solutions is that they’re affordable, they’re all completely web-based which means that you can access the software from anywhere, you don’t need a doctorate degree to use them and, they’re all backed by Sanctuary Media Group who is here to help if needed. A simple phone call or email is all it takes to get help.

For more information about our solutions please contact us today.

]]> http://www.sanctuarymg.com/affordable-content-management-systems/feed/ 0 http://www.sanctuarymg.com/affordable-content-management-systems/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SanctuaryMediaGroup/~3/L3RhwfIF078/ http://www.sanctuarymg.com/link-building-101-ways-to-find-links/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:29:59 +0000 chris.auman http://www.sanctuarymg.com/?p=276 Many people know that acquiring links to your site is very important. Google loves links… LOVES EM. A link is essentially “a vote” in favor of your site. A link tells Google that someone thinks you’re a good resource – a valuable destination. So, in theory, the more links you have pointing to your site (from quality and related sites!) the higher you will rank.

Sounds simple right? Well,  with all things Google, it’s not. We talked a little bit about what types of links Google likes yesterday so we won’t revisit that today. What we’re going to do is briefly look at a couple useful tactics for finding ways to get links.

Have you ever looked at the search results for a particular query and wondering why “Bob’s Company” is ranking above you in the results? Rankings can be influenced by many things but a lot of times their rankings have to do with the number of links they have over you. Wouldn’t it be great to find out who is linking to Bob and try to duplicate those successes?

All you need to do is the following: Go to Yahoo search and type in linkdomain:www.bobscompany.com and Yahoo will return a long list of sites that are currently linking to Bob. You can do the same thing on Google by typing in link:www.bobscompany.com and it will return results – although I find that Yahoo returns better results.

Pretty cool huh? Give it a try as a first step in finding ways to get more links to your site. But remember, not all links are equal. You want to find sites that are high quality and related to your niche if possible. That’s not always possible but my point is that you don’t want links from any ol’ site. Low quality links from “spammy” sites could actually hurt you so be wary.

Good luck! Get those links – go get em! Go…

Twitter

On that note, I just want to clarify something about Twitter. Many people know the fact that to rank well on the search engines you need to get links to your site. The more links the better. A link to your site (in the eyes of Google) is simply “a vote” that tells the search engine that someone thinks you have something of value. The more links, the more they relate back to other high value sites and the more the links relate to your content niche, the more Google will see that you have something of value to offer in your niche. The result will be higher rankings for your site because Google’s job is to return highly relevant search results. Linking is not the only answer to search rankings, there are hundreds – maybe even thousands – of things that affect your rankings. But linking is a major ingredient in the “secret sauce” of SEO.

Now, regarding Twitter. Many people think that when you post on Twitter you’re creating links back to your content and to others that you Tweet about. This is true in the human sense but not with the search engines. Most of the time this holds true for blog comments too. Linking to your site from another blog’s comment area will return some value in that other people might find your site and eventually link there if they see value, but the actual link from the comment has zero value in regards to ranking in the search engines.

See, there is an HTML tag on Twitter links that’s inserted automatically. To illustrate, it looks like this: rel=nofollow. This HTML tag tells the search spider that this is a link that should not be followed. Most of the time this tag is included on blog comments too because it devalues how Google ranks sites. Here’s the reason, Google doesn’t want to make your life too easy. Links are a core part of the Google’s ranking algorithm and they don’t want to make it too easy for you to manipulate that data. Posting links to your content on Twitter and linking back from blogs is EASY. If it was this easy, we could all manipulate the listings and Google would soon start returning junk results and people would start to use another search engine. They obviously do not want this to happen. (Read more about comment spam here)

The most highly prized link in the eyes of Google is presented like this (and it’s extremely HARD to get):

a) A link on a site that relates to your content or industry niche.
b) A link within the body of the content (an inline link) not in the sidebar or on a “links” page.
c) A link with your keywords in it. (Example: Click here for my advice about Twitter)
d) A direct link to your content page, not your homepage.

I hope this has clarified a few things for those who might thinking that posting links on Twitter and blog posts helps with search rankings. Let me clarify that they CAN help you by driving traffic and eyes to your site, but they have no direct effect when search engines are concerned. You should use Twitter and continue to make comments on blogs because they are valuable practices, but not regarding SEO.