So you have been working hard creating your perfect website, be it a blog, e-commerce or just something about nothing in particular. Whilst all this has been created and put online your site will gained a little age. Not much, maybe just a month or two but this is good, this is when you can now get started on the great uphill challenge that is search engine rankings. Getting your site to appear on the first page or two of google is what will make or break your site. Without visits, what would even be the point of having a website. To rank your site I am sure you will have already identified your keywords, it is these keywords that potential visitors will use for their search terms and this of course is where you want to be seen. The only problem is back linking is hard work, very time intensive and if your new to this, it carries a huge learning curve. For most the best solution is to buy backlinks.

How do you gain rankings for your keywords?

Back linking is the backbone of any Internet marketing campaign. The search engines rate you on how many back links you have. They also rate you further if these back links are of a good quality. The keywords play a part in this by simply being the back links anchor text. For example, we all click on links on the internet and these links are rarely an entire URL. Usually they are just words related to the URL and these words are referred to as the anchor text. Getting plenty of back links is not the difficult issue that you will be faced with, you only have to look at sites you visit often like maybe Facebook, Youtube and forums. So many of these allow you to post links with anchor text. The real skill comes in finding links that are of good quality, do follow, and varied in type.

What decides link quality?

If you were to create a back link on a forum that was related to organic foods and this link was in connection with a car modifications website, straight away you would have to say this is a poor quality link. Google is smart and thinks better and faster than humans in some situations. So use logic when applying links. An automotive link has no place on an organics food forum, but it will look great on a car enthusiasts forum. This is what helps determine the quality of the link, if it is on a site that is relevant to the link you will get a thumbs up from the SERP. Even on the organics food forum if the post you were participating in had for some reason a car theme to it then yes your link would become relevant. Another factor that determines the power of the back link is the authority of the site on which it is found. High page rank sites have authority on google and so by getting your link on a page on that site, or better still a page that has a high page rank as well will be worth a thousand low quality links, so always factor this in when searching for the best links.

Do follow vs No follow?

Well the clue really is in the name. Some links have a html no follow tag, and what this tells google to do is not to follow this link to its site. Hence google will not register this link as a back link because it just looked at the anchor text like they were words in the sentence and nothing more. Ideally then we want do follow links, links without this no follow tag. Once again google is smart, we do need to include some no follow links else it will appear unnatural having just do follow back links. The serps will be aware that you have clearly gone out hunting these back links so the alarm bells will ring and your whole campaign will loose a lot of value.

Could variation be the key to success?

Yes, Yes, Yes. I can not stress it enough. The rules that yahoo, google and bing set out for us clearly states that back links should not be created by the site owner, they should not be created using tools and they will penalize sites that show clear signs that they have ignored this. Link building is supposed to be a natural process created by people who have visited your site and therefore refer it to others via the internet. To create this impression with the serps you need to vary your back links as much as possible. This ,means using many different types such as forum links, profiles, blog comments and many others. We need to chuck in the no and do follow variety and also a few random ones just to help mix up any noticeable foot prints. By reducing your back link footprint this will ensure that you get maximum value for each and every one of your links.

To buy or not to buy?

Having read through all the above I am sure you now have a clear understanding of how much effort link building takes. When ever I need to apply time to a project I always weigh up weather it should be me putting in the time or weather I should buy someone else’s time. Choosing to buy backlinks can be a very good solution for many because if you need to keep your sites contents up to date then this where you’re time will be used. Why would you want to spend hours looking for one good link when buying a good set of back links can be instant and save you all the time and hard work. I personally make as many links as I can but I definitely buy more than I can produce and this really helps in terms of time, quality and variation and this is why my link building campaigns always bring results.

The old days

When I was at school back in the 1980’s, I can only remember there being one computer in the whole building. Very few people were lucky enough to have a computer at home, and if they did it was probably because your dad had an office job and it was pretty much out of bounds to the rest of the family. The screen was black the typing was green and to load games onto it took over half an hour from some kind of cassette player loading machine thingy!! At school we would have to spend hour after hour practicing our joined-up handwriting, because nobody ever got anywhere in life if their writing wasn’t neat! And your school bag weighed a ton because of all the heavy textbooks you had to carry around each day, now they put it all on a memory stick you can fit in your pocket….amazing!!

Modern technology has transformed the way we work, the way we shop and the way we socialise with our friends. Some of us very rarely pick up a telephone to actually speak to another person, instead we just send them a text message, and as for writing a letter and sending it ‘snail mail’, well whats the point when an email arrives instantly. There is no doubt we are living in a different world to the one we knew 20 years ago, and young people in particular have knowledge and skills we couldn’t even of dreamt about when we were growing up. It is sometimes difficult to remember what life was like before the Internet took over our lives.

Facebook

Life without the Internet is one thing, but life without Facebook is something else. 845 million users log on each day to update their profiles, send messages, add photos, write on walls and poke people, and anyone over the age of 13 can join for free.

Facebook was created by a group of Harvard university college students in America, as a way for new students to get to know each other. Facebook went live in 2004 and experienced extremely rapid growth , by April 2010 46% of Americans were believed to have opened an account.

Facebook in business

Facebook may have been originally created as a means of helping people to make friends and keep in touch with each other but it’s uses since then have become invaluable to the world of business as well.
Almost all national businesses and a lot of smaller, local firms use Facebook as a way of communicating with potential customers.

Make the most of your Facebook marketing

Here are a few tips from top marketing experts on how to use Facebook social marketing to boost your business profile.

1 – Everybody likes a bargain, so tip number one is this, offer incentive’s to encourage people to ‘like’ your fan page. Maybe you could include a money off coupon, a free trial or special offer.
2 – Keep your posts short and sweet, and stick to the point. People these days aren’t interested in reading long boring comments, especially if they seem to have no relevance to the brand or industry they are promoting. It may be difficult to think of something original to post everyday but by incorporating recent events or perhaps funny or interesting Youtube videos that are in some way related to your brand you should be able to keep them on your side.
3 – Always include a photo with every post. A new product, an employee doing something silly, an advert, anything. A photo grabs peoples attention more than just text so use them to your advantage.

Monitor your marketing effectiveness

All your hard work is useless if it is not doing the trick and pushing your business in the right direction. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing can help you to monitor what your fans like and what they don’t. Therefore helping you to target your marketing more efficiently in the future.
Tools such as Wildfire allow you to measure all sorts of information about your Facebook marketing such as unique users, fans, conversions, clicks, activity, retention, loyalty and much more.

Things have changed a lot since the 1980’s and we no longer need to rely on newspapers, magazines or posters in shop windows to grab attention from our customers. The phone directory is almost redundant, the future is all about the Internet, and social networks, Facebook in particular play a huge part in how we advertise and promote our product or service.
But always remember, it is just as easy for a fan to ‘unlike’ your page as it is for them to ‘like’ it, so stay on top of your game, and be successful!