(You really want to avoid taking these kind of emails seriously.)

If you have, or are considering exchanging links with someone that has contacted you via email for SEO purposes, then this is a must read post.

Everyday we get emails from other “webmasters” or “SEOS” wishing to exchange links with one of our many websites. The reason why they’re doing this is because they want to build back links into their website to improve their own Search Engine rankings. Now if you are not already aware, incoming links into your website play a vital role in search engine optimization and how your website is positioned in the search engine rankings. There are a couple of reasons for this, for example if you have two websites, both with quality content, both are equally optimized, then the only way to tell which site is of higher quality is by the number of incoming links. Remember Google wants to provide the BEST result to their customers. Each link is like a vote coming into your website, but not all links are equal.

You can determine the value of a link by checking the page rank of the page that you are trying to acquire a link from. Page Rank is determined by the number of incoming links, websites content, and traffic. Websites with a high page rank are considered authority websites and a link by them is definitely going to boost your own websites value. Also when looking to build links you need to be aware of the ratio of incoming to external links is. If there is an excessive amount of external links on the website then the value of the link decreases.

Years ago link exchanges use to work very well and many websites participated. Because the popularity in exchanging links with many websites purely to increase your own websites rankings, Google massively devalued weight how exchanged, reciprocal links contribute to your rankings.

Here is an example of a a typical email, and website wishing to exchange a links.

Now when we view one of his websites, Evolving(.)biz we can check out really if this is a good site to exchange links with, bearing in mind reciprocal links don’t carry much weight to begin with.

You can see there is over 600 external links on the home page (and probably every other page) and there is just a few internal links within the website. Upon further investigation using the site: command with Google we can also see that whilst maybe he has a Page Rank of 4, none of his pages are index in Google.

This sets off a huge alarm bells in my head, this site could potentially be blacklisted by Google. Also, because there are no pages index by Google, that means the search bot is not crawling this particular website so in fact will NEVER find your link on this site. There are many ways to trick the Page Rank counter too.

So based on all of this information if you proceeded to exchange links with this website then you’ll be getting an awful deal that could potentially drop value on your pages containing links to this website. There are a lot of people operating website link exchange programs like this, a lot of SEO companies.

The trick they’re doing is,

• 1: Setup a dodgy, spammy website with an incorrectly based Page Rank
• 2: Add your website’s link and then email you
• 3: You link to one of their clients, not to the websites mentioned in the email
• 4: Their client benefits from your one way link into their site, whilst the link from the dodgy site to your site doesn’t do anything

Don’t fall for link exchanges, only exchange links that will actually benefit you i.e from a popular, relevant website of a friend.

For more information on link building and SEO you can take our 3 day hands-on SEO training course, or check out our current SEO plans and let Marketing Bangkok take care of your search engine optimization.

The fact is offline media like magazines and newspaper are slowly dying and becoming less effective for marketing. With SEO we can distribute content and information about your website and products to literally 1000′s of websites where it has the potential to reach millions of people. If you need to stop the SEO service, the affects will last on much longer than advertisement that is only in circulation for 1 week or 1 month (newspaper / magazine).

With SEO it is much easier to track the ROI than doing guess work with print advertising. Marketing Bangkok provides monthly SEO services with guaranteed results! Our monthly campaigns are usually cheaper than most print advertising, and the difference is ridiculous! You have to see for yourself.

Because SEO is a new industry, that’s shrouded in bit of secrecy, you may not understand how to check what your SEO company is doing. Are they getting results for you? Are you getting a good return on your investment? Some ways to catch bad SEO companies out is by checking out whether or not they’ve made any changes at all to your website.Have they performed even the most basic onsite search engine optimization?

There are many companies and individuals in Thailand, and Bangkok in particular who claim to know how to do SEO and to get good results. But realistically these people do not have the slightest idea of what they are doing. In the past I have even come across companies who do SEO for multiple businesses in the same industry, conflict of interest much? Yes I think so. I have even done consultations with companies where their current SEO Company hadn’t performed any onsite search engine optimization.

If you are looking for a reputable search engine optimization company in Bangkok, an affordable established Bangkok based SEO Company is Marketing Bangkok. We have documented case studies of previous successes and even provide a money back guarantee.

Two Results are Better than One

I read somewhere that 87% of search engine traffic for a given keyword is allocated from occupying the Number 1 position in the search engine results page. If you understand SEO, then this post will share a quick method to double your SERP positions and to improve the likelihood of keyword conversions – once you have reached the Mecca for a specific search term.

SEO is predicated on one simple premise, rankings; in order for SEO to be effective, it must produce ranking on the first page in search engines.
Not only is this the crowning achievement of search engine optimization, but once you achieve a top 10 position, then you can pull other keywords into the spotlight as a result of strategic linking. We often refer to this as the buddy system for lateral linking.

Search engine algorithms pay particular attention to individual pages capable of offsetting all of the other inconsistencies of a competitor’s web pages and deem one page worthy above all others for any given search term.

Obviously the metrics are unique for each market, keyword or niche, but the reality is the same, once a top 3 or more importantly Number 1 or Number 1, 2 and 3 positions are present in Google. I have mentioned before, the fastest way to get a top 10 position in Google is to get a link from a website already ranking in the top 10 for that keyword.

It does not matter if that link is provided from your website or another website, rankings are by the page and there is a daisy-chain effect of linking pages together that fuses the pages through a dynamic give and take relationship (based on citation). This citation can provide the algorithmic equivalents of trust needed for the newly linked page to jump in line past others duking it out for that keyword.

Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword or key phrase and the thresholds inherent to the barrier to entry; the time required to initiate a campaign, create all of the necessary content, inbound links and citation from other web 2.0 properties, RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites divided by the amount of time you invest managing or outsourcing the various components involved determine your profitability and return on investment.

With this in mind, from a tactical perspective, it’s better to leverage the SERP positioning you already have than to look outside of your website for off page ranking factors. If you understand the power of a Number 1 position, then you can replicate this next simple SEO tip.

Identify all current Number 1 positions in Google for keywords.

Validate they still exist.

Use Keyword Research to find “related keywords” based on the Number 1 ranking Link from the page that ranks to a new page (using similar anchor text or overlapping keywords to promote the new page).

Let the new page get indexed, then check the SERPs.

Identify: My favorite tool for this is SEMRush, but if you don’t want to use this, there are other programs out there, or even Google webmaster tools can show you your website’s top ranking SERP positions when you log in.

Either way, this is your base, so, identify the keywords which could represent hub status for your SEO campaign and pass along the power of ranking to other pages in your website.

Validate: Check to see if you still hold the Number 1 position, even a top 3 will do, but this tactic works better if you are at the helm of a particular search phrase.

Keyword Research: You should be able to gauge whether or not the keyword is profitable for you based on the frequency of hits and the type of traffic you garner as a result. You can always look through Google Analytics or whichever analytics package you have to assess the keywords that represent the highest percentage of traffic to your website.

Once you know what those keywords are, then use keyword research to find stemmed semantic variations that also fall under the same category or keyword cluster. Those related keywords will become the new focal point for step 4 – linking.

Linking: The closer the shingles (groups of keywords) the more effective this technique is. You can call this padding the search results (if you use similar exact match titles, tags or content), or you can pass this ranking factor along to help synonymous terms.

Simply go back and edit the page ranking in the Number 1 position and add a link to the new target page (with the keyword you intend the target page to rank for as the anchor text). Then, the authority from the page in the Number 1 position will gróup the new page under its umbrella and pull that page into the spotlight.

When the new page gets crawled and the old page reveals the connectivity between the two, typically a double SERP position occurs or a double position accompanied by jump links, breadcrumbs or the [+] with additional search results for that keyword appear in Google to showcase the degree of relevance your website has for the said term.

You can then build additional deep links from other sites or addition internal links to the newly dubbed page. As a result, you should see buoyancy for other pages for multiple keyword variations related to the parent keyword cluster.
With this simple tip you can double your conversions by increasing your website’s semantic array of keywords. Obviously you will know which keywords and traffic is most lucrative for your business model, but this technique is priceless for creating controlled keyword stemming if you understand the implications underlying its premise.

About The Author
Jeffrey L. Smith is the Founder and CIO of SEO Design Solutions, Inc. a Chicago Based SEO company providing comprehensive SEO Services and solutions to businesses of all sizes

Nevermind, you say, I can pay to be at the top of Google. Yes you can pay a lot to be a sponsored or pay per click website. Google makes a fortune from just that. However Google itself admits that its surveys show 72% of searchers ignore the paid listings and click on the natural listings, the listings that earn their position by being relevant.

Okay, you say, I’ll pay an SEO expert a lot of money to get me to the top. Yes, you can pay a Search Engine Optimization company, but the only guarantee is that you will pay a lot of money.

Let’s cut through all the spin. Search Engine Optimization is not a science. Websites really need to be designed for relevance to search engines using some common sense.

How Do You Define Relevance?

In a bookstore, how do you select a book about e.g. motorbike maintenance? You check:

• Titles,
• Front covers,
• Descriptions on the back covers,
• Size of each book,
• Tables of chapters,
• Samples of paragraphs, and
• Which of the books are more popular.

If the title of the book does not include the words “motorbike maintenance” there is every chance that you won’t find a lot of information about motorbike maintenance in the book. There is usually a description of the book on the back cover. If that doesn’t mention “motorbike maintenance” either, you are looking at the wrong book.

But of the books with “motorbike maintenance” in their titles, some are larger than others. Some have more chapters and pages than others. You expect that the larger ones will have more information than the smaller ones. You also question the bookstore on which of the books are selling more. That is how you decide which book has the most information and is most relevant to your search. Is that science or common sense?

How Does Google Define Relevance?

On the internet, if you search for “motorbike maintenance” Google will list ten million results in the order of relevance to your search. To sort websites in order of relevance to a search, Google has used its secret algorithm to weigh up:

• Domain names,
• Titles of the websites (meta-titles),
• Descriptions,
• Page headings and sub headings,
• Menu and navigation bar (links to inside pages),
• Quantity of information, and
• Popularity of each website based on the number of other relevant websites that link to it (same as in popularity of books).

We know those factors which are similar to those you used to find a book. We only guess the weighting Google gives to each factor.

The Factors

You want a website for your business or activity to be easily found by the audience that your website is targeting. So take into account the same factors that you use in selecting a book on that subject.

Domain Name

If your URL (web address) includes some part of the expression “motorbike maintenance”, e.g. motorbikemaintenance.com, Google will rank it ahead of those names that don’t, (if everything else is equal).

Title Tag

The website title meta-tag, that shows at very top left of the browser, is a very important item to Google, just as the book title is to you when selecting a book to buy. Amazingly, some web masters have simply put the words “Home page” into the title tag. That makes a web page very relevant to people searching the internet for a “home” but, not relevant to a search for “motorbike maintenance”.

Also include other words that people might search for, e.g. “motorcycle repairs”. If you are targeting a particular region, e.g. Australia, that word is needed in the title meta-tag to capture searchers who qualify their search for the subject in Australia only.

Description

The description meta-tag is also an aid to relevance, just as the description of a book is there to tell you what the book is about. However the words in the title meta-tag and description meta-tag should also show on the web page itself, otherwise they might be ignored.

Headings

The headings of each web page take the same importance as the chapter names in a book. Page headings are more effective if they are succinct, leaving out words like “and” “the” “of” and “a”.

Hyperlinks

The navigation bar can be text with hyperlinks to the inside pages. The text can look like buttons or tabs with the help of CSS. Google ignores images and javascript navigation bars. In the body text of the home page more points can be gained for keywords if they are hyperlinks to inside pages. Points are also there for those who place a keyword in their email address, e.g. bikes@ instead of info@.

Size of Website

The volume of information counts towards the relevance of the website to a search, just the same as the size of a book. We are amazed at people who put up a one-page website and expect Google to rank it high for relevancy in front of a 50-page website. Look at page one of Google for any search. Are any one-page websites listed there?

Popularity

Google believes that if other relevant websites link to yours, then your website must be more relevant than those that don’t have such incoming links. However the test is relevance. A link from a motorbike club is relevant for a motorbike maintenance website. A link from a gambling site is not relevant.

Are You Relevant?

To be relevant to a search for any words, your web page needs to contain those words in its title, heading, hyperlinks and body text. Links from other relevant websites add to your relevance. Search engines use the same process that you use if you search a bookstore for a book on motorbike maintenance.

This article was not written to discourage readers from paying for SEO. However, it’s hoped that readers now understand more about what’s behind SEO. It’s not magic or science, but really common sense.

By Ken McKay (c) 2010
About The Author
Ken McKay is an Australian web designer at platypus websites.

And while this announcement, which comes as no surprise to those with their finger on the Google pulse, has drawn a few favorable responses from blog commenters, the overwhelming majority of readers have expressed concerns and doubts about the soundness of Google’s approach. At the forefront of these were questions primarily regarding the exact magnitude of any negative ranking impact carried by slow page loading speeds. Alongside these came a large number of complaints about the fact that Google‘s own Analytics script is a known load-time decelerator, and about the almost glacially slow rendering times of AdSense code.

When read together, many comments give one the impression that webmasters are becoming apprehensive to the point of stampeding, as is usually the case when Google does something new. Indeed, the overall consensus seems to be that load-speeds are about to become the ultimate criterion for search ranking performance, and that this will cause major ranking damage to the average website. One commenter even went so far as to announce that he/she will drop all Analytics and AdSense scripts because their slow performance will now obviously ruin his/her website’s performance.

But are these worries actually valid, or are they just the latest manifestation of unfounded Google-noia to hit the SEO sector?

Before I get around to addressing the question, I must admit that I knew this was coming some time ago. Consequently I was able to line up a few experiments on two sites from my own stable in an effort to gauge any real-term ranking impact once Google started to implement its changes.

What did I personally find?

Despite the fact that both websites are rich in graphics and content, both have not been updated regularly since late last year, and neither is what you might call a fast loader, I found absolutely no detrimental ranking effects for either site during the past couple of months. In fact, the slower of the two websites (average load-time 5.3 secs) actually experienced noticeable SERP improvements in the past week or so, which makes me wonder if there’s not more to all this than simple load-speeds. That, however, is another story.

Of course mine is only a limited sample, and a far from conclusive one. It is, however, one of many indicators one can find if one looks around. And with that in mind, let’s return to the question at hand. Are webmasters’ fears justified or ill-founded?

As usual, and as I’ve touched on already, each and every time Google does something new, it invariably precipitates a spate of trepidation and panic among the world’s webmaster and SEO crowds. Perfect cases in point include the implementation of the ‘Nofollow’ attribute, and the announcement that buying and selling links for PR was no longer ok, both of which together sparked major outcries throughout the online communities. And from what I’ve seen, the initial knee-jerk reaction that the Site-Speed announcement will certainly spell the end of the Internet as we know it is no different.

But seriously, although load-speeds are now a ranking factor, at least for English-language searches on Google.com, let’s not forget that it’s still just a single one of over two-hundred signals Google uses to assess a site’s rankings. And let’s also remember that Google is first and foremost about delivering relevant results, just as it always has been.

After all, what use is serving results from the fastest sites on the web, if those sites don’t actually contain the information the user is looking for?

In an interview less than two weeks ago, Matt Cutts himself said: “People shouldn’t stress out too much about Site-Speed, and the reason is that we’re always going to care first and foremost about quality. How good is a page for users?” Addressing Site-Speed’s function in assessing SERPs, he also said: “Don’t think it’s going to be the largest of the two-hundred factors.”

These statements are more indicators…

As part of my daily involvement in Google’s Webmaster Help Forum, I’ve had an opportunity to keep track of developments during the past five months or so since the Site-Speed topic was first raised. There, a number of highly enlightening discussions with the forum’s other Top Contributors and Google staff, along with the general speculations of a great many visitors, have provided quite a clear picture of Site-Speed’s role in the overall scheme of things. It is a role which, as is usually the case, focuses on a better user experience.

Let’s face it, it’s no great secret that the average visitor’s attention span is five seconds or less, and that long loading times do tend to make users hit the back button. And that’s exactly where Site-Speed comes in. It wasn’t ever designed to be the ultimate Google ranking factor; it merely provides a little extra fine-tuning by casting the deciding vote in cases where information of identical or similar quality is available on multiple websites and needs to be ranked with a better user experience in mind.

As a last word about load-times I would have to say that there are a large number of reasons to make sure your web pages load in a sensible amount of time. These should, however, be focused on your visitors, not orbiting around your Google-noia.

By Sasch Mayer (c) 2010

About The Author
Sasch Mayer has been a writer and web promotion consultant for well over a decade. In 2008 he was nominated as a Top Contributor at Google’s own Webmaster Central forum, where he still assists webmasters world-wide address a multitude of technical and promotional issues. Professionally, he provides a wide range of services, including professional keyword research, and help with W3C Compliance problems.

Why are these links to your site important? They can…

• bring potential customers to your site when they click on the link

• boost the number of visitors to your web site

• dramatically improve your search engine rankings

Even though there are software packages on the market that help automate the linking process, use them sparingly, if at all. The only way to succeed in linking strategies is (aside from creating useful content that will encourage inbound links) by manually creating the links. That’s a hard fact to swallow, given how I like to automate as much of my marketing as I can.

Here are the 10 most important inbound links you must have to your site:

1. Directory Links

Directories are indexes of online sites, typically organized by category. Links back to your site from directories like Yahoo Directory and DMOZ.org are very valuable. DMOZ.org is edited by human editors, and while it’s free, it may take awhile for your site to be added. Getting added to Yahoo’s Directory costs $299/year.

2. Press Releases

If you’re writing press releases, make sure they are optimized for keywords that someone would use to find a business like yours and include links back to your site, as well. Once written, you can have your press release distributed through a service like PRWeb.com, which will create links from high traffic news sites back to your site.

3. Article Directories

Writing and distributing articles through high traffic article directories, like EzineArticles. com, is a great way to get valuable inbound links from a high traffic site. By crafting an effective resource box at the close of your article, you can drive traffic back to your site!

4. Social Bookmarking

Similar to web browser bookmarks, social bookmarking sites store individual pages (bookmarks) online and allows users to tag (with keywords), organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources as well as share them with others. If you bookmark your content on these sites (like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us. com), you get a link from the service. By producing content that your readers love and then bookmark to their friends, the link increases in SEO value.

5. Blog Comments

To find blog posts on which to comment, you can use blog-specific search engines like Google Blog Search. Make sure these are blogs read by your target market, not your colleagues. Brand yourself by always using the same name and remember to link back to your site. Always leave a comment that adds to the conversation that’s happening within the comments.

6. Social Media

Now, Google also indexes your Twitter updates and your social networking profiles. Add that to Web 2.0 hubsites like Scribd or HubPage and you’ve got the option of creating many, many inbound links in a very short period of time.

7. Blog/Podcast Syndication

Submitting the RSS feed of your blog and podcast to syndication services will give you a link back to your site. In some cases, each time you publish a new blog post, the post itself will also get a link.

8. Video Syndication

YouTube is one of the most visited sites online, and the number of sites that syndicate videos is growing each day. These sites often allow you to link to your site either in your video’s description or on your profile page, or both.

9. .EDU and .GOV Links

Search engines place a great deal of credibility in government and education web sites, and the links carry a great deal of weight. Frankly, it isn’t easy to get inbound links from these sites.

10. Internal Links

Remember, if you have more than one web site, or a web site and a blog, be sure and link one to the other. You can do this by linking one article to other related articles, or link to categories or archives of information.

Creating a sound inbound linking strategy is a key component of your search engine optimization efforts. Try a few of the strategies listed above and see how your traffic and rankings grow.

By Donna Gunter (c) 2010
About The Author
Small business marketing Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals create authentic, profitable online businesses. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to improve your visibility and get found online by claiming your Free gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketíng Toolkit, at ==> TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com