What is ‘link building’ and why is it important to my website?
It’s possible that you have heard of the term ‘link building’ before which relates to your website’s popularity and importance in the eyes of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Links, or backlinks are simply the hyperlinks that connect websites together as clickable text. You see them thousands of times whenever you surf the web and without them the Internet would be a very different place. So why are they so important to your own website?
First, backlinks are a means for people/traffic to find your website and therefore products, services or information. The more backlinks you have visible on other websites, the easier it will be for others to find your website – simple.
However there is a second benefit as to why having a high number of backlinks is beneficial to you. Search engines crawl trillions of websites continuously checking content and links to help them determine where websites should rank in their search engine results for various keywords and key phrases. The more backlinks a website has, the more important it could be considered as many people are linking to it. Let’s look at a simple example:
Dog training website 1 = 7 backlinks
Dog training website 2 = 544 backlinks
Taking every other factor out of the equation, which of the above websites is likely to rank higher in search engine results for the keywords ‘dog training’? Yes, dog training website number 2. Google, Yahoo and Bing for example will notice the number of backlinks to each website and in their eyes will determine that the second website is more popular as more third party websites have linked to it. This is an indication that the website has good content and is valuable to the search engine users. It will therefore rank higher and get more traffic than the first website. This doesn’t necessarily mean the second website does have better dog training content than the first website; it simply seems that they have done a better job of getting their message out to others on the internet and provided their links are from sites that are from sites that are relevant to their industry, they will be more popular to search engines.
Therefore, obtaining a solid number of relevant backlinks to your website is very important. In fact it is considered the single most important aspect of search engine optimization and it is essential rather than important.
There are hundreds of ways to get backlinks to your website and some methods include article marketing, video marketing, directory submissions and Web 2.0 methods. However, link building can also involve a steep learning curve and it does require a serious time investment, especially if you are new to website promotion. It is important to obtain a balance of quality and quantity of backlinks to ensure maximum returns from your link building strategy.
ACES4HIRE specializes in all aspects of web promotion, including link building and have helped countless websites rank highly in the search engines, increasing traffic and sales. See how ACES4HIRE can help you with your link building campaign now.
What’s a Squidoo? No It’s Not an Appetizer!
Filed under: Link Building, Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing
For those that don’t know, ‘Squidoo’ has nothing to do with cuisine or eight-legged creatures that live under the sea. No, Squidoo is the name given to a content website situated at www.squidoo.com.
This website offers its users the ability to create a ‘lens’, which is just a unique name created by Squidoo for a standard webpage or blog-type page that is created at Squidoo for original content to be added.
If you use article marketing as a form of website promotion, then Squidoo should be at the top of your list as a place to publish your articles, videos and other content. The reason for this is simple – Squidoo ranks very highly in Google and the content that you create on their website can be indexed in within hours of it being published rather than days, weeks or months in some cases. Additionally backlinks from Squidoo have good ranking strength so Squidoo lenses are a powerful tool to help with your promotion activities and best of all they are free!
A lens on Squidoo can be about absolutely anything that the user wishes it to be. However each lens should only cover a single topic. As already mentioned, Squidoo can be a very useful ally in improving website traffic through either direct readers or through improved search engine ranking and as a source of backlinks, however it is possible to make money directly from a lens as well. Affiliate information such as Amazon Associates, eBay and Google Adsense can be added to lenses to help optimize monetization.
Each lens is built up of ‘modules’. There are many modules available to you and you simply select which ones you would like to add to help with your content creation. Below are some examples of useful and popular Squidoo modules:
- Text – self explanatory – adds text to the lens;
- YoutTube Videos – embeds videos relating to your topic from YouTube;
- Flickr – adds pictures from Flickr to your lens;
- Poll – add a poll to survey your readers;
- Link List – add your favourite website links (can be used to link to your websites for backlinks);
- Google Blog Search – adds content from other blogs relating to your content;
- eBay – products from eBay that relate to your lens are added here;
- Guestbook – allows your readers to comment on your lens. Great for getting feedback on your content;
- RSS – add entries from your website RSS feed or from a third party RSS;
- Amazon – adds products available from Amzon.com;
- Google Maps – useful to add a viewable location on a map;
- Wikipedia – add content definitions from Wikipedia.
The above outlines a few examples of what can make up your Squidoo lens. You can use all or just one of the modules and the flexibility to create very informative lenses means that the page is customized exactly how you would like it. However if you have never used Squidoo before, setting up a lens can be quite confusing and creating a Squidoo lens that has a positive effect on your web traffic can be difficult for new users.
At ACES, we take the learning curve out of your website promotion and create professional looking Squidoo lenses for you. That way you get an optimum performing lens that will help boost your website traffic and increase your search engine rankings. Check out our internet marketing services for more information on how we can help your website get more targetted traffic.
To see what a Squidoo lens looks like and the type of content available on it, click here for one of our clients examples.