Las Vegas Web Design Blog | The Web Squad

When you hire an SEO firm they all pretty much promise you the same thing, first page rankings in the SERPs for certain keywords. How do they do this; by creating lots of backlinks to your website, tweaking your website a little bit, and writing quality content. This is great for most people and as long as they see results they don’t question the firm’s methods. However, like with a lot of things, there is a good way to get on the first page and a quick way (A good SEO can do both, but for the sake of simplicity I will talk about the two separately). Search engine optimization is like a marathon, it takes time and a good strategy to get to the front.

The quick method of reaching the first page involves creating lots of backlinks and content very quickly, kind of like a sprint. With this method a lot of SEO’s will just focus on building links from wherever they can and to the homepage only. Like sprinting in a marathon, this may get you to the front quickly, but you will soon run out of steam and start to drop back. It may take awhile for other websites to catch up to you so you could remain on the first page for a few months or even a few years depending on how many of your competitors have hired SEO firms. SEO companies are able to get away with this because the average person does not know a single thing about search engine optimization, and for those that know a little bit they do not know how to check where the links are pointing to. When people get a summary report from the SEO firm it may look something like this:

Oct. 2009*
	New links: 200
	Total links: 2,000
	SE Ranking “Keyword A”: #3
	SE Ranking “Keyword B”: #5
	PageRank: 3
	Amount Due: $4,000
*Not Real Stats

What they do not tell you is that out of those 2,000 or so links, 1,990 are pointing to your homepage and about 1,000 (maybe less) of those links are actually relevant. They figure that you will never check this or have the knowledge to check it. However, it is fairly easy to check how many links are pointing to your website and where they are pointing to using Yahoo Site Explorer. All you have to do is enter the URL of your website (Note: http://www.site.com and http://site.com will return different results so use the URL that is ranking) and Yahoo does the rest. If over 70 percent of the links are pointing to your homepage that is a bad sign, unless of course you just signed the SEO contract in the past two or three months then 70-80 percent is normal. If the SEO is doing a good job then you should see this percentage start to drop below 70 within the next few months.

If you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm you might want to do some research on their website using Yahoo Site Explorer. If 90 percent or more of their links are pointing to their homepage, chances are that they will do the same to your site. They may tell you that their method is the best way to getting to the top quickly, but remember search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint.

The good way search engine optimization strategy is to link to all or most of the pages on your website. A good percentage that will return strong rankings would be 50 percent of the backlinks point to the homepage and 50 percent point to other pages. This method still has most of the links pointing to you homepage which is the most important page of your website, but also have links pointing to the content of your website, this is also known as deep linking. Deep linking is a very underutilized strategy in search engine optimization because it takes longer to reach the first page of the search engines, but in the end the strength of your rankings will be much better and you will even rank above others who used the sprint method.

Another part to the slow and steady method is getting quality, relevant links. Many times SEO’s who use the sprint method will get links from where ever they can whether the site is relevant or not. Some of the best (or worst) examples of this are commenting on hundreds of unrelated videos (i.e. man breaks world record for corn eating and linking back to a law website), commenting on unrelated blog posts (commenting on a law blog and linking back to a health website), and creating a fake program and having the download URL point to the clients website (I have actually seen all of this done more than once). This might yield a lot of links, but since they are unrelated they do not have much weight to them.

A good way to think about links is to compare them to change; the lower the quality the lower the value. For example, using the sprint method will yield lots of low value coins like pennies and nickels, and maybe a few high value coins like quarters and half-dollars. The slow and steady method will yield a lower number of coins but they will be of higher value such as quarters, half-dollar, and dollar coins. So in the end which would you rather have 1,000 pennies, 500 nickels, and 250 quarter(1,750 coins, $97.50); or 500 quarters, 250 half-dollars, and 50 dollar coins (800 coins $300)?

Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO? by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

In the world of SEO you don’t hear much about Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. This is because Bing is still has less than a 10 percent market share of all search engine traffic. However, it is gaining its market share, and fast to the demise of Yahoo. This increase in Bing’s market share has SEO’s looking at how to rank well for this new search engine that is still in its infancy compared to Google and Yahoo.

Not much has surfaced on how to rank well in Bing’s SERP’s due to its age, but in the webmasters blog on the Bing website it does tell us their link building policy and how to go about building links. It reads very much like a Google blog on link building, using many of the same standards as Google. The blog talks about site relevance, authority sites, and what will get you penalized.

In the blog they talk about something they call “spam rank” which factors how ‘spammy’ your site is, the lower the better. They also mentioned that in the webmaster tools on Bing, they tell you if your site is blocked from the index, and why which is new compared to Google. This tool could prove to be useful if a webmasters site is penalized from both Google and Bing, they can actually fix the problem instead of guessing why you were penalized in the first place.

Bing’s growing popularity may be the end for Yahoo, especially since both companies are in talks about Bing taking over Yahoo anyway. It is unlikely that Bing will be a major problem for Google by itself, but if they take over Yahoo, Bing could have a combined market share of 28 percent compared to Google’s 65 percent. The future of search engines could be an all-out cyber war.

Probably one of the biggest SEO mistakes that people are making today is not deep linking. There are hundreds of websites that have a good design and have a respectable PR on their homepage, but start to click around and you will find out that the rest of the site has as PR 0 or worse. This is a prime example of poor or lazy SEO, and so many people are making this mistake. It is understandable to have your homepage to have a high ranking, but don’t forget that your site is more than just one page. You homepage usually does not have the majority of the content that you want people to see anyway. Optimizing these interior or deep pages will benefit your overall rank in the SERPs and increase your PageRank across your site as well.

The objective of deep linking is to optimize specific pages on your website for the one or two keywords that they focus on. For example, imagine that you were a vet and had a page on your website for each type of animal that you treated i.e. cats, dogs, horses, etc. Now instead of optimizing your homepage for each type of animal you treat and optimizing for you being a vet, with deep linking you would only optimize your homepage for you being a vet (i.e. vet in “your-city”). Then you would optimize your page about cats, your page about dogs, and your page about horses separately. If your on-site link structure is setup correctly, this type of optimization will benefit your entire site because as your deep pages gain in PageRank, they will share that with the pages above them. Now instead of having a site where your homepage has a PR of 3 and the rest of your site is PR0, you will have your homepage PR3 and your deep pages will have PR1 or 2.

Deep linking will also make your site more user friendly. Say a person is searching for a horse vet and they come to your site. Now if you optimized your homepage for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and end up on your homepage, only having to look around for your page about horses. Instead, if your optimized your page about horses for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and immediately be on your page about horses. This provided instant satisfaction, which is what internet users want. This will increase your chances of converting potential customers into real customers.

There are some instances where deep linking is not necessary. These would be for pages you don’t necessarily want people to see like a “terms & conditions” page, or pages that are not that important for users to see right away like a “contact us” page. Also, if you have a small site with just a few pages, deep linking may not be too important because your PageRank will naturally trickle down to your interior pages if you have the right setup.