Attract Your Market SEO Blog

One of the most common questions people ask me regarding Search engine optimisation is whether they should focus on getting a high quantity of backlinks or high quality backlinks. Let me try to answer this common question. Whenever you try to increase your natural search engine ranks try to think about what it is that Google wants to see from your website. They want to make sure that the websites they show to their customers are the most relevant to match their needs. The do this by essentially organizing the Internet into similar websites.

From personal experience I can say that when I focus on quality links I normally see faster results in my SEO efforts. However I also think this depends on the level of competition you are up against. For example if you are in a very competitive market you are going to need a variety of good quality inbound links and you will likely need a high quantity as well. From past experience the less competitive the market is the more likely it is that you can get by using either quantity or quality; for more competitive markets you really need to do both when possible.

Try to think the way real websites grow in popularity. They start of slowly but usually grow rapidly. I always like to refer to YouTube because it is the benchmark of all websites and link building. People will happily link to YouTube all the time for free without even asking them. You have most likely even done this yourself at one point or another.

When you provide good content link building can actually take care of itself on the quantity level leaving you to focus on the quality part. This is easier said than done with commercial sites. It should be noted that up until recently Google struggled to make any money from YouTube because they didn’t know how to monetize it to make money.

Link building can also be done on the quantity side by using something called link bait. I’ll save the details of link bait for another day but for now just know that sometimes it’s possible to make people link to your site for free.

Anyway I can summarise by saying that for the less competitive markets there is really no correct answer as either will probably work however the more competition in a market the more you will likely need to focus on both quality and quantity.

I want to kep this post as short as possible to help people understand the theory of link building. When Google made their algorithm originally they wanted a way to sort the internet automatically and make sure that the sites were organised by importance.

They decided they would use popularity as a measure of a websites authority and quality. Essentially they said that the more links there are to a website, the more popular that site must be as people want to tell other people about it. In essence every time you link to a website you are creating a vote for that site, you are telling Google and the other search engines that you think that site is worth visiting and you enjoyed your visit to it. If enough other people also vote for (link to) that site the search engines will give the site more authority and you will rise in the search engines natural ranks.

The second part top this theory came from imagining you were told to go onto the internet but you were only allowed to navigate using links on the websites. For you cannot use the address bar to type a website name, and you also can't hit the back button. Effectively you could navigate the internet without every visiting the same site twice. This is theory though so let's keep going. If you spent long enough though how long do you think it would take you to find a link to a site like YouTube? Probably not that long... How long do you think it would take to find a much smaller site like a personal blog? Probably months if you were actively trying. So Google decided that's a pretty good way to measure the authority of a website and stuck with it. This is effectively why we build links, we want to make it as easy as possible for the Google spiders to find our website, the more links out there the easier this becomes for them, make things easy for Google and they will reward you. Ok so that about sums it up if you have any questions, leave a comment and I'll do my best to help you out.

P.S This is just one of the ways which Google measures websites on, their algorithms have evolved massively over the years and get smarter all the time, but this is a pretty good place to start and build from if you are interested in SEO.

All businesses are experiencing hard time but don't let this stop the flow of experimentation and creative juices in your business. Recently I was reading an article on experimentation within business research and it got me thinking.

The article spoke about how businesses are reluctant to make short term losses for long term gains. In this one instance it was an organisation that wanted to research how their pricing would affect their sales. They went to the trouble of setting up all the websites and experiments and then pulled out at the last minute. The reason being they didn't think it was fair on their customers if some of them purchase their product at a higher price than others.

On one sense you can understand and appreciate their loyalty to their customers; however it was only a short term solution and was intended to further the research for the company to improve future sales. It could have actually result in a drop in price in the long run if the experiment showed that more sales were made at a lower price than higher. This is where the short term sacrifice is made for the long term benefits.

This can also be related to search engine optimisation. Initially when a new project is taken on for SEO; company's are scared because in the majority of cases results don't happen over night, there is therefore likely to be a period of increased spending with no result in increased sales. This is the point which most companies panic and pull out of their campaign. If they do so  they have gained nothing from the experience. If you keep going with the project you will get to the top of the search engines eventually for you targeted phrases. This is the point at which the sacrifice pays off as you are likely to see a sharp increase in sales as a direct result of your SEO efforts.

Don't let the hard times pressure you into becoming stale an not innovating, when you get to the top of the search engines for you target phrases, you have a massive advantage over you competitors; if they are to catch up with you they need to go through all that you have and more.

Don't be scared to experiment, see what our search engine optimisation services can do for your business.

Ok so you finally have you new all singing, all dancing website up and running. It cost you an absolute fortune but that's OK because this is the missing link in your business. This brand new website is going to go great, it's worth every penny, as soon as it goes live everyone is just going to flock to it! (Or so you think).

Don't worry though, the majority of business owners also believe this. I don't have real facts and figures but from experience I would estimate that around 80% of business owners who invest in a website believe that the majority of that websites success is down to how well the site looks to the user. Well if you are one of these people, I hate to burst your on line bubble but unfortunately that's not the case. Just because you think your new site is great and you invest a lot of money in it doesn't mean you can simply buy your way to the top of Google by having a better website than everyone else.  If you are in the process of planning your website, take my advise; cut the budget to build the site and up the budget to promote it and optimise it. See our Search Engine Optimisation Services page for more details.

Don't get me wrong, the look and feel of your website is important, but only once people reach your website, if no-one knows your website exists it can be the best looking website in the world but it wont bring you a penny of business. This brings me to my first point in the top 3 on why most websites are a disappointment to their owners.

1- Your Website Does Not Exist

Obviously this is metaphorically speaking, if your website is up and running it obviously does exist, what I mean is that to everyone else your website doesn't exist until they are told otherwise. Until they know your website is at www.yourwebsite.com they can't visit it; it may be that you have a great website but unless they know the web address they can't visit it.

OK so lets assume you need to find information, how do you go about it? I'm going to take a guess that you go to one of the big search engines and put in terms related to the information you are looking for. Lucky for you Google will then return a page with 10 results, all of which are normally good information, this is the second way and most important way you can let people know you exist.

Why is this more important? Let me explain what I normally see when I take on a new client. One of the first things I'll do is look at how their website is currently getting traffic.  I see the same thing with every single website; the majority of the traffic is coming from people searching for the business name and variation of the website e.g.

yourbusiness, 
yourbusiness.com
www.yourbusiness
etc

While this is a good thing, these are potential customers who already know that your company is the one they want to use, these can be considered as already sold, they are going to use your services.

The real benefit of a website comes when people don't know who they want to use yet and are searching for keywords related to your business. Lets use this website as an example, the searchers I want to attract are people searching for terms like "Search engine optimisation" , "Pay Per Click Servies" etc, there is no point optimising for my business name as these customers will find me anyway. You want to capture as much passing trade as possible by optimising for search phrases related to your market.

OK, that the first part in this blog series, look out for parts two and three to find out how you can make the most of your website.

Before you can take action on your search engine rankings it's helpful to know where your website is positioned already, perhaps you are already ranking well for some terms that you don't know about.

Aaron Wall has produced a very simple browser plugin you can add to check where you rank on Google for search terms. This essentially allows you to type in certain search terms which are relevant to your industry and check very easily where your rank in all the major search engines. You can also check multiple terms simultaneously which can save you so much time.

The plugin is called Rank Checker and is free. Click here to add it to your browser and find out more »»