So for a quick recap we covered 3 types of popular links which were:

How to get Authority Links

How to obtain Directory Links

Getting good Reciprocal Links

This blog post will see us delve a little deeper into the link building process that you can do to get your website appearing more in the search engines.

Article Distribution

These articles sites are good for a few reasons. Most sites that allow article submissions allow you to place a keyword link at the bottom of your article. This will not only help you target that keyword but the link will be relevant to the content that you are writing.

The submission will also allow you to write a bit about you subject matter and you can show people that you know what you are talking about. One submission site is ezinearticles.com I have included a link to an article I have written to give you an idea of what you can do. 4 Tips to Successful Content Marketing

Top Tip
Make sure that you check the sites submission guidelines before you submit your article as this could save you a lot of time.

Press Releases
If you have something news worthy, or can turn something into a news worthy article, this is a great way to get a few links from good sources. You may even find that if your news is interesting or quirky enough then you may be linked to be others in your industry or even picked up by a national newspaper. http://www.prlog.org/pub/

Top Tip
As with the article sites there are submission guidelines. 

Comment and Profile Links
Blog and forum comments and profile links are all valuable in getting varied links. These may not be as great as some of the other techniques that I have pointed out but they are worth considering and have a hidden benefit.

Interacting on relevant blogs and forums will help you become more established in that community. If people are after advice about what to go and see if your area then offer them some advice. They will be grateful and you get a link out of it AND you’re seen as a helpful person.  This will let people know that you are approachable and know your stuff.

Some of these places include a profile if you want to contribute and in there you will get the chance to add a link to your site.

Top Tip
Participate in these communities that are relevant to what you have to offer. There is no point talking about toy robots if you offer self catering holiday accommodation.

This should provide you with a bit more detail in your link building quest. I won’t lie to you, it won’t be easy and most of the time people won’t even respond, but a good link from a good neighbourhood can really help your rankings and your customer base.

Today you are going get a better understanding of the types of link building that you can do with your website. You might be asking however, ‘Why do we link build?’ Well, this helps Google understand what your website is about and that your site is constantly being linked to.

Top Tip
In this process variation is very much the key. Too many links from one type or one location and you are wasting your time.

So lets get started.

Authority links
Google your keyword that you are targeting and see what results come back. You are looking for websites that rank well and if they offer links out to other sites. You ideally want a site that might benefit from your content (as you can write them original content which will then link back to your site).

How: Get in contact with these sites and tell them that you have found their site informative and that you might be able to provide their reader with something of interest. This usually does the trick.

Why: This is important to have in your link profile, sites on a similar theme to yours will help reinforce what you site has to offer and will help your site become more established.

This can be a drawn out task but very rewarding if you get some good quality links.

Directory links
These links aren’t the gold mine that they once were, as Google (and other search engines) noticed that people were just getting hundreds of these links with ease, so they have been devalued.

Like I mentioned earlier variety, is the key so a few won’t be a bad thing but don’t go mad.

How: Search for terms like “(your industry) directory” these won’t be high value links but you will get some for your related market. This way you can indicate to Google what you have to offer. This will give you an idea of what I mean – Click here to see what I am talking about

Why: in one word – Variety.

Reciprocal links
These are links that point to your website and in return you link back to their website. Now, Google knows that many people that do this are creating networks to try and promote their site, so they aren’t a formula to success, but to see them in your back links won’t do you any harm either.

How: Look for websites that are in the same industry as yours. Get talking to the owners of these sites and see if you can help each other out. You may even be able to get something better or a chunk of their audience.

Why: These types of links will be present in any community, but don’t overdo it, as the last thing you want is a link profile that is too much of one type of link.

That should give you an idea of three types of links that are available to you and for your websites back link profile. You may also find that you get more out of contacting these sites other than backlinks such as followers, readers, subscribers or even customers!

Like I said variety is the key and if you can spread your efforts than your site won’t look too odd when Google crawls it.

Let’s get stuck right in.

On our last post about Optimising Page Titles we talked about a trick that many people are missing out on with their presence in search engines like Google.

I mentioned a thing called ‘AIDA’ “But what’s does it mean?” I hear you cry.

It means the following:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

It’s as simple at that!

This is a technique that is used by the best advertising companies in the world. And through your appearance in Google you can use this to drive visitors to your site. This can also be used on each page of your site to get these people to take the desired action that you want.

So lets start at the top.

Attention – You need to make your listing stand out from the crowd – draw their eye to your website. Once you have done this you are ready for the next step.

Interest – wet their appetite with a good offer like a discount ‘great deals’ or ‘find out more’ make it compelling

Desire – Make them want your product. If you can stir a positive emotion in them this will help get them to your site.

Action – Tell them what you want to do. People want to know that it’s ok to VISIT NOW or BOOK TODAY. You aren’t making them do anything but letting them know that it’s ok.

This should then drive them to your site. Then once they are here you can repeat this process all over again to drive them so you can make a sale.

I will look at getting this AIDA approach into you next Meta Description so you will have an idea of what you want to promote.

TAKE ME BACK TO THE SEO BLOG

It’s been a few manic months since the last post but these updates. The Google Panda update has rocked a few foundations in the online marketing world.

Not to worry, these blogs will become more regular – so stay tuned.

I wanted to talk about your websites page title tags. About 80% of my time on the optimisation of websites is spent link building and I am amazed that the amounts of websites that still do not have good or even relevant title tags for their pages.

Now, I know that many of these pages are generated by poor Content Management Systems which won’t let you change these on all of your pages (so try and avoid systems like this) but that is just making it harder for you to get traffic and rank well in the search engines.

As you can see from this image – I have search for ‘Holiday cottages’ and you can see how Google has highlighted where the term ‘holiday cottages’ appears in that listing. This show you that Google has found you relevant results for what you want.

Now if you don’t have that term in the page title like the image above then you won’t appear in bold. To be honest it’s unlikely that page will appear at all.

The page titles should reflect the content of that page. This will help Google Identify what the site is about and help potential visitors to see your site as well (which is what you want).

As I want you to not only consider your websites ranking so you get seen by people but also get customers to visit your site.

Here is some advice that about 98% of people STILL DON’T DO!!!

You can include a call to action in there as well. Like ‘BOOK NOW!’ as people like to be told what to do and this will help move them through to your site.

Having a call to action is a simple and easy way to get people to come to your site. The best marketers use call to actions on their adverts but for some reason people still don’t use it online. After all these chunks of text that advertise your business so why not draw attention to it?

My Next blog post will be on AIDA – Information that you CAN NOT manage without if you want to increase visitors to your website!!

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about delivering relevance, relevance for your website, your customers and the search engines.

Why you need SEO?

The process of optimising your website will help you in many ways. It will help you build more customers, get more traffic and your site will be easier to use for those who visit.
By understanding what your site is about and what you have to offer will help you target keywords to each page. By implementing SEO on your website you are forced to evaluate the structure of your site and look at elements like the navigation from the perspective of your customers.

After all you don’t want them getting lost or fed up of looking for what they can’t find.

You want to make your website as easy for your customers to use as possible. Having spent so much time on your website it becomes easy to ignore that they are coming to you with no previous knowledge about your site and its structure. This is why we need to make their experience as smooth as possible.

If your website is clunky and awkward then that comes across as a reflection of your business.

Adding SEO will push you in to determine what page is about what. Rather than having many pages that each touch on the same subjects again and again you will be able to have a while page dedicated to accommodation, a whole page about the local area, a whole page about things to do etc.

Why your customers need SEO?

A main element of SEO is relevance and that is what your visitors want. If they come to your site looking for accommodation they don’t want information about the local apple fare (no matter how good them apple are!). Although this might seem interesting to you it won’t keep people on your website and it won’t encourage people book with you.

‘Each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence. ‘ – Leonard Peikoff

If you have something on that page that is relevant but it’s at the bottom of the page then that’s no good either. Make the whole page about one thing otherwise it dilutes the message.

Keep it clean, keep it clear and keep it simple.

Why the search engines need SEO?

With SEO you can help the search engines too. It’s easier to get them to understand what your site is about and what you offer if you are clear about what each page is about.
You can then use elements like anchor text to show to the search engines the contents of that page and what keywords you should be appearing for.
Think about this through every step of the way ‘Am I building my website for my customers or the search engines?’ remember it’s the customers who will pay the bills.

It hit the US before heading over to the UK and many sites reported a drop in rankings for keywords resulting in a loss of traffic to their site.

If this happened to you, you are not alone.

The update was originally intended to target scraper sites. These are websites that have just pulled data from other sites to populate their own. These sites have very little value for people looking for information as the content is not original.

Two of the big wigs at Googles search (Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts) wrote:

’In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking – a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries – and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.’

Not all sites were affected by this update.

This was a shakeup designed to bring the rubbish sites out of the system. Once the dust settles your website is more than likely to return to normal and visitors will come.

So you may be thinking what do I need to change?

Well before we decide what to change we should have a quick look at what got devalued.

It seems that most people are reporting losses if their site is low on content. Poor ad-to-content ratio or content that has been copied from elsewhere seems to be holding some pages back.

What is Google looking to promote?

Most likely ‘human content’. Information that is required by people coming to your site. text that isn’t overly packed with links and adverts that have just been put there for the sake of content.

Low bounce rates seem to be important. A bounce is when someone come to your page and leaves really quickly because they can’t find what they are looking for. This is why your pages should reflect the keywords that you are targeting. People will be expecting to find what they are looking for – it’s all about the relevance!

So…

Make sure you have enough content on you site.

Make the content useful and not too link heavy

Ensure the content is relevant to keywords you are targeting – this will keep people on your pages longer

Look at removing pages with low quality content – this will increase quality overall

My name is Martin and I have been working in the SEO industry for over 4 years and the travel industry for just as long. Having worked for an agency I am more than well aware of the pitfalls that this arrangement offers. Also having worked in house for a company and having done freelance work I have learnt what works and what doesn’t and I can pass these tips on to you.

This place will be your one stop shop for everything you need to know about optimising your website, especially if you are in the travel industry.

I’ll kick everything off with a post about an awesome seminar that I went to on Friday.

It was all about a key element of SEO. Do you know what SEO is? If not ready this page on What is SEO? Then you’ll be brought up to speed.

So one of the cornerstones of online success is the element of Link building. Why? It’s important this is done as this will help to point out to the search engines that your site is growing and is being talked about. So I went to this awesome Seminar in London: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-training-strategies-tactics-and-tips

Some of the biggest names in the biz were there and each one talked about a key element of link building:

Wil Reynolds – Our link building mistakes

Paddy Moogan – Outreach myths and case studies

Russ Jones – Social media strategies

Tom Critchlow – Inside SEOmoz

Will Critchlow – Scaling White Hat

Jane Copland – Getting actions from competitor research

At this event I got to hear about new link building techniques ideas and suggestions by some of the best in the business.

I give you this tips and advice, along with my own top tips and how they can be applied to your website and enhance your online marketing campaign.

You will also find here tips on optimising your site for your customers as well as those search engines. So many SEO companies (especially agencies) forget that it’s your customers that will make your business a success – not the search engines.