SEO Basic Strategies

Search engine optimization is about building links from numerous websites to your website.  Although it sounds simple, it is always evolving in both complexity and technique.  The right choice of SEO specialist and SEO techniques can propel the growth of your business.  The wrong choice is not quite so fulfilling.

As a marketing and business person, it is up to you determine how much risk you’re willing to take to maximize results.  If you’re impatient, you’ll end up with a higher risk solution that may get you the results quickly, but won’t maintain those rankings for long.

The SEO industry is quickly moving towards automation to reduce the manual effort and associated expense of link building.    The following is a summary of popular, relatively lower risk, white and gray hat techniques.

Automatic Distribution of Content

If a well-written blog post or article works well, and provides a link back to your website, why not develop software that can automatically publish it on hundreds of websites at a time?  There are multiple software platforms and services that could take your blog post and automatically offer it to hundreds of independent blogger websites, or take your article and automatically offer it to hundreds of independent article directories, or take your press release and automatically offer it to hundreds of independent news websites.     Of course, the articles can also contain text, images and video.

However, there is some debate in the SEO community about this approach; if Google sees 400 identical articles, for example, they may not reward your site with the power of 400 links.  That is because Google is always looking for unique content, and 400 copies of the exact content isn’t unique.

Spinning Articles

There is actually software that can turn your single article into hundreds of unique looking articles.  It’s called spinning.  For example, for every sentence in your article, you give the software four other sentences that mean the same thing but are worded differently.   Every time the software goes to submit an article or post or press release to another website, it randomly chooses between different versions of each sentence, creating an article that is virtually unique from the original.   Creating spun articles takes a specialty writing skill to minimize the risk that the article ends up being poorly composed.

In the end, spinning articles probably delivers significantly more backlinks than a single article, but may not give more than a few hundred links maximum.

Comment on It

Commenting on someone else’s blog post is a common way of link building; the commenter often embeds a link back to their website in their text or in their signature.   Services exist that can automatically post hundreds of comments on relevant blog posts.  The comments are generic, so there is a risk that they will not be accepted by the website owner.  However, the number of comments that are accepted can make this a cost-effective technique.

Be Social

The search engines are also using social media in their search algorithms.  Links within Facebook messages, Google+ messages and Twitter tweets/re-tweets are influencing the ranking of websites.   Services exist within the SEO community to automate distribution of these micro-blogs, in the very same way they distribute articles via spinning and syndication.

Advertise IT

You can add your link to the homepage of a website, in the blog roll, or as part of the resources section.  It is marketed as a way of advertising called text links.  You can also add your banner ad to another website.

There are “advertising” services that can automatically put your text link on hundreds of selected blog categories.

Get Found Locally

If you do business locally, like a service or retail business, you really want to make sure that your company is represented and displayed on Google Places and other business directories.  There are techniques to help you rank higher on Google Places, and yes, many of these techniques are somewhat automated.  Directory listing services are available on Marketing Outfield from outsourced marketing specialists.

Build Your Own

Rather than try to build hundreds of links from lower quality websites, many SEO specialists are building fewer links from higher quality websites.  For some time, specialists have been able to rent links from the home pages of high PR websites, or they simply built their own network of high quality websites to use for the sole purpose of link building for their clients.    This has proven to be an effective way to increase the ranking of websites, but it has the disadvantage that you need to rent the links on a monthly basis.   So companies are now starting to build their own high-quality network of websites.

You Need Help From  Experts

With increased automation, it becomes very tempting for some businesses to manage their own SEO requirements internally.   However, the above techniques in the wrong hands can be dangerous, and in the end, may not be enough to get the rankings you want.   SEO techniques start to get a lot more sophisticated and complex from this point on

While I strongly encourage business and marketing people to have a general understanding of SEO and the potential impacts to their business, it’s an enormous challenge to keep up with the everyday changes and ever evolving techniques of the search engines.    You’re much better off letting the experts handle it.

At Marketing Outfield you have a wide choice of SEO services and SEO providers to choose from, all with satisfaction ratings from other buyers.    With fixed pricing, one-time projects and monthly subscriptions, you have the flexibility to meet your SEO needs and still stay on time and on budget.  Find a couple of SEO specialists that demonstrate results for you and you’ll be on your way to quickly growing profitable revenue from the Internet.