Building links to your website is one of the major strategies in getting your website to rank well in the search engines. Google and other search engines need to determine somehow what content is relevant to the user and what is not. In order to establish this relevancy, one thing they look at is the amount of links to your site.
Google assumes that every link is a vote for the value of that content. To determine why someone linked at you, the look at the topic of the webpage that links to your site and the topic discussed in your page that received the link. It then runs an elaborate computer program that determines why you got the link (for what topic material you received the vote) and matches that with the topic the searcher is trying to get information about (Google determines the topic by looking at the user’s search phrase.)
Below you’ll see his video, followed by a discussion and summary of his advice.
Build great content
Content that is valuable has a better chance of getting linked to. In other words, post something that people care about and adequately satisfies their thirst for information on the topic. If you effectively solve the problem or provide an education, your content will be seen as useful and ‘linkable’.
Types of content that gets linked to are:
Build a blog
Matt Cutts says there is no excuse for companies or even individuals not to have a blog. It is great way of having authorative discussions about a subject you know a lot about. Create tutorials that solve problems or educate.
Controversial posts
Matt Cutts isn’t to flattering about people who use controversy when writing their content. His main issue is that it is part of an anti-culture, where people define the world in a negative way, by emphasizing on what is bad and should be hated.
Saying that, if you truly believe something controversial and can back up your claim, it is worth sticking to your guns and try and convince your readers of your position. It might get you lots of posts linking to yours decrying what you wrote, but it is still a link.
But Matt Cutts is right in pointing out that there is a responsibility towards our culture as well. We don’t want to promote a culture that defines itself in the negative or creates controversy without basis, as a sort of knee jerk reaction against the prevailing attitude which one finds uncomfortable and attacks without proper examination or merit.
Humor
People love to laugh. Add some humor to your post and you can get lots of links.
Originality
Research and write about topics or issues related to a topic that nobody ever talked about. By doing that, your site will be the only site anyone could possible link to to further explore the topic.
Originality will truly help you if it is related to your overall search engine strategy (if you write a post that is far removed to the overall topic of your site, the links to that particular post will carry less weight in terms of helping you with your overall ranking in the search engines.
Building lists
“10 ways to do x” is a popular form of content writing on the web and are articles that get linked to often. It is part of our fast-food approach to knowledge.
Matt Cutts acknowledges the effectiveness of top 10 lists, but warns against a dumbing down of culture. Do create lists where appropriate, but make sure it isn’t all you do.
How to’s and tutorials
A great way to establish authority is by taking on an issue a lot of people struggle with and create a tutorial on how to solve it.
Have great site architecture
Matt Cutts is surprised at how many people ignore this. Make sure that your site is easy to link to: it must have linkable URL’s, your content should stay in one place (if you build content that moves around, it will be impossible for someone to link to that post) and have a site structure that makes sense both to humans and search engines.
Participate in communities
Join forums and leave comments on blogs that offer valuable insights. If you can help someone understand a topic better through your contribution, they will remember you, and might even be willing to link out to your site that discusses similar topic material.
It also spreads awareness: people who receive valuable feedback from you will start to regard you as an expert, and if they ever have a need for your services, they might just pick up the phone and call you for some business.
Social Media
Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook are all great tools to reach people where they hang out. Join discussions and groups and help them out in the same way you help out people on Forums. Again, this enables you to build authority. Once your authority on a subject is established you could be invited to conferences to speak on your chosen topic, and live bloggers could be linking out to your site – or people might simply remember you as an expert and give you a call to take on a project.
Newsletters
By allowing people to subscribe to your content, whether through RSS or email, or sign up for a newsletter enables you to deliver content more effectively. You don’t rely on the content consumer visiting your website, they can be notified of your content in their inbox. That heightens awareness of your content, and providing your content is of interest, might inspire someone to write a blog post about your discussion and link to your content.
Create tools and services
Create free tools that people can access to solve their problems, such as a knowledge database, plug-ins for Wordpress, clickable lists that solve problems in interactive ways, calculators (e.g. mortgage calculators), etc.
Create videos
Don’t just write, create videos as well (and provide transcripts). Video is a popular way to connect with a demographic that rather watches you talk than read your blog posts. It allows you to tap into a whole new demographic.
Conclusion
Matt Cutts adheres to the philosophy that content should be valuable, and that we have a responsibility to our culture not to clutter the web with spammy information or fast-food blog posts (such as mindless top 10 lists). He argues that backlinks are created by creating good content across platforms (e.g. blogs and video), networking and participating in the open source solutions.
There are many more link building strategies, and we will be discussing his suggestions and others in next months SEO tutorials.
This post is part of our ‘How to create an effective website‘ series. If you followed the series, then by now you have a website that looks good and is customer focused. Today, we’ll be adding a blog in the mix and teach you how to promote it.
Yesterday Sirius, an online member of our Community, spoke in our Forum about his strategies to make money online. You can read the discussion here.
We just wanted to add to the discussion by giving you a quick overview of the 15 steps we recommend to create a popular blog and make money from it.
Create a blog about something you are passionate about.
Design it well. First impressions matter on the web.
Develop your personal brand e.g. ‘the marketeer who guarantees return on investment’, ‘the chef who tells you what really happens in kitchens’, ‘the merciless burger connoisseur of DFW’ (burger joint review site), etc.
Create your call to actions for your blog: Facebook connect, Facebook Fan page, Follow on Twitter, Social bookmarking, email to friend option, contact us info, provide a RSS feed for your blog and publish a newsletter with subscription, etc. Capture leads and use every medium to keep your audience engaged with your brand
Post content to all these channels
Create community: use blogsearch.google.com and find relevant blogs, engage through valuable comments and blog post exchanges. Search for topics on Twitter and communicate. Join topically relevant forums and engage. Join Facebook Groups and fan pages and network with the audience you find there.
Keep doing this, day after day: write one blog post, network in social networking sites and forums, interact with bloggers, it will build awareness of your blog.
Once you have plenty of content and some following, offer yourself up for speaking engagements. Come up with an original theme, offer to speak for free to begin with until you are known in the circuit.
Approach magazines online and offline and offer to write articles.
Leverage all the attention you get: start creating seminars and teach people. A seminar of 10 people works for now. You’ll get big soon enough.
Now that you are building some worthwhile traffic, start adding affiliate programs to your blog: Commission Junction, Amazon, local businesses, etc. Now you’re making some money.
Write a book. This will get you more exposure, more speaking engagements, more seminars and some TV and radio gigs.
Now you website should be attracting lots of traffic. Start reaching out directly to advertisers who share your target audience and begin raking in the money.
Remember that as with everything in life, it is all about a combination of hard and smart work. Blogs and books about online marketing tap into the 80’s yuppie culture of making big bugs fast without much effort. For most of us, this is a dream. Some of us do win the lottery.
But you can slug it out for 18 months, creating a blog post every day, raising awareness of your blog daily using the methods we suggested in our 15 step program, and you will start seeing results. Make it easy for yourself and do work with offshore workers, virtual PA’s, etc. You’ll get more done and it doesn’t cost all that much.
Don’t get fooled, this isn’t about making astounding fortunes. Your blog, providing it has valuable content, you communicate with a carefully selected audience in the social networks they hang out in and treat them with respect, will provide you with a steady income. The ammount of income will be dictated by your negotion skills with advertisers and the amount of traffic your site gets.
We get a lot of questions on how you can rank well in the search engines. This is a vast topic matter that will be extensively discussed in our blog. For now, we just wanted to give our audience some quick pointers about the essential components of an SEO strategy. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask them in our SEO forum.
A brief overview
As with every specialized knowledge, we can draw broad strokes, while reminding the reader that the devil is in the detail.
Our SEO 101 Guide will open with describing the broad principles. They will give you an eagle eye overview of the framework in which we work coupled with a short overview of how these principles have developed historically in the search engine algorithms.
Raw PageRank (a.k.a. Link Juice)
Let’s start with the smallest factor of interest.
PageRank used to be an important factor in SEO optimization for Google. Today, it is somewhat important, but it’s advocated effectiveness is more myth than reality.
PageRank was a simple algorithm that calculated the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. In other words, it wasn’t the amount of links that point to the page that were important (this is a frequent misconception) but rather the chances that somebody could stumble upon your page.
In the hay day of SEO, PageRank was extremely important. You could install the Google Toolbar, that gives you an indication of the PageRank of each page. The trick was then to get links from pages with high PageRank, as this would increase the probability of a surfer randomly clicking on links to arrive on your page. The algorithm would then list you higher in the search engines simply based on this algorithm.
Since the beginning of the Naughties search engines have gotten smarter, and PageRank has declined in overall importance, in many ways because it was such a random way of assessing the value of a page.
Key Words on the page
Next on the list is optimizing the keyword distribution on your page. Although the second least important factor, this can really give a boost to your site, and it is recommended that this is where you start your SEO efforts. We will be giving you an in-depth guide on On Page Keyword Optimization.
But for now, a quick overview:
It is important that keywords that are indicative to the search appear on the page. In other words, if a searcher looks for ‘electric kettles’ and your page is about ‘electric kettles’, those words better be on the page. Seems obvious, but quite often we don’t know what search phrases our audience would use. This would then require us to first find out what key phrases are the most popular when people look for our services. Once we know these key phrases, we should then include them on the page.
There is a whole ’science’ behind on-page optimization, and we will be addressing this in-depth. The science also extends to optimization for visitor to customer conversion, and this will be addressed in November’s tutorials.
Anchor text in Backlinks
Backlinks move your site to the center of the web
More important than the keywords on the page is the words used in the link from an external page (on a different domain) than your page. If your page is about search engine optimization, and an external page links to you for the keywords search engine optimization. than that will count towards how relevant your page appears to be to the search engines, especially if the link comes from a page that is contextually relevant to your topic material.
The influence of anchor text in external links has been declining in the past, because this is yet another element that can be gamed by SEO’s. But if you have a lot of backlinks to your site, you will see a definite uplift in your position in the search engines!
Domain Trust / Authority
Way way back in the history of SEO, when the industry was still in its infancy, an astonishing 7 years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, Domain Trust didn’t really play a role that I knew off. Today, it is THE factor in SEO.
If Google decides that you are a trusted domain (like the BBC or Wikipedia) you will do well in the search engines for all key phrases that are relevant to topics you discuss. That is not to say that you can’t be beaten by pages that have lots of backlinks (see the previous page), but you will have to try a lot less to get far superior results. In fact, Google’s algorithm update this year (called Vince) has given even more weight to the fact whether Google trusts your brand or not.
So the task at hand is to write lots of quality content and become a trusted domain (this can take years) – or the second best thing: get lots of links from trusted domains (we’ll discuss this in future updates).
Conclusion
Although we will discuss some tricks other than the four main categories above, adhering to the above rules will take up most of our discussions and activities when optimizing your site for search engines. The recipe is simple: don’t worry too much about the myth of PageRank, focus on creating quality content with strategic placement of keywords, accrue backlinks across the web and fight hard to become a trusted site (the best way to avoid calamity with each new search engine algorithm update).
Over the next month, we will give you step by step instructions how to achieve success in each of these categories.
Over to you
Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think we left some essential information out? Or do you have questions that require clarification? Let us know, we love to hear from you.
No-one will look at your website unless you have valuable content. You need to be interesting to attract attention and get others to talk about you!
In order to create good content, you need to understand who your target audience is and what type of content and style they’d value.
The Review process
Much of your success is defined by your own personality and the people you naturally connect well with. The first two questions to ask are:
Who did you do your best work with in the past?
Do you have easy access to that type of target market today?
This will define your target audience based on strenghts you already have.
Example
When Apple made their iPod, they defined their target audience as non-tech savvy. MP3 players were originally build for tech-savvy users, and the industry was embroiled in a technology war to create ever more features.
Apple knew that in the past it had already had success with getting non-tech-savvy users to use their Macs. Now they were going to target an audience nobody previously cared about: non-tech-savvy users who don’t look for advanced features, just a product that is easy to use. And thus the iPod was born.
Example for blogs – Andy Beard points out that targetendness, not hype, makes a big difference:
“I have very specific goals, and a very specific target audience. Some people measure success by how many subscribers or how much money someone makes from their blog. I have never had a front page Digg, but my target audience doesn’t really use Digg.
I define success by who reads my blog within my target audience as my defined goal was to attract people within a specific niche, and even specific individuals.”
You cannot be everything to all men. If you want to win in business and create a successful website or blog, you need to be the best at what you do within your existing industry.
If you are not the world’s best within your market, all you have to do is to define your market more narrowly. What niche are you better in (or could you become better at) than any other competitor?
To find this niche, ask the following questions:
Does your market have an urgent pain and / or an irrational passion?
Are they actively looking to resolve this pain / passion (if not, find another answer to the above question)
Can you clearly define a niche around the pain / passion they try to resolve?
Do you have clear and effective answers to resolve the markets pain / passion?
Example
Keeping the iPod as an example, the pain of the audience was that they couldn’t use these complicated MP3 players and had no clear software to rip and download music to their devices. Their passion was easy access to music, but they had turned to the illegal service Napster.
So Apple not only created an easy player, but an easy music library called iTunes that also enabled the user to buy music in MP3 format directly from their online store.
Example for blogs
When Copyblogger looked for a blog topic, he realized that many people wanted to learn how to blog, but that there was no easy manual for the average writer who hasn’t majored in journalism and has no technological skills to speak of. So CopyBlogger seized on this target market and created easy to absorb content about becoming a successful blogger.
Your niche will probably be narrower, since the blogosphere today is more competitive and territory on the net is more effectively conquered niche by niche.
Profile your audience
Okay, now you have a clearly defined niche. You know who you work well with + that you have access to them. You clearly defined needs and wants that no-one is fully providing solutions for.
Now it is time to build a profile of your audience. You’ll create a general stereotype that defines your audience in such a way that you have someone you can imagine communicating with.
Answer the following questions: of the narrow target market you defined, what would you say are their
Desires (things they aspire to but not necessarily need)
Values (a code of behavior they define as ‘good’, ‘cool’ and /or ‘appropriate’)
Needs (things within your niche they cannot do without and if you provide solutions will ‘hook’ them)
Can they pay for the products you promote or sell?
What is their level of expertise (you need to pitch your ideas slightly above that, but not too far above that).
Conclusion
Answering all these questions will enable you to create a clear, living, breathing profile of an audience you already connect well with and have some type of access to (we will widen this access in future tutorials.) You will be able to speak in their language, conform to their codes and behavior and rattle their cage enough to stir their curiosity, enthusiasm and loyalty.
Leave us a comment with your own link building ideas. We value any contribution that keeps us motivated, points out mistakes or gives constructive criticism to help us improve our content and website.
You can also connect to our community in the forums. Discuss how to build links in our Link Development forum. We are always prompt to answer questions.
Next on the list is optimizing the keyword distribution on your page. Although the second least important factor, this can really give a boost to your site, and it is recommended that this is where you start your SEO efforts. We will be giving you an in-depth guide on On Page Keyword Optimization.
When Apple made their iPod, they defined their target audience as non-tech savvy. MP3 players were originally build for tech-savvy users, and the industry was embroiled in a technology war to create ever more features.
“I have very specific goals, and a very specific target audience. Some people measure success by how many subscribers or how much money someone makes from their blog. I have never had a front page Digg, but my target audience doesn’t really use Digg.
When 
