Gaining Trusted/Authority Links
With Google it is now all about trusted and authority site back links. For them it is a way for them to be sure your site is not a spam site simply for the fact that if these tops sites are linking to you then you must be real.
For you its about traffic and if you are a new site it is about breaking free from the Google
Sandbox or "aging delay".
How do you gain trusted links? As natural as you can.
1:
Submit and try your hardest to get in to dmoz.org. This is a trusted Google controlled directory.
2:
Offer related charity .orgs or .edus something free or donate something to them and see if they can link back to you. What better way to help yourself then to help others. It is much better then spamming or do shaddy business practices.
3:
Build free resource tools on your site. Draw the attention of many by giving away something free and useful. News sites might pick up on this and link to you or write about it.
4:
Try to get on college web bulletin boards. If your site is relevant and useful you might succeed.
In other words make your site useful and relevant and you will build trusted links to your site. Also remember to spread the word about your site on forums (do not link spam them), with press releases, blogs and other regularly updated sources.
Urchin Now Free
Google has re-tooled Urchin and are now offering it for free.
http://www.google.com/analytics
Underground SEO Link Networks
You never read on the forums about it and you never dare start a thread about it either. What am I talking about? I am talking about the secret underground world of SEO's trading links with other SEO's. I am not talking about one SEO site to another either, I am talking about sites run or created by the SEO. Each of these link trading SEO's have many sites that they strategically trade links with other SEO's with networks of sites. This building of fake link popularity leaves the average honest web developer at a disadvantage. How can a legit site compete if these people are plugging their new sites into this pre made network of links?
How can they not be caught and penalized?
Well they have many sites that will never have one reciprocal link exchange. Nor will they give links to same IP range sites. The registrar information is also unique. Hard to weed out, but still grounds for penalization.
Even top SEO's who post on the top forum boards are doing this in some capacity. You would be surprised with who is doing this. It makes Search Engine Relevancy's job of supporting proper site development and growth a hard concept to follow at times. This is why there are no white hat SEO's. Each one is about fudging the numbers in someway or another.
I am going to express the importance of natural growth one more time. you wont be able to trick the search engines for much longer. Don't ruin your site for the future.
SER and the Future of Organic Success
As the industry changes there comes new ideas and even newer tactics. One thing that the Search Engine Relevancy methodology always tries to teach is natural growth and site development.
In the old days of SEO it was a simple matter of stuffing your keywords in the meta tags and in the body text and you will rank. Those days have been long over with and thank god! Relevance is now starting to poke its head out now.
I can not stress enough the importance on dedication to your site and future development. The only way to gain traffic and the less important rankings (rankings are not everything... traffic comes from many avenues) is too grow over time. Search engines are putting a lot of weight on site authority status now. Authority status is the measure of a sites age, link popularity and site relevance. These factors all lead to better rankings and less spam.
You might read on forums of people saying how their site's rankings have disappeared or have dropped significantly. To me that is a clear sign of optimization and not relevant site growth. Those people don't understand the practice of SEO is dead and there is no fine line of white hat and black hat anymore.
There should not be SEO firms anymore. They only lead to false hopes and fudged numbers. True authority status is grown internally and developed with the visitor in mind first and not the bottom line. By internally, I mean a dedicated company vision and staff of site developers. These site developers are not just webmasters, but they are experts on the site subject matter and have goals of growing the site's reference status. If you are not willing to give away information (and I mean useful information) then you will only succeed with paid placements and minimal organic success. Dedication and education are the goals of organic search traffic. If you don't start now watch out, because the search engines will catch up with you and you will be one of those people on the forums with a puzzled sad post.
- Relevancy
