I think on page SEO is super easy because I've done it so long, it's just second nature. It's link building that's hardest for me.
Hardest part of SEO..
- Thread starter Linda Buquet
- Start date
I have to agree with linda on this one 100%, onpage is a 5 min job, link building is a time consuming job and you sometimes have to think outside of the box to get the right links to dominate.
But...then again, having the patience and persistence to follow through until you get results is the biggest killer for the beginner. With todays "I want it now" attitude, SEO seems to be a better fit for the "old souls" that have the frame of mind to plow and plant now for a latter harvest. So it may be the hardest part of SEO.
But...then again, having the patience and persistence to follow through until you get results is the biggest killer for the beginner. With todays "I want it now" attitude, SEO seems to be a better fit for the "old souls" that have the frame of mind to plow and plant now for a latter harvest. So it may be the hardest part of SEO.
v9designbuild
New Member
Link building has become a dead end
I agree 100%, to the point where I can no longer offer these services or, for that matter, find any other company that can either. The problem is that if you have time and you're doing it for your own site, that may be fine; somehow you might be able afford the time. But if you're doing it for clients, the cost nowadays is so prohibitive because of the time it takes. And, in all honesty, I've run out of places to look for links and, because of it, my website stands at #5 when once it was a proud #1 for years. I just don't know what to do and am looking around for some answers.
I agree 100%, to the point where I can no longer offer these services or, for that matter, find any other company that can either. The problem is that if you have time and you're doing it for your own site, that may be fine; somehow you might be able afford the time. But if you're doing it for clients, the cost nowadays is so prohibitive because of the time it takes. And, in all honesty, I've run out of places to look for links and, because of it, my website stands at #5 when once it was a proud #1 for years. I just don't know what to do and am looking around for some answers.
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djbaxter
Guest
Actually, I think what Linda said is that she's done it so long it comes easy to her.
But it won't or shouldn't be a 5 minute job for most people. In fact many people put so much focus on link building that they neglect or dismiss the importance of on page optimization.
I think it should be the starting point. In fact, the advice I've given to people in the past is not to even think about link building until they have the page content right. Getting links to a page with poor or poorly optimized content may boost your Google PageRank but it's not going to help you rank well for your important search terms (keywords and phrases) or get much traffic that sticks.
- If search engine spiders can't see it, search engines can't index it.
- If what's on the page is poorly written, that's what's going to get indexed and what will be out there on display for anyone looking for you or your competitors.
- If guests (or non-logged in members or subscribers) can't see it, generally neither can search engine spiders.
- If the snippet shown in search engine listings (usually drawn from the meta description tag for the page) is poorly written, click through rates will be lower regardless of how well you rank .
- If the content looks and feels spammy or illiterate, most of the human visitors who do click through to your page/site aren't going to stick around long enough to make you any money.
- a well designed and well written page is more likely to attract organic links, and
- non-organic links will be easier to arrange for a "quality" page.
Too many people focus on link building as the "quick rankings fix" to get listed. What they don't understand is that if you content is not that good, or you are winging it with PLR garbage in the hopes of catching rank, then good luck.
There are so many filters these days to "bust" out the link builder....you know, the things that aren't that natural like all of your links happen to come from PR4+ websites, anchor text is all the same, there are no diversified anchor text (like the actual URL, your name, a single word) in the link profile, ect.
I am not saying that link building is not important. It is just that a lot of marketers tend to think of them as the end all of getting ranked. It is not.
Great content that PEOPLE like (and the SE's can read and categorize your site) + Links = Popularity in the Search engines.
The ironic thing is if you promote well enough and people like your site, you could grab most of your high PR links naturally...go figure.
Just a different opinion here.
There are so many filters these days to "bust" out the link builder....you know, the things that aren't that natural like all of your links happen to come from PR4+ websites, anchor text is all the same, there are no diversified anchor text (like the actual URL, your name, a single word) in the link profile, ect.
I am not saying that link building is not important. It is just that a lot of marketers tend to think of them as the end all of getting ranked. It is not.
Great content that PEOPLE like (and the SE's can read and categorize your site) + Links = Popularity in the Search engines.
The ironic thing is if you promote well enough and people like your site, you could grab most of your high PR links naturally...go figure.
Just a different opinion here.
If that is true, how can you write interesting content for local plumbers that the visitors like? What about the foot doctor? Sure the doctor could dazzle us with fancy phrases, but who would search for that? Another doctor?
You look at commercial shopping sites, they lack badly on content, just an item, description and a boatload of links.
I have had clients that had beautiful content sites with great and unique content and few besides them and their momma seen the sites.
I go in and start a linking campaign and then hundreds of thousands of people come and visit that content.
Links account for about 80 % of traffic and that is just 100% fact.
And link building is not a "quick fix", you just had 2 pros say that link building is the hard part because it is time consuming.
I tell you what, you can try this and see for yourself, take one page of your site with limited content and build 10 good links a day to it and compare it to 20 other pages without links being aggressively built and that one page will out preform the other 20 pages combined, 100 to 1.
Yes , you need good copy more than just "content". But that in itself is almost worthless without a throne of links for king content to sit on.
And Minstrel, you are right about the time, but in comparison, links take a lot more time.
You look at commercial shopping sites, they lack badly on content, just an item, description and a boatload of links.
I have had clients that had beautiful content sites with great and unique content and few besides them and their momma seen the sites.
I go in and start a linking campaign and then hundreds of thousands of people come and visit that content.
Links account for about 80 % of traffic and that is just 100% fact.
And link building is not a "quick fix", you just had 2 pros say that link building is the hard part because it is time consuming.
I tell you what, you can try this and see for yourself, take one page of your site with limited content and build 10 good links a day to it and compare it to 20 other pages without links being aggressively built and that one page will out preform the other 20 pages combined, 100 to 1.
Yes , you need good copy more than just "content". But that in itself is almost worthless without a throne of links for king content to sit on.
And Minstrel, you are right about the time, but in comparison, links take a lot more time.
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djbaxter
Guest
But if the item is what the4 searcher is searching FOR, then the item description is what you optimize. Exactly how you write content and how you optimize that content obviously depends on the target audience.
Not quite. Links and clickthroughs account for traffic. So your anchor text or the snippet in a search engine listing needs to be well written to match the most appropriate search terms for the content of your page. And after you get the clickthrough, the page content has to deliver on the promise of the anchor text or snippet or that visitor will click away as fast as he clicked through to you. No content - no sale. Poor content - no sale. Poor navigation structure - no sale.
But compare it with respect to what metric? SE ranking? Go for link building and ignore content. Clickthrough rates and traffic to the site? Minimal work on content except anchor text and description. Traffic conversions and sales? Focus on content before you even start link building.
No one can argue that link building works.
My only point is that people think that link building "aggressively" is going to be the cure all. They miss a lot of things.
For instance, relevancy, age of domain, trust rank, CONTENT (yeah, I said it)..geo location (if I was looking for a Foot Doctor, why would I simply google foot doctor?...wouldn't it be more practical to google foot doctor in {name of city}.
I actually questioned Michael Martinez about the notion of link building (who is an SEO expert) and why he thinks it is an inefficient link building model...here is what he told me...take it however you want to...
Of course link building works. And you can move mountains one rock at a time. The question is, if someone offers you a dump truck to move about 5,000 rocks at a time, do you still want to keep picking them up and carrying them across the street by yourself?
You get one keyword expression per anchor text.
You get as many keyword expressions per page as you care to place on the page.
1 versus many, 1 versus many. Which would you prefer?
So the real question is, how can content outrank link bombs? It depends on the size of the link bomb and how creative you are with repeating and emphasizing the keywords in your page.
If someone has pointed 10,000 value-passing links at a page (a very rare occurrence even in this industry given how few links actually pass value any more), you won?t outrank it with content. I?ve never seen that happen.
Do you have the ability to target 10,000 value-passing links per keyword?
On the other hand, there are certain Web sites where people in the SEO community just scratch their heads because those sites rank without any links. ?Oh, it must be the authority,? the SEOs tell us.
For a site like Wikipedia, I would accept that.
For some unknown person?s site, I would be very dubious of such a conclusion. Of course, I don?t know everyone and some people may have 1,000,000 pages of content I cannot find ? but we?re really talking about those obscure, ?Who the heck is this guy?? sites that just jump out of nowhere to rank for competitive expressions.
You get two things to work with in this business: links and content.
If the guy isn?t winning on the basis of links, then he must be winning on the basis of content.
So which is it easier to do, build links or build content?
Find a way to say the same thing 500 times on one page without looking like spam and you?ll wonder why you ever wasted your time on link building in the first place.
The point was that without links, that content is worthless, and links account for 80% of seo, which brings natural results, which brings the clicks, which is the only way that content will even be seen in the first place.
I worded it wrong saying links account for traffic, what I should have stated is that links account for top listings, which brings the clicks (traffic).
And let's face it, minimal content is needed for most sites to convert. Most content sites are selling ad space based on traffic volume, or a review site with affiliate links.
If you look at the sites of the top affiliates, they have limited content, it does need good copy, but not in the quanity that most here try to imply, it is something that is parroted over and over without any understanding of it.
but back to the point, and that is you or anyone can write 20 pages of the most beautiful content on any given subject and not build links and it is worthless, whereas I can write one paragraph of pitch, link it heavily, get top positions and i can sell the product/service because I have people seeing it from the results of the search engines.
Content is king alone is like a king without a kingdom when it comes to SEO.
If you write 20 hours of content, you should be doing 80 hours of link building, or you have wasted the first 20 hours.
I worded it wrong saying links account for traffic, what I should have stated is that links account for top listings, which brings the clicks (traffic).
And let's face it, minimal content is needed for most sites to convert. Most content sites are selling ad space based on traffic volume, or a review site with affiliate links.
If you look at the sites of the top affiliates, they have limited content, it does need good copy, but not in the quanity that most here try to imply, it is something that is parroted over and over without any understanding of it.
but back to the point, and that is you or anyone can write 20 pages of the most beautiful content on any given subject and not build links and it is worthless, whereas I can write one paragraph of pitch, link it heavily, get top positions and i can sell the product/service because I have people seeing it from the results of the search engines.
Content is king alone is like a king without a kingdom when it comes to SEO.
If you write 20 hours of content, you should be doing 80 hours of link building, or you have wasted the first 20 hours.
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djbaxter
Guest
And the other point is that without content those links are worthless.
They're both important. I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. My original observation was that people need to pay more attention to content if they want conversions and return visitors.
Agreed.
I have just seen a lot of souls take content and think the world was going to flock to their site based on this only, and like you stated, neither will do it alone, but also trying to make the ratio understood for proper seo.
I fully understand the Importance of content, I have several full time writers and they are crucial, but only only 2 write "copy" and the rest write for linking purposes.
I think that people need to understand the difference between copy and content. Content usualy does not lead to conversions, but copy is a different story.
I have just seen a lot of souls take content and think the world was going to flock to their site based on this only, and like you stated, neither will do it alone, but also trying to make the ratio understood for proper seo.
I fully understand the Importance of content, I have several full time writers and they are crucial, but only only 2 write "copy" and the rest write for linking purposes.
I think that people need to understand the difference between copy and content. Content usualy does not lead to conversions, but copy is a different story.
I could actually argue with you on this one...I have had local clients that had websites for years that got few to no links but ranked for the keywords that they were gunning for BASED on CONTENT. They just didn't realize that they were doing it (they were knowledgeable about their area of expertise).
Granted, the market wasn't competitive (it was local with less than 500,000 results) but still, they did get results from the search engines for the keyword(s) they were gunning for. And they did it with no links (their site was 6 years old).
Now obviously, you can't do this for competitive expressions. You have to intermingle link building with relevant content. But to say that link building is the end all for getting ranked is absolutely incredulous.
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djbaxter
Guest
That may depend on how you're determining incoming links, though, since we know Google at least has intentionally crippled its link: query. I'm always a little skeptical about posts that claim "PR3 with no links" or "page 1 ranking with no links", etc.
As you pointed out above, writing good content tends to encourage others to link to you, i.e., organic linking, so whether or not those clients were actively seeking links (actively link building) they may have benefitted from incoming links nonetheless.
As you pointed out above, writing good content tends to encourage others to link to you, i.e., organic linking, so whether or not those clients were actively seeking links (actively link building) they may have benefitted from incoming links nonetheless.
"Granted, the market wasn't competitive (it was local with less than 500,000 results)"
Which means small results. And we are in an affiliate marketing forum, which means that there are a lot of sites competing on average.
I would doubt that there are few results on just about anything you can do as an affiliate to make a decent income based on the point that you are stating.
I have to deal with the content spammers in my business on a dialy basis, they put loads of keywords in the footers into the thousands of words and phrases and they do get a little higher than a well written pitch , info or copy, but all I do is add a few hundred links and smoke them out fast.
Another thing that may need consideration with these sites you speak of, and that is the number of pages and internal linking structure. All links have value to some extent, so each link within a site to the homepage also counts as a link, so to say there is no links could be false. A 25 page site will produce 25 links to the homepage at the very least, and depending on the navigation could produce over 500 links if the site is setup right, If you look at wikipedia, they severely limit outbound links and they have an excellent internal link structure.
I would be willing to say that 50% of wikipedia's links are internal with few outbound links.
Yes, you do need good content, but if you want massive targeted traffic(enough to make good money), links provide about 80% of that on average (through positions in the search engines).
Which means small results. And we are in an affiliate marketing forum, which means that there are a lot of sites competing on average.
I would doubt that there are few results on just about anything you can do as an affiliate to make a decent income based on the point that you are stating.
I have to deal with the content spammers in my business on a dialy basis, they put loads of keywords in the footers into the thousands of words and phrases and they do get a little higher than a well written pitch , info or copy, but all I do is add a few hundred links and smoke them out fast.
Another thing that may need consideration with these sites you speak of, and that is the number of pages and internal linking structure. All links have value to some extent, so each link within a site to the homepage also counts as a link, so to say there is no links could be false. A 25 page site will produce 25 links to the homepage at the very least, and depending on the navigation could produce over 500 links if the site is setup right, If you look at wikipedia, they severely limit outbound links and they have an excellent internal link structure.
I would be willing to say that 50% of wikipedia's links are internal with few outbound links.
Yes, you do need good content, but if you want massive targeted traffic(enough to make good money), links provide about 80% of that on average (through positions in the search engines).
v9designbuild
New Member
SEO is a given; link building is not any more
No one can argue against making sure the SEO is water tight before submitting the site for links, nor can relevancy and authority be taken for granted. But where do you get these links that have PR these days (I'm only suggesting PR here because it a gauge, not a rule)?
No one can argue against making sure the SEO is water tight before submitting the site for links, nor can relevancy and authority be taken for granted. But where do you get these links that have PR these days (I'm only suggesting PR here because it a gauge, not a rule)?
PR is actually overrated...you need contextual anchor text within the article on a page that is within your niche. That is the best backlink you can get. How to get them? The pros buy them but you didn't hear that from me.
v9designbuild
New Member
PR is actually overrated
It is not PR I'm concerned with. PR is merely a gauge. It is placement that concerns me. And when you have the perfectly optimised home page and it is trounced by either a keyworded domain or for lack of quality, relevant inbounds, where does one now get these links to bounce back?
It is not PR I'm concerned with. PR is merely a gauge. It is placement that concerns me. And when you have the perfectly optimised home page and it is trounced by either a keyworded domain or for lack of quality, relevant inbounds, where does one now get these links to bounce back?
