Search engines take numerous variables into consideration when displaying websites inside their natural search results depending on the search terms you use.

Backlinks are just one of these many factors.

Unfortunately only a small number of people,who are sworn to secrecy, know the complete algorithm that is used. This makes it real tough to know what links are worth perusing that would benefit your domain the most.

And alas not all search engines are created equal. Even though there might be some aspects of the algorithm that are comparable to say Google, Yahoo and Bing have their own ’secret sauce’ whenever figuring out rankings.

Things such as the domain age, quality of content, the actual domain name, and on and on establish where your website falls whenever people do a search.

Backlinks play a huge, but not fully known, roll in driving a ton of visitors to your website and in many cases it helps with SEO. Plus it gets you traffic from the sites you are receiving backlinks from.

If you would like to drive top quality traffic to your web site – you need backlinks. Lots of them. And if you want to be found in the search engines for short and long-tail keywords, you need backlinks from several other websites using those words as anchor text that link back to the web page you’re trying to rank for.

Don’t make the error that many people do – and that’s just focusing on building backlinks to their home page. They are missing out on a great deal extra traffic!

Don’t just build links to your home page for the main keyword(s) you’re targeting, but dig deeper and get backlinks for longer-tail keywords you’re targeting within a blog post or an individual page on your website.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Why You Need Backlinks

As more consumers go online and use major search engines to find local businesses, local merchants have to supplement their advertising strategy. While it used to be enough to take out an ad in the local phone book, such as the Yellow Pages, now local merchants also have to consider SEO.

Although this seems like an overly complicated strategy for the average mom-and-pop, it’s not. First of all, you don’t even need a website to rank locally (which cuts costs considerably). Secondly, ranking locally is much different than ranking nationally/internationally, meaning that it can be much less competitive and, therefore, much more cost-effective.

The 10 Pack

The most important part of localized search result is “the 10 Pack.” This is the first set of results that appear alongside a Google map whenever you search for a certain kind of local business. Since the 10 Pack can include anywhere form 3-10 results, it monopolizes much of the SERP real-estate above the fold, making it considerably more impactful than the second and third results. You need to get into the 10 Pack. There are both onsite and offsite elements that your business can leverage to rank in the 10 Pack.

Offsite Factors for Local SEO

Because you don’t even need a website to rank in 10 Pack, offsite factors carry a lot of weight in local SEO. These include: verified local business listings, citations and offsite references, local directory listings, customer reviews, and backlinks with the right anchor text.

Search Engine Business Listings: the first thing to do for local SEO is make sure that you have a map listing with the Google Local Business Center. Not only is it free, but anyone can create one. So if you haven’t created one already, check if someone else has. If one already exists, revise it to include the terms you want to rank for. If one does not exist, create one that includes all those key terms.

Citations: it’s also important to have as many offsite references as possible. this includes getting mentioned on community blogs and other local business sites. If there aren’t any offsite references to your business, reach out to the webmaster and find out how to get mentioned. And if you have a site, see if they will link to you. If you don’t have a site, see if they’ll link to your Google Local Business Center.

Local Directory Listings: just because directories like the Yellow Pages aren’t the only game in town anymore, that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. By having a listing in the online editions of these directories, you can increase the odds of ranking in the 10 Pack. Just make sure to place your listing in the right category, otherwise you can end up ranking for terms that aren’t relevant to your services.

Other Verified Listings: although the 3 major search engines all have their own business listings, they also get data from sites such as Acxiom, infoUSA, and Localeze. So you want to get your business info listed with third party sites, as well. Just make sure that your business info is consistent across all sites, because Google can interpret inconsistent listings as different businesses. Some of the more reputable online local directories include:

• SuperPages
• CitySearch
• Yelp
• InsiderPages
• BizJournals
• AreaConnect
• MagicYellow
• and SwitchBoard

Customer Reviews: once you have a Google Local Business Center listing, you’re going to need reviews. The more reviews you have, the more that Google will see your business as relevant for the keywords you’ve targeted in that review. So reach out to colleagues and customers about leaving such a review. But do not try to write 20 reviews yourself. If Google flags you as spam, there’s a good chance that it’ll hurt your rankings. Google will also pull local business reveiws from all over the web, so reach out to local bloggers and communities about getting reviews there, as well.

Because of the importance of reviews in local search optimization, you should use your site to build trust. First, devise a way to encourage happy customers to generated positive reviews. Second, link to your map listings so that Google has some indication that that listing is relevant to your business. And then, get links from local trust sites, such as the Better Business Bureau and any local chambers of commerce.

Backlinks: finally, whether you’re building links back to your site or your business listing, you want to pay attention to the anchor text of those links. While traditional SEO dictates that you want keyword sensitive anchor text, in local SEO, you want that anchor text to actually be the name of your business.

Onsite Optimization for Local SEO

If you do have a company website, there are also a number of things you can do to help enhance your local SEO efforts. First, make sure that your business name is in all your title tags. Second, having a domain name that includes your business name will also enhance your local ranking.

Finally, have a page that includes the address and telephone number of your business. The info on this page should also be consistent with your other listings on the web. For example, if you have separate phone numbers for tracking purposes, that can hurt your local rankings. So if you can’t avoid having different tracking numbers, try to keep them restricted to pages that you can tell Google not to index, such as PPC landing pages.

Think Global, Act Local

As Google continues to personalize search results, localized data is going to become more and more important. The web is evolving from local users getting worldwide answers to global users getting local answers. This is why local SEO is more about optimizing for locations, and less about optimizing for keywords.

What you should be focusing on to get included in the 10 Pack, then, is having your business info appear in multiple locations, and making sure that that info is consistent. And when building links back to your site or reviews, those backlinks need to have a strong geographic scent. Finally, because local search is about people searching for local answers, customer reviews are very important. So if you have a site, use it to build trust and encourage users to leave reviews.

Many local businesses are still unaware of local SEO. So by optimizing now, you can put yourself in a position to dominate the 10 Pack for years to come. After all, if your site is super relevant today, it’s easier to convince Google that it’s still relevant in several years when it’s still in business, and still serving its community.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Ranking Locally: Optimizing for the 10 Pack

In order to understand what drives website rank you must first look at Google and how it views the web. You have to remember that Google is a computer algorithm, a program. It cannot read a web page like you and I and tell what the content is about and what should be ranked highest.

How can Google tell who should rank in the #1 spot?

There are many factors that effect rankings including keywords, content and site structure but to look at this a little closer we need to look at Google’s explanation of PageRank^TM.

“We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank^TM algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.”

“PageRank^TM also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.”

Source

In part it can be deduced from the above explanations that Google looks at links pointing to your website and determines what the page should rank for, in part based on who is linking to you and more importantly HOW they are linking to you.

As I said earlier, in my opinion links play the largest roll in ranking. But not all links are created equal. A link from a lawyer’s site when you are a florist does little to help your rankings. The best links come from websites that have the same theme or topic as yours, uses your keywords in the anchor text of the link and has a lot of quality incoming links from the same theme/topic related sites as their website and yours.

If website rank depends on links, then keyword specific rank must be dependent on keyword specific links which means effective links are links pointing to your website using the phrase or keyword you want to rank well for in the anchor text of the link.

Assuming I wanted a website to rank for “screen capture tutorials” I would seek out other websites in my topic and format the link to my site something like this:

Five <a href=”http://www.mysite.com>PC Screen Capture Tutorials</a> by Tim

The link ends up looking like this:

Five PC Screen Capture Tutorials by Tim

Note: Your link appears more natural by using word besides your keywords. This goes along way with your link reputation.

It’s not enough anymore to just have links as Google is looking for much more:

• Link popularity
• Link age
• Link authority – links from a site that are ranking high
• Link reputation – crosses over into authority
• Link growth rate – how often are links being added – to fast will hurt you here
• Linking within a topical community – stay within your topic/market
• Link anchor text – natural keyword rich text

So to wrap it up the website with the most and “best” links pointing to it using the proper keyword anchor text will stand the best chance of ranking for that keyword.

Understanding what factors affect rankings and how to effectively include them in your search marketing strategy will help your pages rank well and get the laser targeted traffic that any red-blooded webmaster wants.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

What Actually Drives Most Website Rank

Over the past few years it has become apparent to me that search engines rank web pages in relation to a keyword based on their perception of the authority of that page in relation to that keyword. What a mouth full huh?  In layman’s terms; If your site is about courier services then the content of  the website or page page should be on that topic.

There are a lot of definitions of authority but I believe Google views authority in terms of quantity and quality of links that point to your website. Also from websites that also has quantity and quality pointing to them.

Here are a few of my views on what factors make up a good link -

• Static one way links are better than reciprocal links
• Links from higher PR websites (more authority) are better
• Links from websites with the same theme relevance as the websites they link to are better
• Links that contain the keyword phrase are better
• Links from .edu and .gov rock!

Authority

Authority is a indicator of how much a particular website or a particular web page is considered the “go to” source on a particular topic (keyword).

Back link

Back link, or incoming link, is a term used to describe links that are on other web properties pointing your your website.

Static link

A static link is a link from a website that points to you but you don’t have a link on your website pointing to them. If you have a website that has a large number of good quality static one way back links pointing to it then Google will perceive that that website has authority in relation to the keywords that the website is optimized for.

Reciprocal link

A reciprocal link is when you link to them and they link to you. I wouldn’t recommend exchanging links with other websites.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the words used on other peoples web site that form the link back to you. Good anchor text is not the words click here or check this out, rather good anchor text contains the keywords that are relevant to your sites theme and what you want to rank for.

Theme

Lets say your websites theme is  about courier services. You would not want a link from a website that was perceived by Google to be about seo, nor would you want to link to a website about seo. There is no relevance between the two sites and the link, thus is given less consideration.

.edu – .gov

Back links from .edu and .gov are much harder to get but if you can get them they are golden!

There are other factors that might lead to ranking such as the age of the domain, on page optimization and content but by far the websites that rank highest in the search results tend to have the most back links.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Link Building Factors To Obtaining High Rankings