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When to Stop Building Links?
You should never stop building links; you should always be on guard for sites vying for the same keywords. Everybody wants to be on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing and when you reached that target it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop. Let’s not forget that being visible on the web opens a door for bigger opportunities. If you want to stop building links just because you reached your target, ask yourself if you’re ready to lose your spot on the search engine result page (SeRP), maybe then you’ll have a second thought.
Building links is easy you just have to do it the right way to prevent being considered as a spammer. Another, you also need to educate yourself from time to time of other ways to get a free traffic or a back link to your site. It’s not just about Directory Submission, Article Submission, Blog Commenting or participating in community forums, if you know how to strategize, you’re up for a hundred possibilities. You don’t have to tire yourself writing articles all over again, comment to blog post you’re not interested reading, try out something new. I’m not saying article marketing is not an effective tool. All I’m saying is, sometimes building links doing the same activity could be tiring plus if you don’t try out something new, you’ll never know which works best or which also drive traffic to your site.
If you’ve reached your target, keep on building links, but this time ADD something new to the activities that brought you to the first page of SeRP. Also, add a new keyword to target, remember, you don’t need to stop targeting the same keywords, you only have to add additional keyword to the list and promote it as well. You can strategize on this one. Believe it or not, it could drive more traffic to your site without losing your position – more traffic to a new set of keywords added, therefore, expanding your horizon.
Don’t stop building links…just be creative…strategize…
Secrets Revealed to Using White Hat Method
Optimizing a site may sound simple, perhaps simple in context if you know the standards set by Search Engines but could get really complicated when it comes to implementation. We already know what on-page optimization is but for those who don’t, it’s the first step to optimizing a site for SE – work within the elements of your site.
- Do create quality content or relevant information but Don’t overstuff it with keywords.
- Do use Keyword Tag but Don’t provide too much keyword 5-7 keywords will do.
- Do use keywords on Title and Description Tags but Don’t overstuff it.
- Do use Alt Tags but Don’t use it to stuff keywords, use only what is relevant.
- Do use Anchor text but Don’t use anchor text to mislead users.
If you notice I mentioned keyword stuffing several times, this is because abusing keywords is a black hat technique. Be reminded also that even if it’s not visible to the end- users how you stuff keywords, like changing the colour of the text to match the background, it can be read by SE. For on-page optimization, there’s not so much to do actually except that you have to update it from time to time to adapt with the current SE standard. Below are other things you could DO to optimize your site:
- Use keywords on your URL structure if it’s relevant to the content, example:
Instead of just www.yoursebsite.com/services use www.yourwebsite.com/seo-service.html or www.yourwebsite.com/linkbuilding-services.html this way you links are also optimized. For products, use relevant keyword for your URL structure related to your page. It’s not keyword stuffing since it will be related to your page’s content.
- Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for leaner code. A well optimize site should also allow SE to read its code easily, by separating content and style sheets you can attain this.
- Use Site Map to easily navigate to your site.
These are secrets to a well optimized site using white hat method. The critical part though is finding the right keywords. The secrets are now revealed what you could do now is finding the right keywords and then adapt this.
Is Social Medial for all, if so should you Hire Someone to do it?
I’ve been pondering about social media for quite some time now, asking myself whether it’s applicable for all regardless of industry and if so, should you outsource social media. I came upon this great article from Conversation Agent site and this inspires me to write something about social media. At first, I thought social media is not for everybody, your reputation is at risk here, your brand, your company, profession everything will be revealed. Lately, upon reading and attending various seminars, well indeed it’s for everybody. When you say social media, it’s not just Facebook, MySpace and Twitter let me first define what Social Media is, according to Wikimedia:
“Social media is a term used to describe the type of media that is based on conversation and interaction between people online. Where media means digital words, sounds & pictures which are typically shared via the internet and the value can be cultural, societal or even financial.”
There are many forms of social media like forums, blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing, Q & A and social bookmarking. So from here, it really is for everybody provided that you know exactly what you’re doing. A blog post can make a lot of difference, one wrong move and people will be talking about you. Social media is for all, but not all has the right knowledge to strategize and make the best of what social media can do for you.
Next, should you hire someone to do it? It depends, outsource social media to do what, there are different stages before you actually maintain it. If we speak of design and development, you can hire someone to do it, depending on what you want to achieve, Facebook has a lot of feature you want to take advantage of and sometimes you just don’t know how, Twitter can be customize but how, monitor social media activity again, how…that’s when you need to outsource that part of your social media campaign. How about if your goal is to brand yourself or your business through the use of social media, that’s a tough one and I suggest you hire a Social Media Strategist.
How about the maintenance, it will If you ask me, there are several factors to consider, first is your goal, what was your goal in the first place, what do you want to achieve then ask yourself will you let someone handle your Facebook, Twitter, Q & A etc. (like asking yourself will you let someone be you or let someone handle your business who is not actually on the business). Secondly, your product/service, are they knowledgeable enough to know the ins and outs of your business.
Social media is for all but think twice if you want someone to handle your social media, there’s always an option to outsource part of the process but the whole thing, think about it.
If you want to know more visit Valeria Maltoni’s article of Conversation Agent, you’ll see different point of views and pretty much give you an idea in a broader sense. I like her approach and gathering inputs from her Linkdin connections. I don’t know her I just bumped into her article yesterday and I honestly love it and would love to share the link with you.
Target your audience
We spent some time today with Andrew from SmallBiz.ca. We were talking about marketing products. Now, do you know who your target businesses are? We do and I am not telling you who but let’s say this, for small businesses, it is very important to target. Otherwise, you could be throwing your money away. Sure! Walmart can target anyone and everyone! But is your business comparable to Walmart? If it is then fine! Go ahead run TV ads! But if you are not and not looking for a hit and miss then it would be a very wise idea to target your market.
So how do you market your product? Well, obviously you will need to make some investment and spend a lot of time. If you are a one man show.. well, I am not sure how you could do marketing and also build your products unless you are reselling someone else. Anyway, the bottomline is that you will need to invest much more money in marketing your product than the investment you make in manufacturing your products. You can have the best product in the world, yet, without proper marketing there will be no money in your pocket.
A major part of our own marketing is the SEO, we find search engine marketing to be the most cost effective solution, however, SEO is not the only thing we do. In business, it’s all about relationships we built. So we are spending a considerable amount of time building just that.. relationships! And we are growing very nicely. So I’d suggest guys, you do the same! Hey! Let me know if this tip was any help to you 
A perfect online software?
I was thinking today.. is there any such thing as a perfect online software? Well, age-old saying is nothing or nobody is perfect. I will have to agree to that. Sometimes I do think I wrote the perfect software just to realize that I could add more codes to it to do something differently. There is simply no such thing as a perfect online software unless you created it to say just “Hello World”.
So what is involved in software creation?
First of all, a flow chart, then some pseudocodes then…. ok enough with the geek talk! Lets speak in english now! Lol. So do you think your business model is perfect? No there is always room for improvement. Same goes for softwares.. always room for improvement and growth. These days people are getting more into online softwares, who wants softwares today that you can’t access from outside your house/office? You need all your documents on the go but remember just 1 thing NO software is perfect. You always could get hacked, your software could crash but our effort would be try to minimize the chances as much as we can.
Fly by night Website Designers
I can’t help but get really pissed off when people are looking for a website at a bargain basement price. We get an inquiry, we give them a rough estimate of the cost and then get a rebuttal.. they say, “But I can get a site done for allot cheaper”, ya! if you want crap! The facts are you need to get realistic on what you’re getting.
There’s a TV show about contractors that don’t do the job properly. Yes it is true, they don’t do the job properly because you’re getting what you paid for..If you want the work done right you need to hire the proper professionals to do it. These so called basement dwelling web designers whom most of them have day jobs and are designers by night can’t do the job properly. You will get what you pay for which is a poorly designed website at a bargain basement price. God forbid a couple of years or even months down the road something goes wrong or, you want to add or update something on the site, try to get in touch with the individual or so called website design professional that did the site for you and they’re nowhere to be found. ”
So beware of the flyers you see on the street light posts for cheap website design.
VBEC Seminar On E-business at Eagle’s Nest
Today, Saturday May 8th, 2010 morning I attended an e-business seminar arranged by Vaughan Business Center in Vaughan, Ontario. Well, I guess I should say yesterday morning as it is now 12:34 am Sunday morning EST.
Anyway, it was really nice to see our good old Dolores Rotondo back at VBEC (centrebusiness.com) after her 9 months of absence. Teresa is gone which is a good thing for us as we had some conflicts of interest in the past.
The first part of the seminar was presented by Andrew of Biz Launch. I had attended a few of Andrew’s seminars in the previous years. He is simply an amazing presenter. I always enjoyed his seminars before and I did again this (yesterday) morning. He has a way of making the seminars more interesting. A nice touch of humour and his efforts to engage the audience always works like a charm for me ie. I actually stayed awake through the entire presentation.
Andrew talked about the importance of social media exposures for businesses. I realized once again, this is something we just all have to do to promote our business. This is a powerful marketing tool that we have not fully utilized yet for our own marketing campaign thou we do this for our clients. Well, you know we wouldn’t exactly get paid to do it for ourselves thou
The second part of the seminar was not too productive for me. This part of the seminar was run by a guy name Bruno. The guy was running a seminar on Search Engine Optimization yet, his only experience seemed to have been SEO for his own website! And guess what? This experience seemed to also have been based mainly on “onsite SEO” only. I guess any website owner with some SEO success in olden days when SEO was easier could just start running seminars on SEO now.. ya’ know I helped passing a few pieces of wood last year when my father-in-law was building me a deck in the backyard. I guess I should now start running seminars on carpentry! Viola!
He did not seem to have separated SEO from web design either. According to him (like many others) the web designer is the SEO expert.. well, on the other hand, web designers as well quite frequently mislead people by saying they would include SEO in their web design cost (say what? All these months of SEO work for free??).
Anyways, the food that followed his seminar was good so overall it was worth attending the seminar. Pino and I spoke with Andrew afterwards as well as Judith, a business consultant. We are sure to hook up again in the coming weeks. And oh! I gotta drop by talk to Dolores tomorrow about some ideas I have.
2nd Day Insider Secrets to a Google – Friendly Website
Google cares more about their users rather than those people spending huge amount of money to advertise their site. Regardless whether you give Google $10k a month for your PPC campaign, they can actually slap you anytime, “Google slap” as they call it. Another thing I learn, I’m not an expert on PPC (Pay per Click) yet, I only use it on my own personal site and I learn that you cannot just pause and play campaigns, just to test, there are other way of doing it. Why, your historical CRT (Click Through Rate) matters a lot. The acceptable CTR at least is 2%; Google actually monitors your activity and inactivity the first day you run a campaign. How do you measure CTR? It’s Click/Impression = CTR. And if you want to know your Ad Rank its CPC (Cost per Click x Quality Score). The CPC is the amount you’re willing to pay and Quality score covers your landing page, relevance of ad test, historical CTR, account performance and other relevant factors. In short, Quality Score encompass both your account performance as a whole and the quality of your website, which is quite a lot to discuss. Well, I can’t discuss it yet, I still have to attend another seminar this June on PPC, a hands-on coaching (I’m really excited on this one).
What else, I cannot actually reveal too much information since it’s a SECRET haha…just kidding. But as a whole, it was more geared toward harnessing the power of Social Media Marketing. What was actually exciting about the seminar was not the Insider Secrets itself, though it was the reason why I actually came but the tips you get from the experts themselves. I will be seeing them again this June and August for SEO and PPC. It’s always my goal to continuously improve, what works today may not work tomorrow. One example, the Page Rank, people are so focused on this, yes Google made an update this April and almost everybody notice an increase in their PR but it doesn’t really mean Google still uses PR. That was actually the question I raise during the seminar and was told by Simon Leung himself that PR is already obsolete.
One more I think you all should know: Google manually reviews each site/ads. They do have a system but the final decision still relies on the reviewer. Perhaps this is no longer a secret, there are just simple who don’t believe that they really conduct manual reviews, like the one who created a scene on the seminar, whoever the guy was, he was rude and today he didn’t come actually. Its okay to challenge the speaker but it’s not okay to be rude, there’s a proper way to argue your point. But I could attest to that, Google actually reviews your site, my personal site actually was blocked a year ago because of malware attacked, I contacted Google and within 2 days I got a response and my site was up again. Systems or software cannot interact with inquiries right, human intervention will always be there. Anyway, to wrap it up, I had fun, we had picture taking at the end of the day, and I have my certificate and a photo beside Simon Leung and Fabian Lim. It was great, this won’t be the last that I’ll be seeing this guys.
I need to take a rest now, it was a tiring day but I had fun.
1st Day Insider Secrets to a Google – Friendly Website
Just this morning I attended the 1st day of Insider Secrets to a Google – Friendly Website. The speaker was a Simon Leung, a retired most senior Google optimization specialist with guest speaker Fabian Lim who is currently the CEO of Internet Academy Pte Ltd. The event was sponsored by Powermax Consulting Group Inc. The topics covered were…well, of course we haven’t discussed some of the topic outlined below, I still have to attend to tomorrow though, but here it is:
· Crush All Your Competitors in Search Engines
· Overcome Automated Penalties to Your Websites
· Who Google Values More Than Their Highest Paying Advertisers
· The Biggest Mistake You Can Make on Your Websites
· Setting Up and Designing a Google Friendly Website Layout
· What Would Have Prevented Penalized Sites from Poor Quality
· Which Types of Website Google Associate with “Scams”
· Quality Score Elements You Must Be Mindful Of
· How to Set Up Your Navigational and Outbound Links
· Integrating Social Media on Your Site for Best Results
· One Simple Graphic That Instantly Increases Your Quality Score
· Essential Content Pages That Are Often Neglected On Most Sites
· Your Number One Goal For Every One Of Your Site’s Clicks
· Shocking Quality Criteria Most Websites Never Implement
· Building An Automated Lead Generation System The Right Way
The seminar was fine, the speakers of course are both good and the food served was great, lol. Though I can say that I am not new to this and would say perhaps Google Secret is not really a secret to me and for sure for other Internet Marketers out there, still attending this seminar is something I would opt to. Perhaps a confirmation if I was really doing it right and of course to gain competitive advantage, which definitely is my goal. It was an opportunity for me to listen to these people who have proved themselves well enough to earn six figures, that’s in US dollar. Both has its way of presenting their expertise, while Simon Leung highly recommend to harness the power of Social Media and to patronize its partners (love your own) Fabian Lim on the other hand presented his expertise by actually using a live site and do some googling on a particular term. This is by the way is very effective and I honestly learn new stuff in him with regards to keywords research. He will be here on July to conduct another seminar about SEO and Google Adwords, I don’t have the definite date yet but I will sure be attending. Anyway going back, there were 10 topics discussed today and as I’ve said earlier, I’m not new to this but it did meet my expectation.
Something I learn today about creating sales letter, I don’t know if you knew about this but I only learn it now. Long sales letter are conceived to be scams. I see a lot of that on the web; I’m honestly annoyed when I land on those pages with long sales letter. Simon Leong thought us how to create an effective sales letter, a landing, a call-to-action etc. In short, the seminar was A okay, plus the bonus of what I learn from Fabian Lim.
Tomorrow I’ll share what will happen on the event and perhaps share with you some links or photos of the events. For now I really have to rest from a long day’s event.
When to Stop Building Links
Based on experience, the moment you stop building links that’s when your Google ranking start to sink. So definitely, you don’t have to stop building links regardless whether your site is on the no. 1 page of Google and other major Search Engines. You have to bear in mind that you’re not the only person doing the same thing. Do not be complacent and always watch your back. It’s like deciding whether you have to stop promoting your site or continue campaigning for it.
Building links encompass many activities (read more about link building strategy). Generally, you don’t build links for the sole purpose of gaining as many links as you can. You also build links to advertise your business and attract as many potential clients as you can. So if you think you have enough links, well, there’s always an option to slow down. When you slow down the process, you also have to strategize at least just to maintain your position. It’s like, when you believe you already built a foundation then the next thing to do is how to strengthen this foundation.
Well, this is me speaking, personally, I don’t recommend site owners to stop building links. That’s a big NO for me. If just in case you really don’t have a choice, let’s say “I don’t have a budget”, “ time constraint” or just feel like, “I’m on top, what’s there to worry about”. For case where you think you don’t really have a budget, good news, you can actually do it yourself. Have the initiative to learn the process; there are huge resources on the web that teaches you about link building. Time constraint, outsource link building. Time constraints with no budget to outsource, as I’ve said earlier, you can always minimize your link building effort but you have to strategize. Being on top that gives you an excuse to be complacent… well.. well.. well.. if you’re willing to gamble your position that more or less represent 60% of your market, go right ahead