How Important is Search Engine Optimization? Years ago you were able to build your website and once it was uploaded to your server there wasn’t a great deal required to get it to the front page of the search engines and consequently gain traffic i.e. visitors to your site.
However, today the number of websites trying to rank their website on page 1 of Google has become more and more competitive, resulting in more work being required to obtain that prized status of number one.
But having said that, there are a number of things that you can do to give your website a boost in the rankings and that entails getting the best benefits from your search engine optimization (SEO).
There are two different types of search engine optimization known as on page SEO and off page SEO, both requiring different approaches.
We aren’t going to address on page SEO in this article which is basically doing a certain number of tweaks to your website pages to ensure that they meet the criteria for a good website as defined by Google and other search engines.
Instead let’s take a look at what off page SEO entails, and in particular some of the best ways to build backlinks to your webpage’s. It has long been recognized that search engines rank sites higher that are perceived to be popular and this popularity is measured by certain algorithms – which are constantly updated and changed by search engines, I am sure you are familiar with references to the Google Panda and Penguin updates, and the fact that many sites supposedly not meeting the those requirements lost their page ranking and many plummeted down to deep dark depths.
But not everyone was affected and this substantiates in a lot of cases that they had made the effort to have quality backlinks pointing to their website that gave the appearance of being natural i.e. not hundreds of spammy links created by software.
So what do you do when you have a new site that you want to get ranked?
Once you have got your site uploaded and indexed you can start off by doing blog comments making sure that you only link to your root domain in the first instance. Write about 3 a day until you have built up a base of 40-50 links pointing to your site. This will give a similar appearance to natural link building. It’s not hard to find good quality blogs to write a comment for by just doing a search for your specialised niche or topic.
It’s worthwhile making the extra effort to write a quality comment that adds some value to the blog rather than something like “nice site” to make sure your comment gets approved.
Once you have your initial links built you can look at other options for finding quality links, it’s not unusual at this stage to prepare and submit a press report this can result in getting you in front of lots of traffic very quickly and give a boost to your ranking in a short time.
However on a more long term basis you need to think about building links from other properties like web2.0 sites, wiki’s, article directories, video sites and many more. Whilst this can be done manually a lot of people choose to either use automated software or seek the services of a search engine optimization service to help them with their link building.
Particularly since the concern of being de-indexed because of poor quality links, whichever way you choose to build your backlinks – just keep in mind without backlinks your site just won’t rank in that special spot on the front page.
