The following question was sent in using StepForth’s SEO question submission form . If you have a question that you don’t mind being answered publicly please send it in and we might just use it in our next SEO newsletter.

QUESTION: “When do inbound links dictate ranking?”

“We have been told by an SEO consultant that, once the number of inbound links becomes significant, this rather than any SEO optimisation of the site itself dictates ranking for search terms. How true? If so, it implies that, to make any changes in rankings and search terms, we need to devote effort to links and link text from appropriate sites (authority etc). It implies time spent on adjusting title tags, keyword density etc, is fruitless.” Paul C. Read more…

I just have a second for a quick tip but this is a good one for those of you new to link building. If you have ever done a backlink search on a competitor to find out where they have their links from you often find that a large majority of the links are from their own site. It can be a real pain separating the wheat from the chaffe so here is a little trick on Yahoo (the best place to do link building).

Conduct the following search in Yahoo replacing “domain.com” with your competitor’s address:

http://www.domain.com -site:domain.com

The result is a listing of all the sites your competitor has gotten links from minus your competitor’s own pages. This is a handy little tool. Now if you want to do this faster you can always pick up OptiLink – a program that we use religiously when we are conducting link building campaigns. Visit our recommended SEO tools section of the SEO Blog for this one and much more.

Thank you to those that sent in their SEO questions from the last few search engine newsletters. I would also like to again request that you take a moment and submit your own questions; it is paramount that I answer the questions that are important to you. Just email me your question, it is that simple! Read more…

Dirk Johnson from DomainDrivers.com provides link-building services. Over the past year, Dirk’s firm has helped a number of our clients acquire the relevant incoming links necessary to achieve strong Google placements. These are not purchased links though clients do pay for the time it takes to find and get them. Read more…

In the PPC world the more you pay the higher you rank. A #1 ranking on Overture for “search engine placement” would cost $8.01 and a #3, $5.25. It has generally been understood that this is a major difference between the PPC engines and the natural engines. You can’t buy placement on the natural search engines … or can you? Read more…

There was a time when link building meant finding only high PageRank links that used no forms of tracking, but now, free high PR links are extremely difficult to find, and more and more webmasters are using various tracking techniques.

When many people go out looking for links, they tend to focus on higher PageRanks. High PR is certainly useful and very important, but its important to know that those sites have not always had high PR’s. All sites have to start somewhere, and if you can get that free link while the site is at a lower PR why not? Read more…

We all know that incoming links are an important part of any search engine placement strategy. Exchanging reciprocal links is one of the easiest ways to attain links to your website from other webmasters and there are many sites out there willing to exchange links with you. That said, not all of them are valuable links that will benefit you – so where do you find them? Read more…

When you’re working with a limited budget and need to increase your visibility with minimal expense, then forums are a great place to start. The effect of posting information and opinions on forums are two-fold:

When you post to forums you are posting information to a targeted readership that is interested in the forum topic. Provided that you have chosen a forum related to the topic of your website you are, in posting interesting and insightful information, promoting your own knowledge of the area and people are likely to visit your website based on this. Read more…

Change Happens

Chances are, the results you see in Google this week are not going to be what you see there next week. We are predicting another massive change to listings over the next week, based on our analysis of how Google is looking at incoming links and its recent behaviour patterns. If you are about to stop reading because this sounds complicated, hold on a minute. Read more…