Today is the launch of our new website. Unfortunately the majority of our blog content still resides on news.stepforth.com while we deal with transition issues so here are the top posts on Links from the old SEO blog.

‘The ins & outs of Link Building’

3 Methods to Build Links with a Blog – An Interview with Ross Dunn

‘Advantages of blogging for building valuable links and reputation online.’

Building Links with Directory Submissions

‘Some things to consider before using online directories to build links to your site’ Read more…

At least a few times a month I get asked various questions about why a search engine ranking looks the way it does.

For example, someone might ask me how they can influence the description and/or title that Google gave their website in their search engine ranking. But easily the most prominent question is “what are those links that show up under some #1 rankings? How can I get those?” Read more…

There is one important factor to remember whenever you are involved in improving the organic rankings of a website, and that factor is time. One of the most common questions I receive as an SEO is “How long till I start to see results?” This article is dedicated to anyone who has ever asked that question.

It doesn’t matter what industry you are involved in, or what techniques you follow, in all cases you will be a prisoner of time. In the vast majority of cases search engine rankings don’t come over night. Read more…

Yesterday Google Webmaster Central posted a video response to numerous questions the department had received from webmasters. The following video addresses duplicate content, search engine friendly web design, spider blocking, and more.

This morning the Google Blog announced a staggering milestone that even had Google engineers astounded; 1 Trillion unique URLs were found by Google on the web at once.

This statistic not only shows the amazing power of Google’s indexing engines but outlines just how massive the Internet has become… it is truly mind boggling.

The full blog posting is located here but the following are some interesting segments quoted from the blog posting.

• How big is the Net if that is what Google manages to index? “Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you.” Read more…

SEO QUESTION:

“I have a number of websites used to market XYZ Travel. The main site features all products and a number of specialist / boutique websites feature duplicates of these products. Is this an acceptable practice or am I being penalized by Google? How can this be overcome?

“I accept that creative write-ups can be rewritten if essential but fact is fact – what can I do about factual data i.e. room numbers, types, facilities, amenities, address, rates, name etc?” Read more…

Over the course of a day we tend to run into situations where some basic and occasionally not so basic tips and tricks need to be applied to a website. Here are three that come to mind at the moment and might just help you improve your web marketing results. Read more…

Over the past few weeks I have received a few questions regarding my 3 part series on How to Optimize for Google. This post will answer a few of the questions I have received.

Do hyperlinked images count as back links? Which scores higher, text or image links?

Yes, Google does count hyperlinked images, however, to get the most out of imaged based links it is best to have relevant, preferably keyword-rich, alt text tagged onto the image.

As far as which scores higher, for the most part they are equal, assuming that the image has the appropriate alt text. In some cases a text based link may actually pass on a little more value if it is located within a highly relevant paragraph as an in-line link. Read more…

Today I was kindly offered the opportunity to participate in Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm with Jim Hedger and Dave Davies. The discussion we had was all about what it takes to keep rankings high in search engine results after successfully attaining them. Here is a link to the episode on the Webcology page where our show will be archived and to Jim’s article on Keeping it Up and here are a few tips from me on the essentials of maintaining rankings:

1. Keep adding content to your website in the form of a blog or informational pages and where appropriate provide relevant textual links to the pages you want to maintain rankings. Check out our comprehensive tutorial on how to create, market and manage your own blog.
2. If you write articles for your blog(s) try submitting them to article sites like ezinearticles.com. If your article includes links to your website these external sites will provide link juice to your content and help you maintain visibility.
3. PRWeb is a great tool for telling the world about your company’s accomplishments; see this video interview on link building and publicity with PR Web. By submitting a carefully written press release to PRWeb you can (depending on the service you choose) attain a large number of incoming links. These links will not necessarily provide long term impact because they tend to devalue after a week or two but inevitably you will get additional long-term links out of the process. By the way, if you don’t know of a topic to create a blog about consider creating one that just offers company news releases – there is nothing wrong with that.
4. Submit your blog’s RSS feed to the multitude of RSS aggregation sites (news sites) online. These sites will help pump up the visibility of the content you write. This is particularly important if you rarely have time to write new content for your blog because it will give you the most bang for your effort.
5. Keep in tune with the changes at search engines by monitoring sites like Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and of course StepForth’s SEO News Blog. If you hear of a pending or current algorithmic update on a key search engine find out all you can about it and prepare your website to bear the change – if necessary. If you find you aren’t sure what to do in response to an algorithmic update just contact a reputable SEO and get their opinion. You can find reputable SEOs in many places but to be sure you know who you are asking do a little digging to find out just how long they have been practicing SEO.

These are just a few tips but they cover the main points that everyone should know about maintaining rankings. If you have any SEO questions just use our Free SEO Questions submission form.

The following were questions sent to us by readers of the StepForth SEO Newsletter and the StepForth SEO Blog. If you have a question of your own we would love to hear from you; email us your SEO question.

Question from Steve:
Information about the why’s & how-to’s of the BLOGosphere have made for a plethora of copy all over the SEO world, yet my constantly recurring question never seems to come up! And this first question always leads me to second one. (1) If your business is NOT in any way concerned with… let’s call it “journalism” (it seems that the business of StepForth would have a sizable reliance on journalistic talent), how would a company go about deploying a blog initiative and still have time to sleep more than one or two nights a week? (…there’s this business we gotta keep running!) And (2) if one were to hire one of many firms offering such a BLOG service, how would it come off as more than a thinly veiled SERP ranking initiative, when your business is not of the type where there is really any “news” to report — AND further, where the BLOG service cannot possibly be expected to have the specific knowledge needed to write usefully pertinent journalistic copy? Read more…