Compete Effectively Against Bigger Brands with SEO

One of the greatest advantages the Internet has over the Yellow Pages is that the Yellow Pages puts your business right next to your competitors, whereas the Internet gives you infinite scope to differentiate yourself from competitors. In addition to this, the various analytical tools available to website owners allows for you to identify areas where you can make an improvement to your website.

I Have Good Content But I Still Don't Rank on Google's First Page, Why?

This is a question that is asked many times. The way Google prioritizes its search rankings is done in two ways:

1. On-page optimization – at the very basic level, it is where the good content comes in with the related keywords being used in headings, sub headings, bullets and internal link text.
2. Off-page optimization – These are external links that point to your website from other websites. These links are seen as recommendations and build credibility for your website. Google ranks your web page based on the number of valuable related links. You could view this as a voting system; the one with the most related votes will do well.

So Where Do We Get Valuable Links From?

Other websites will link to your website if you have good content that they wish to refer to. In this case your website will acquire links without much intervention from you.

Many webmasters soon realized that external links would get their website ranked well and that is when they started to use techniques that are seen or termed as “Black Hat SEO”. A term used when one engages in activities that try to manipulate the search engine rankings.

The objective with link building is to get links back to your website using your “product keyword” or variable thereof in the link text. This is seen as a valuable link and not easily manipulated.

Links can be created by the following link building strategies:

• Blog posts that promote, discuss or compare products
• Article marketing – where one writes product related articles and submits to “Article websites” where webmasters can use your article on their websites. The rule is that they cannot change your content and must leave the authors signature where links are pointed back to your website.
• Reciprocal links from other industry related websites. Where webmasters agree to swap links with one other using requested “valuable” link text.