Jason Roe / Blog, Jason Roe - Web design, Development, SEO Advice

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Build your empire to last

At the moment search engines seem to be ranking sites fairly well that have pages with relevant inbound links. This is not the only factor involved to rank well, however it seem to have a lot of weight behind it. The search engines have also got smatter about identifying people who are playing the system to their advantage.

Link exchanges are no longer as effective as the where in the past and many people have got banned or caught up in a bad neighbourhood by using them. In an ideal world, if everyone followed the rules link exchanges would work perfectly, but this is the real world! Quality is more important than anything else. I found a chart that approximately shows how many links are needed to achieve a certain PR from pages with a particular PR.

“…the meaning of a link has been transformed from a reference to a vote.�
Bill Slawski, from his interview with Aaron.

Link building takes time. I would compare link building to building the foundations of a home. The foundations have to be strong and must withstand the test of time. Everyone has there own theories about the best ways to build links, you need to take time and work out your own linking strategies. I found a great article over on search engine watch regarding linking strategies. “101 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies�

How long does it take? I found an interesting post over at Link Building Blog that mentioned a “time line� of sorts:

Established Domains (domains that are over 1+ year old or are already ranking for many terms)
*build links -> 10-12 weeks later see results.

New Domains (domains under 1 year old and are showing no strong ranking results) *build links -> 12 weeks to 16 months later see results.

Feed the monster

Start adding news content to your site and make sure to set up an RSS feed immediately. This can be done via a blog, content management systems or custom script. The advantage of a feed over a standard news section is that feed will be picked up and aggregated by many sites. A standard news section will only be read and indexed by major search engines. News is produced to be read, not just to fill up a page on your website.

Bloggers have realised for a long time that Feeds are they way to go. Your news will be out and all over the web in less than 24 – 48 hours. RSS is being picked up and read and indexed by most of the search engines. Most aggregators will also give you link backs thus boosting your rankings.

Make sure that you ping every aggregator site that you can. Many blog tools already have pinging tools build in as standard, make sure to add in all the aggregators that you can find to your list.

Don’t get lost!

Black hats have many ways to help you get removed from search engine indexes. Be careful to watch out for malicious server side includes, comments sections or reviews with direct links without nofollows and link spammers (with irrelevant keywords). There are many more ways to get removed, banned and penalised they just break the rules!
Most of the time there isn’t much you can do regarding external attacks. Try contact the major search engines, describe what is happening and plead that they won’t remove you from the index.

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