seo backlinks Archives - Page 5 of 5 by Mark Murnahan

Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference

There are good SEO (search engine optimizers) and there are bad SEO, and if you cannot tell the difference, your money and time will be wasted. I am going to give you some third party objective tools to tell the difference between good and bad SEO. These can help you to determine whether yours is working, whether you have hired it out, you are seeking to hire it out, or you are venturing into the ever-popular DIY SEO. The information I will provide in this article also includes some great SEO tools just to satisfy your curiosity. This can help, in case you wondered why there are not more people coming to your website, or to estimate how well your competition is doing. First, I want to be sure that you understand what SEO is and why good SEO is important, so I will start with that.

Why Good SEO is Important

We should first establish that it is important to be listed when somebody searches the Internet looking for what you offer. Searching the Internet is the most common way for people to find a business. If people do not find you, they will find somebody else. Obviously, they will find your competition. Count on it!

I will be really basic for a moment, in case you are totally unfamiliar with SEO. In this article, I will use the term SEO as both the field of search engine optimization (the art and science) as well as search engine optimizer (the person). In basic terms, SEO involves placing your website at the top of a list when somebody performs a search on the Internet. SEO also has a lot to do with making sure that when your link is found in a search, people will click on it, read what you have to say, and take an action such as buy what you have to sell, tell their friends, fill out a form, call you on the phone, and etcetera. These are the things that will produce more business for your company. It really involves a lot of different areas of art and science, so I want to give you some ways to measure both of these things.

Now, let us assume for a moment that good SEO actually exists. It is not a unicorn chase, and it is not some VooDoo witchcraft. Somebody actually is at the top of those searches, they are making sales, and there are reasons for it. So, let’s look at this from a standpoint that there actually is such a thing as good SEO for a moment, please? After all, we can be pretty sure that there is a reason the company at the top of a search for, let’s say, “travel” is not just a brand new company with a $400 budget and 13 incoming links to their site. No, it does not happen that way … ever.

Tools of the SEO Trade

Good SEO is not just made up of a couple of big factors. Yes, there are some big things we look at, but there really are a lot of little things that make up the big picture. Some of the factors are specifics about the website itself, such as the programming code, the servers, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, text content, link structure, keyword usage, and much more. There are a whole lot of pieces to the puzzle of the website itself that add up to make a difference. You have to get those things just right, and have every piece in place to achieve high search engine ranking for competitive search terms. That is to say, the things people actually search for when they need you. Then, there are the things that exist in the world outside of your website. These are things that a lot of website owners often feel are a bit out of their control, or really hard to improve. It is not so hard, but it does take some work. When there is work to be done, there are tools for that work. My father was a craftsman, and he always expressed the importance of using the right tool for the job. If you use the right tools, the job will always go much smoother. My father was really on to something.

Understanding SEO is Not Like Understanding “Rocket Surgery”

SEO does not require a degree in “rocket surgery” (rocket science and brain surgery). A lot of people will try to do some, if not all, of their SEO on their own, and it really can help. I respect anybody who wants to try to build their search engine optimization. Having people understand that SEO is important and that it actually works when done properly is one of the biggest hurdles in my job. In fact, I do everything in my power to be sure my clients and prospective clients understand SEO enough to help themselves. I tell them to read the “Google SEO Starter Guide“. I teach them the good reasons to blog, and I want them to have a better understanding of SEO. Most good SEO will generally try their best to be helpful, because they equate their success with the client’s success. They realize that it is a joint effort. Good SEO know that when they make clients massively successful, they have a lot easier career path. It is why people who Google the term SEO lessons find me at or very near the top. I want people to understand how and why it works. That makes my job much easier.

One of the biggest factors of SEO is backlinks, or links that point to your site from other websites. As you surely understand by now, this is not a silver bullet, but it is a huge factor. So let’s look at link building for a moment, and how to see if you or your SEO are doing a good job.

How to Check for Backlinks (incoming links)

Since a primary factor of good SEO is backlinks, we need to know how to check for them and monitor them. When I say backlinks, I mean links coming to your website from other websites. This is the biggest factor of Google’s PageRank algorithm, and it is what will make the difference between two otherwise equal websites. One with a lot of high-quality incoming links will be ranked, while the other may be totally invisible to search engines, or somewhere between. This is so important that if you could just see me right now, I am jumping up and down and screaming.

Most SEO fail at link building. They get it totally wrong, and their link strategy fails miserably. If you want to know why, I strongly suggest reading this article: “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“.

I will give you some tools to check for backlinks. Each of these are useful, but for the most comprehensive look at incoming links, any SEO knows to use Yahoo Site Explorer. By default, it will show you the links for the particular page, so if you enter your website, be sure that you click the “inlinks” button and then select links to the entire site rather than just looking at the home page. After all, people link to the pages they like, and not just link to the homepage and tell people to look for it. Only television stations do that, and perhaps you have heard what kind of trouble they are in these days.

Your search for backlinks should look something like this search that shows tens of thousands of “inlinks” to my blog or like this search excluding internal links.

Another useful tool for determining incoming links and whether they are doing any good is to look at SEOmoz Linkscape. Linkscape will also show your mozRank, which is similar to Google’s PageRank but, in many people’s opinion, more useful.

It seems that most people are confused about backlinks. High-quality backlinks do not just mean any link from any website, and they do not mean just any type of link. The quality of the linking website makes a big difference in the quality of the link. Also, a link coming from a picture is not all that great, but a link from text is fantastic. Wait, but not just any text. A link that points to you with the words “pink ponies for sale” is not so great if you do not have any pink ponies to sell. You want links that are relevant to what you offer, and links that benefit your site. This is where Open Site Explorer can be handy. Open Site Explorer (another SEOmoz tool) will show you which links are valuable to you. It will tell you the actual text within the links pointing to your site (e.g. pink ponies for sale), whether they are “nofollow” links or “dofollow” links (which is another blog post), it will tell you the domains that link to you (e.g. facebook.com), and even how many domains link to them (which is also important). There is a lot more functionality to Open Site Explorer than I will go into here, so be sure to check it out. If it starts to feel like you are just tinkering with useless information, then you are getting the picture about why there are people who actually do this for a living.

Now that you know a little about checking for links, you may also like to know how to discover new ones as they arrive. For this, you can keep checking back, which I suggest anyway, but you can also set up a Google Alert to email you or monitor the RSS feed for new links coming in. That is another blog post, but what we want here are ways to decipher good SEO from bad SEO. So, let’s look at some tools that examine good or bad on-site SEO. This is to say, the things about the website itself that are working correctly, or need some tuning.

SEO Website Readiness Tools

Is the website ready for the incoming links? Let’s find out. I know that I probably spent too much of your time with that drawn out portion about incoming links. Backlinks really are very important … extremely important … but there is more. If you are still with me, I want to share some good SEO tools that will help you to uncover on-site issues that may be stumping your search engine optimization efforts. Running your website through these free SEO tools will help you find things that you can often fix quickly and relatively easily. If you test your website with these tools, and fix it as directed, your SEO will get better. If you are trying to determine a good SEO from a bad SEO, their website should be standing tall in these tests.

Note, that a good SEO also knows which “rules” to break. Nobody will have this all just perfect, because sometimes you just have to break the rules to get the results you want. For example, my site will not validate as XHTML Strict, because I use Disqus commenting system, TweetMeme for people to easily share my articles on Twitter, Apture for cool content display, and I use an anchor target in some of my links so that pages open in a new window. This is OK, because I know which trade-offs are worthwhile. However, the SEO’s own website should provide a good indication of their SEO knowledge. I understand the whole excuse of “the plumber with leaky pipes” (I have been guilty, too), but this is not a good excuse! Any good SEO should be able to show some pretty impressive results with their own website. I find a lot of people trying to sell SEO services who have very few incoming links, and really rotten rankings for their targeted keywords. Try these tests to compare SEO:

HubSpot Website Grader
SEOmoz Toolbox (an assortment of good SEO tools)
W3C Markup Validation Service

Website Traffic Estimates and SEO Website Age

If you are comparing SEO, you should know a couple of key things about them. Does anybody know they exist? You can find a really quick answer to this question by checking their Alexa.com rankings and see their estimated website traffic. This only gives a reasonable estimate based on sample data, but it can definitely tell you a lot about the SEO. If they are unknown there is a reason, and there are no good excuses for it. There is also the often more definitive Quantcast, but a lot of SEO do not wish to share that much data.

I see a lot of SEO with new domain names. This is not always a red flag, but it can be a sign that they are either new, or their previous domain was banned by search engines for abuse. It happens more than you may imagine. This is not the kind of SEO you want to do business with. If they have been banned, you can bet some of their clients have been penalized as well. I said that a new domain is not always a red flag, because there are a few newer SEO who have talent, or may just be beginning their freelance career. However, if their company website is new or unranked, they better have a really good sales pitch. You can look up domain ownership with a WHOIS tool such as YourNew.com WHOIS Lookup or DomainTools.com

Content Creation is Important to Good SEO

Content creation is where many of these SEO factors come into play. A great looking website that is easily indexed by search engines is a good start. Now let us consider content production. If the website does not have good content that includes topics and keywords people search for, it will not matter. You must have something fantastic to offer once the website visitors get there. This is where a lot of the art of SEO comes into play. This is where marketing talent and creative content really make a huge difference between success or failure. How important is creativity in marketing? The easy answer is that it is absolutely critical. Great website content is what creates a desire to buy what you sell, and is also the biggest factor in that important SEO goal I wrote about above. It builds links! If people like what you have to share, and if they find your website content to be useful to them or somebody they know, they will share it. They may tweet it, digg it, stumble it, facebook it, or blog about it, and that creates links.

I explained that incoming links are the most important off-site factor in good SEO. This is an undisputed fact in my industry. Now I want to explain that you do not get those backlinks by taking a pink pony ride with one of the SEO offering to add your website to a squillion search engines and directories. No, that is not how this works. That is how the bad SEO will often try to get your money. You will get the best links with great content, and being useful to others. Even then, good SEO results only happen if you make all the other pieces fit just right.

By the way, good SEO also means they read it all the way to the bottom of the page.

SEO Directory Submissions and Pink Ponies For Sale

Sometimes I wonder how pink ponies became so popular in today’s Internet marketing world. Then again, I guess I should stop wondering. People just love buying pink ponies and fairy dust. It is a shame, but when I look around the Internet and talk to people, I have to believe it is true. They think there is a magical fix for their dwindling or less-than-stratospheric profit levels.

Pink Pony Rental: $180 Per Month

I do not like to call people stupid. I try to inform them, instead. It usually doesn’t work, because the majority of people really love pink ponies, fairy dust, and all the other Internet marketing magic that gets sprinkled into their eyes every day. I can only try my best to save one or two of you.

I see a lot of “SEO companies” (that’s search engine optimization for the record) offering packages for placing companies at the top of search engines for search terms. The packages often consist of submission to a squillion search engines and directories, building incoming links to the client’s website, and a bunch of other magical fairy dust. Some of them will say their magic potion includes creating h1 tags (Google h1 tags and see where my article about h1 tags is), meta tags (serious, this is a joke) and HTML title tags (sure, that is all it takes).

What bothers me is how hard some people’s heads are when you try to explain that pink ponies and fairy dust are just ways that pretend SEO companies take people’s money and then leave them thinking that this whole Internet thing is a big unicorn chase. I hope this is not the case with you, but based on the numbers … the real hard facts … you probably have a lot of room for pink pony rentals deep in your heart. If you keep reading, I am going to smash some pink ponies into tiny little bits and eat them. This is not for the faint of heart.

Maybe you believe in magic, and you aren’t ready to put down your “My Little Pony” doll. Fine, but maybe you should mark your calendar for a good time to have somebody pop that bubble for you and help you to do things that actually work. You know, things that actually increase your profit and create more sales. If you are in business, profit is what you need, right? Not precious little pink ponies and fairy dust. Just in case you are not ready or you are in SEO relapse, I will give you a fun little pony video to look at while your competition continues reading and takes away some more of your profit.

SEO Magic Takes Research, Targeting, and Talent

Call it “SEO magic” if you like, but real Internet marketing and SEO takes research. Real research … the kind that compiles real data and has a focus on real results. You do not get that with an out of the box SEO service offering … for any price.

Once the research is done, online marketing success requires a targeted approach to reaching the right audience. The research tells who the audience is, but knowing where to find them and targeting their attention is another task. This is often skipped and companies end up with the equivalent of trying to sell knitting needles to race car drivers. Is that the right audience to spend your money marketing toward?

When you understand who and where the audience is, it takes marketing talent (yes, you should click on the link about marketing talent) to convert those lookers into buyers. This is the artistic part of SEO and Internet marketing, and an important piece. If you get this part wrong, you can just drop a signed blank check in Times Square right now. Your money is wasted … gone … poof … it disappeared!

After these things are handled, it takes more research and understanding the marketing data to know where to focus the next efforts. When you discover what works, it is time to keep doing it, only better than before. That is what takes profit into orbit.

Oh, and I probably should not leave out the huge fact that it takes a website that does not suck. Here, read a story about a $150,000 website that sucks.

When you think about these things, maybe you can drop me a comment to tell me how stupid I am for never submitting this blog to any directory other than DMOZ. Maybe you don’t know what DMOZ is. Well, the pink pony salesman probably doesn’t either. He probably does not have thousands of incoming links pointing at his site, either. That is because most SEO fail at link building.

Real SEO Providers Eat Pink Ponies

I was talking to one of my SEO buddies yesterday as we dined on some pink pony burgers. He was telling me of a prospective client who came to him for search engine optimization. The man had a great product and wanted my pony munching friend to perform some search engine marketing for him. My friend, who had no reason to lie to me about this, told me he could make this guy’s product a smash hit. I mean, the way he described it, he could have sent this guys profits into orbit. A serious SEO guy knows when they can totally smash a market, by the way. We have research on our side.

My friend went on to tell me that after talking to this guy a bit, the potential client said he could spend $180 per month to sell his machines. Where in the heck did this guy get the figure of $180 and what kind of pink pony did this guy smoke? Seriously, a $180 per month budget to make a serious impact in his company’s profits? Is this really what people think we SEO people do? Do people really think that a person who can send their profit into orbit is going to live on minimum wage? Wow, so the one person who can truly make the biggest impact on company sales volume is worth all of $180 to the company?!

What really made us taste our partially digested pony burgers was that a lot of people think the same way. They have it in their head that there is some automated magical fix for marketing success. They think that the same thing that will work for a car dealer should work for an accident attorney, a construction company, and a real estate developer. The industry of Internet marketing has deteriorated into a pack of thieves who pick the bones of desperate companies who really so badly want to believe that there is one single magic pill they can buy over the counter and fix everything that ails them.

Those machines my buddy spoke about sell for a minimum of $14,000 and included a good profit margin, by the way. So, anyway, it kind of made us both gag on our pink pony burgers and face the fact that most people are really not ready to take their market seriously. They are not ready to push their marketing go button.

People Don’t Want the Truth: They Want Pink Ponies!

This all got me to realizing that people don’t really want to hear the truth. I have become pretty popular for telling people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. The crazy thing is that they may like to hear the real truth once in a while, but it is like watching a horror movie. It is like entertainment, but it could never happen in real life. Like Hollywood. They like hearing how their Internet marketing guy made millions of dollars conquering a market. What is sad about this is that the Internet marketers who actually have earned millions upon millions of dollars for themselves and their clients (yes, like me) are the guys you really don’t want to hear from, because we will pop the bubble you ride upon and give you the truth. We make fun of those guys. See … here I am in a video making fun of them, while subtly showing you that I am not full of pink pony poo and actually have been doing this successfully enough and long enough to buy a few toys of my own. Yeah, I didn’t do that selling pony poo … I did it making my clients a whole lot of profit!

Anybody who is tired of renting pink ponies and watching money slip away, what you really need is a pony slaying marketer. The presentation may be a bit crusty and abrasive for some people’s taste, but there is a reason serious pony killing search engine optimizers hang up the phone when people ask for a price before they even consider the real reason they called … the profit!

NOTE: If you like buying pink ponies, save us both the trouble and just drop me $180 per month in the mail. It will help me to cover my $1000 coffee expense while I work 25 hours per day to crush companies who try to compete with my clients.

Bounce Rate? What is a Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate of a website, or of any given page, is an important measure of whether you have captured a reader’s interest enough to click and visit another page on your site. It is more important to some types of sites than others, and is often dismissed by considerations of the ratio of returning visitors to new visitors, but it should not be ignored. I know a lot of people understand bounce rate, but I still thought it was worth blogging about because you should hear it from somebody, and maybe I will give you a different angle on this.

Does Bounce Rate Affect Search Engine Rankings

The answer is no … and yes. Although bounce rate is purportedly not used in the ranking algorithm of Google or other search engines, some people will still try to insist that it is. I have heard arguments that even if Google used it, they would keep it very secret because it is too easy to cheat in the ways people have cheated to have higher Alexa rank. I think it is worth considering what Google has to say about bounce rate, and how true it is. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, it is “Spamable and noisy” data, and I agree. There are many things that can cause a higher or lower bounce rate that it is not useful as a single measure and requires other factors to become useful data. The ways that bounce rate can affect search engine ranking are outside of the search engine algorithms, and come down to how useful your site is to people and if it is not useful, they are probably not linking to it. Bounce rate is a symptom and not a cause.

Bounce Rate Factors

Bounce rate is subject to many different diluting factors, and a good example is Wikipedia. If I search for something and I find the answer at Wikipedia, I will likely not visit another page in that same browser session, thus creating a “bounce” for Wikipedia. This is an example of a high bounce rate being a good thing, because I did not need to click around to find my answer. I found it, Wikipedia’s job was done well, and I will still return often. There are a lot of things which may cause a high bounce rate, and it is not all bad. This does not mean you can ignore it, though.

You really should not ignore your bounce rate, because it can still play a role in your SEO efforts and make a difference in your rankings for other reasons. For example, if your bounce rate is on the rise but your site has not changed, it would be best to determine why before you start losing people’s interest any further. Is the information less relevant than it once was? If so, you really should pay attention to this. If people lose interest, they will probably stop returning to your site, linking to your site, and sharing it with others. If it is a blog, maybe you need better content, or maybe the content is so good that they come back every day to read more. Whatever the instance, you should be measuring this and know the answer. An important measure is not only whether the bounce rate is high or low, but whether it is changing.

How Bounce Rate is Calculated

Bounce rate of a website is calculated based on the total number of visitors of only one page in a session divided by the total number of visits to the site. Because it is based on a “session” there are several ways a bounce can occur. Things that can cause a bounce are clicking a link to another site, closing the browser window, clicking the back button to try their search again, or a session timeout, which could mean they just left your page open and went to lunch.

Don’t Bounce Me Just Yet!

I did mention the ratio of returning visitors to new visitors. If you have a high bounce rate, but you still have a very high number of returning visitors, it is easy to be relaxed about this. There are a lot of instances where a high bounce rate can still be a sign of potential improvements, such as emphasizing a further call to action. If you give people a reason to stick around right now, you will also improve your chances of a return visit, that they will bookmark your site, subscribe to your blog, or better yet, share it with friends.

The bottom line is that if you are not doing all that you can to make your website more useful, you are leaving the doors open for the competition. Knowing your bounce rate and knowing why it is high, low, or on the move can be a good step in the right direction.

By the way, while you are here, you may like to take a look at my “Recent Articles” listed to the left of the page. I would also invite you to visit the list of articles in my blog archive. I have worked very hard to make it useful for you.

Polarizing an audience does not mean that you are telling them to go away or that you do not appreciate them. When you polarize your audience, you set yourself apart from the crowd and you often gain respect. If somebody does not respect you for who you are, you probably did not need that respect anyway.

I am first going to explain what I mean by polarizing an audience, and then give you my recent example that happened with an article I wrote titled “Era of The Social Media Dubeshag”.

Stop Trying to Make Everybody Happy!

Sure, you are in business, and you want to be certain that anybody and everybody will want to buy your products or service. You want everybody to love you, I get it. Have you ever considered the downsides? Yes, the downsides can be that your biggest fans are indifferent. They are not the kind who will drag their friends, family, and complete strangers kicking and screaming to buy your brand.

Looking around the business world, you can see many very successful instances of polarizing an audience. A good example may be in Apple Computer’s decision to not support Adobe Flash Player in their iPhone and iPad products. Other examples are available in the soft drink market with Coke and Pepsi, and extreme examples occur in politics. Who wants a wishy-washy politician, anyway?

Do Facebook and Google Polarize Their Audience?

Once you know your brand, stand strong to it. I don’t mean going around and intentionally making people mad at you, but don’t be a chicken either. Just look to Facebook for an example. Facebook is not at all afraid to polarize their audience. They are in the news for it every time they make a big change, but you don’t hear them apologize for how they run their business, or the culture of their brand. Does it work for Facebook? Consider this: If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world with over 500,000,000 (yes, five hundred million) users.

Google battles against whole countries, like China and recently Italy. I don’t think I need to go into a lengthy argument of how Google polarizes their audience. They are famously polarizing, just as most massively successful brands are.

Sure, you can say that Facebook and Google do not have any real competition, but they do, and in huge order. Many people just don’t look at them as having competition because they are so extremely large and tower over their competitors. In any case, consider who you hear more polarizing stories from … Google or Dogpile?

Today’s Murnahanism: Being famous often requires the guts to be infamous. If you just want to please everybody, give up now, before you get hurt!

Pleasing Everybody Satisfies Nobody

I have said it many times that “I do not try to please everybody, and that pleases some people very much.” I strongly believe in this statement and it is with me at all times. What it means to me is that I will not waiver from who I am just to make people like me. It seems that if they do not like me, they dislike me with emphasis. Conversely, if they like me, they like me very much and they are brand-loyal. I try to leave very little room for indifference.

So What About This Dubeshag Article?

I created a new word for our chubby or less-than-Clark-Gable friends in the social media world. I called them “dubeshags”. The genesis of the word was in good humor, and there is what some would call a very funny back-story. You can read the article and judge for yourself.

It polarized an audience in a pretty big way. I was accused of all kinds of crimes of social media for writing it, such as using popular names to build popularity. I explained my reason for writing it in an addendum to the article and it included the statement as follows:

If you think I wrote it for attention, I would have left it as a draft if I didn’t want people to read it. Sure, I want it to be read. Maybe you just blog for the entertainment of your cats, but I do it for public consumption.

The moral of the story is this: Whether people loved it or hated it, the word “dubeshag” is no longer a secret. In roughly 36 hours, dubeshag went from zero listings in Google and no recognition at all to over 500 listings in Google (and later over 25,000); over 120 Digg.com diggs; a handful of votes on Mixx.com, Reddit.com, and StumbleUpon.com; was re-blogged on many blogs; has been tweeted to hundreds of thousands of Twitter users; created an interview on Social Blade; and has flattered a few of the dubeshags who were mentioned.

Who cares if it made a few people pout? Certainly not this author.

Author’s Addendum: This was a strange example, but it does show a few key things pretty clearly. It shows that original content can spread fast. It shows that with a little know-how, you can build a lot of incoming links. It shows that even if you step on a couple toes, you can still be very well branded and have an audience like the kind I mentioned … the ones who will tell a lot of people.

It is funny that since I wrote this and was away for an event at my son’s school for a couple hours, the number of listings for dubeshag on Google keeps going up. In a short time it increased to tens of thousands of pages talking about dubeshag, and linking to the article. So it should kind of make a person wonder what happens when you do that several times per day? What happens if you do it for six months, a year, or longer?

It amazes me how some people still wonder if this whole SEO and social media thing is really worth looking into or not. To those in doubt, I hope I have given you some food for thought, and I hope you will investigate further. Stick around and read some more. You may find that there is a lot more to it than you think.

SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building

Backlink search on Yahoo! for awebguy.com

Backlinks are massively important to SEO because they reflect a consensus that your Website is either great, or it is not. Most people know that it is important to have a lot of links pointing back to their site, and some even know why … but few really understand how. I will draw this out for you and explain just why most SEO really stink at backlinks. Unless you settle in for a good read, right now, you will miss a huge lesson in SEO that you should know before you spend another cent. Get comfortable, because this is information that will benefit your business.

Most SEO Are Clueless About Backlinks

Most SEO fail at link building, and there are a few good reasons. Yes, I said most, and I mean it. Most SEO are failing at this one singular most measurable task that will make the difference in everything from customers finding your Website, to your Website conversion. The troubling thing to note is that they will often not tell you about it, and worse yet, they don’t even have a clue why they are so awful at it.

First, I will explain the couple of terms I use here and how they work for you, since I know everybody is not totally into SEO the way I am. SEO stands for search engine optimization (interchangeable with search engine optimizer, like me).

SEO is a whole lot more than just making sure you are at the top of the list when people search for what you offer. It goes much deeper, and it has a whole lot to do with another important and misunderstood term. Conversion! Oh, you’ve heard the term, right? In my most simple way of explaining conversion, it means converting searchers into clickers, clickers into buyers, and buyers into raving fans who will take your business to a totally different playing field. Conversion does not mean you conned another sucker into buying your stuff! Conversion could be said to mean that you are converting your business from an “also-ran” to the lead in the race.

Link building, as I am discussing it here, does not mean asking your cousin Sally to add a link to your site about insurance from her site about landscaping. When I say link building, I mean valuable, sustainable proof that you are serious about your business and that other people recognize this fact.

SEO Often Lie About Backlinks!

Now for backlinks; a backlink is what you have when somebody links to your site. It seems simple, right? Every joker who sends you an email offering to sell you backlinks for $49 knows that term. It means a squillion people will come flocking to your Website and enter their credit card number to snatch up your massively important stuff before you change your mind and raise the price. Yeah? Well … NO! This is the way a lot of SEO will explain it, but then, people lie … even on the Internet. By the way, why are they emailing, and why do their Websites never have more than a couple backlinks? I actually think it is not always just a mean-spirited lie, but more because they see this huge market and they are desperate to grab their piece but not willing to learn before they sell it to you. They are trying to earn as they learn, and the customer is often a victim.

Build Backlinks With Talent and Trust

When you have quality backlinks it tells Google and other search engines that others place a trust in you and they like your site. It is a democratic process. It is often faked, just like any other democratic process, but what sets you apart is that you are up for re-election today, tomorrow, and every day. Your business cannot afford to mess this up, and a bad fake in this democratic process can get you banned from search engines and waste a whole lot of your money. The biggest portion of the cost is the money you didn’t earn because you were wasting time with what did not work and your competition got the business.

If you take a creative and well-considered approach to your business and your Website, backlinks are simple. I never asked anybody to link to this site … not even once. I did not have to. I provide information that people want and can use to their benefit. People link here because they trust the content and they believe that others can benefit from it, too. This is the mentality it takes to build backlinks that matter. This is the kind of backlink that is relevant to those people looking for you, and a whole lot more likely to give you that conversion you are seeking. It is the kind of backlink that the SEO who sees you as a meal ticket will never create, because their mind simply does not work that way.

Trust and familiarity can build a whole lot of backlinks. Branding takes time and it takes purpose. When you do it right, you build great relationships. Here is an article that explains the difference that trusting relationships make in SEO and social media marketing: “How the Big Dogs Get Paid”. Have a little faith. I would not link to it if I didn’t think it would benefit you.

How SEO Sucker People: A Simple Explanation!

How does this happen that SEO sucker people out of their money? It is another blog post all together, but it is too commonly because the nature of need, greed, and fear tells people that they should seek the lowest cost in their business. They are out to make money without spending money. They want what sounds great, but for the lowest upfront expenditure. The first SEO to claim that they can do all that those other guys do for a fraction of the cost gets the money. What you should consider is that old saying that you get what you pay for. I would add that sometimes you don’t even get that.

If you are needy, greedy, and scared, do not cry to me or the other SEO who take the job of marketing your business seriously. Until you can get over the anxiety for grabbing fast money from the Internet, you are probably not ready for SEO performed correctly. If you take your business seriously and consider the importance of doing it right, the backlinks will come effortlessly.

Summary of SEO Backlinks

This little observation of backlinks explains a lot of reasons that when somebody asks me (as they often do) “What is your hourly rate for SEO?” I explain that they are asking the wrong question. The cost of SEO does not boil down to hourly rates for SEO or even how much money you wave goodbye to upfront. It comes down to how you look at your business and whether you only plan for tomorrow or plan to take your business to the head of the race. If you want to know my hourly rates, just Google it. If you want some free SEO lessons, go ahead and Google SEO lessons and find out if those backlinks I write about really matter.

If you want it done well, stop and think about these things and bring your lunch money. Doing SEO well does not mean doing it cheap. Real SEO means that you are in business and that you can swim with the sharks, and not that you are just willing to test the water.