Just a quick note today to call your attention to some discussion going on in the link building space.
Everyone wants to talk about how to beat the Google ranking algorithm. And if you are a professional search engine optimizer (SEO), that is a lot of fun to talk about. In fact, the guys over at SEOmoz recently wrote a great post about their study on Google ranking algorithm. The problem is, you need a Ph.D. in math and statistics to understand the post (well, almost).
See, most of us are just trying to get traffic from Google. I was talking to Jon Leger about the SEOMoz post last night, and he made me laugh. During the discussion, he pointed out a few key things missing from the SEOMoz results (and he wrote a post).
Bottom line for me after all that discussion: there are really only two things that you need to know:
Thing 1: Make sure your keyword is in the title tag of your page. Yes, you should use your keyword phrase elsewhere. No, keyword meta tags tags don’t matter to Google. Sure, it can help to have the keyword in the page filename. No, header tags are not very important. And yes, there are a thousand other details that don’t really matter. You can write a book about on-page SEO — but it is not very important. The thing that really seems to matter regarding on-page SEO is the title tag.
Thing 2: Get more and better links back to your page than your competition. As Josh Spaulding points out, you should avoid the common link building mistake of getting links from just a few places. You want links from lots of sources. (For a great free list of ideas on how to get those links, check out this post from Lynn Terry on Effective Link Building Strategy.) Yes, it helps if the links have related anchor text. Yes the authority of the domain that the link is coming from matters. Yes, the authority of your top level domain matters. And yes, there are a thousand other details that don’t really matter. The thing that really seems to matter is that you have links back to your page (and your domain).
Really that’s it. Want a little known secret boost? Match your domain name to your keyword as recommended by Jon Leger (make sure it is a .net, .org, or .com). That is not always possible (depending on your project), but it sure helps when you can do it.
Look — I know you want things to be more complicated. You want to know guru tricks and ninja SEO secrets. I get that. All of those tricks are about details that don’t really matter to most of us. Here is the trick that most of us need to use:
Write great content, put your keyword in your title tag, and get backlinks to that content.
Want more details on how to get links? Check out the Ultimate Link Building Report from Josh Spaulding. Links are the key to your Google rankings, and Josh shares all of his tricks in this inexpensive report.
I’d love to hear you thoughts on all of this.
Regards,
Mark
