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18 March 2010 11:20am
Hi there, im quite new to this industry, lots to learn and loving it. Im reading lots about how SEO is all about relevancy, basically if each page in your website is highly targetted to a product/service and you use title & meta data & relevant urls and content to reflect this, then you should rank.Which all seems to make sense. I like it when things make sense.
However i've been advised by people with much experience in the industry that its the off page stuff thats more important and should take precedence over on page stuff. Building links and buying urls to make micro sites etc. This has shifted my grasp of SEO a little, i suppose im now wondering...can seo be effective without intensive link building...will i ever get any where with my on page efforts?
Any help/opinions would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Partner and Executive Producer at Digital Pulp
18 March 2010 16:17pm
We've found that there are three major things that effect SEO...
1) Traffic
2) Inbound Links
3) Page Content and Coding
The reality is that if you don't have decent traffic, it's unlikely that google will see your site as relevant. If no one (of quality) is linking to you then you're potential to satisfy the needs of google users is even lower. And finally if the content on your pages is not identical to what searchers are looking for there will be other sites that will appear first.
While this seems like bad news, it's the situation every website owner is in so you're not alone! With 65% market share google should be your main target and we recommend taking the long view and starting from the bottom up.
Decide the 10 key phrases where you'd like to appear. Check out who appears in natural serach results and how you measure up. Craft your page content to suit the phrases and code your pages with standards in mind. Find sites that should be linking to your content (like bloggers) and pitch them your story.
Over time your page rank will improve. If it's not improving fast enough you'll need to consider purchasing google adwords. As a side note google says having an adwords campaign doesn't improve your rank. But having a google webmaster account and submitting an XML sitemap to google will help.
Consultant at Possible Worldwide
19 March 2010 05:27am
Majority of impact for SEO remaining as Back Link as Google using this fundamental concept to measure which website has value. Even crawling rate, Google still using Pagerank to set how frequent to index your website, how deeply to index your site. The content is matter to gain the links, you need to develop something unique that will allow you to get the good quality sources. On-Page optimization is also important that you can ignore, off-page and on-page strategy should go in the same direction like target keyword.
Managing Director at Ergo Digital
19 March 2010 09:32am
You have to start with on-page... however this is definitely no guarantee of top rankings... but on the flipside if your site is not SEO-d properly in the first place, then you'll never be able to make it.
But inbound links are crucial too. As is traffic.
Google wouldn't be dumb enough to make it just about what happens on the page!
Technical Project Manager (MBA, MBCS, CITP, CEng) at Naxtech.com
19 March 2010 09:36am
Hi,
I will go straight to the point. So..."can seo be effective without intensive link building"... the answer in my view is Yes.
Firstly, link building is aimed at improving Pagerank, as this is defined by the initial Google algorithm. Search engine results pages however do not show results based just on Pagerank, but on Relevancy. Naturally, high pagerank however does not imply a high degree of relevancy but it certainly helps to a certain degree.
Secondly, there are regulated business sectors (eg. Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology are some of the sectors we specialise and work in) where directly/indirectly things such as Adwords/PayPerClick, PR, Link Building, etc are not allowed. So, sometimes lack of link building is actually part of the requirements in a way. But that does not mean that a website cannot do well without link building. On the contrary...
A relevant example which you might find useful is one of Servier UK, which you can find very easily if you search for http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=what+is+angina where no link building has taken place, yet the website is performing really well and has produced great results.
Having said that though, SEO without link building means that you are most likely going deeper into coding, design, application performance and other aspects of an online presence which means that SEO begins to come closer to the Technical side of a site and a little further away from the Marketing side.
I hope the above help.
regards,
Denis
www.naxtech.com
www.quick-flight.com
www.accommodation-center.com
Managing Director at Ergo Digital
19 March 2010 09:52am
To add to this post. You can get ranking very easily for low traffic / volume phrases. And, occasionally, if no-one has spotted them, higher traffic phrases.
But mostly, if you want to achieve ranking on competitive terms, you will need to do more than just on-site activity. But, get the site right first.
CEO at Econsultancy
19 March 2010 10:23am
As others have pointed out, a lot of this is about competition i.e. how competitive the search phrases are for what you want to rank on.
If you go super-niche with your phrases you'll probably be able to rank well with just on-page optimisation. But there will be very little traffic/volume. Which might be OK if you're in a niche B2B area where the competitors barely even have a website.
However, if you want to rank for more competitive keywords then I don't believe it's possible to do that with on-page optimisation alone. Linkbuilding (how to do it) is a whole big topic of its own. But 'best practice' in link building is moving more towards a) creating great content and b) using PR (online and offline) + social media to market that content and engage with your target audience. They then link to you because of your great content. This approach is different to the early days of link building which was more about directory submission, online press releases, and buying links.
19 March 2010 11:03am
Wow - much that i still need to learn then? Thank you all so much for taking time to contribute your thoughts/ideas/opinions/knowledge.
Im more fascinated by the day and off to read more articles on link building.
Marketing Head at Primetech Software
20 April 2010 09:13am
There are no ways to make SEO effective without Link Building Campaign.As google robots searches for website who has more quality links refers to particular website & gives them positions accordingly.
Regards,
Primetech Solutions
Web Development Company
http://www.primetechsolutions.in
SEO at Bsolutions
21 April 2010 12:52pm
I agree with Pranav , you cannot have good ranking without good number of backlinks of good quality.