In practice, this means you will need:

- Mostly links to your homepage
- A large number of links that are simply your domain name, rather than keyword-rich “anchor text”
- Links to internal pages of your site
- A range of links, not just those that are known to pass on link value
- Blog post links
- Links from sites that are unrelated – though not too many of these
- Links from sites that are on the same theme as yours
- Links f rom directories – again not too many of these

I’ll be examining a “natural link profile” more in future posts.

The main buzz phrase of the past couple of years, though, has been Social Media Marketing. What it means is promotion of a business through engaging with your target audience on various networking, blogging and microblogging sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. So is this going to be the way businesses use the internet in the future? Yes and no.

Social Media sites provide a fantastic opportunity for a business to interact with their target audience and expand their network of potential customers. And with Google cluttering up their search results pages with mainly adverts, local listings and the like, Social Media Marketing (SMO) may be seen as the main successor to SEO in terms of “free” internet marketing.

However, to perform SMO properly, you need to interact on a regular basis, adding new posts, comments and content to not just your own sites, but other sites in the same space as yours. That makes it pretty time-consuming and resource heavy.

One of the main reasons in the past year or so to have a widespread presence through Social Media has been to boost your ranking in Google, so obviously it’s been seen as a good thing. However, with the imminent release of the Google Caffeine update, it’s suggested that these Social Media properties will provide less of a boost to your ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

So really the best way to use SMO is for its own sake – ie interacting with customers and broadening your network of potential customers – rather than as a boost to your SEO activity. That is to say, SMO will be useful as an addition to your internet marketing toolkit, rather than the be all and end all of internet marketing. More on Social Media Marketing in the future.

Google essentially invented this idea of link popularity with its Page Rank algorithm. What this is based on is the theory that the more inbound links a site has, the more popular it is and therefore the more relevant to specific search queries. Of course, there are other factors to consider, such as the words that are used to link to your site (“anchor text”), and the quality of the site doing the linking.

But the principle is broadly that the more links the higher the ranking. So where do you get these links from? A very good question, and one that I’ll be exploring in more detail many times in the future. For the time being, though, here’s my basic list of the type of links you should be getting to your site:

- Reciprocal Links from complementary sites. A good place to start here might be sites that are not competitive with yours, but are still relevant. eg a shoe shop might link to a clothes shop and vice versa. You don’t want to have more than approx. 5% of your links being reciprocal.
- 1 Way links from complementary sites. As above, but with them simply linking to you without you having to link back. This can be achieved through having unique and valuable content on your site that people will link to of their own accord, or through some other method of persuading complementary sites to link to you (eg paying them!).
- Blog Post Links from relevant blogs.
- Article Links from blogs, sites and article directories around the internet.
- Directory Links from paid and free directories that are known to provide a boost to your site’s rankings. In practice, the only free directory that is worth looking at is DMOZ.org, but best of luck achieving a listing.
- Social Media Links from such sites as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
- Press Release Links that can take on a life of their own for generating links as people pick up the news.
- Viral Buzz and Web 2.0 Links that can take on a life of their own for generating links as people see the info and link to it through their own choice. The ideal method for generating these type of links is through developing quality Linkbait.

Of course, this simple list merely outlines the type of links you need. For more info on how to go about getting these links, you can see my Link Building page at my consultancy site, as well as read my future postings about link development for SEO.

One of the easiest methods for updating a site is through utilising a blog, such as this one. It’s not difficult to write 100 words or so on a topic relevant to your industry, and post it to your blog every few days. Ideally, a daily update is best, but that can prove more tricky.

Another method for continually adding to your site is to write new articles / pages on a regular basis. This could be based on “thought pieces”, designed to inspire contemplation in those who read them, or simply be some tips and advice that is relevant to the subject of your site.

Another good thing about a site that is regularly updated is it looks better for your visitors. The information you provide can also be a good source of inbound links (the key to good rankings), if it is unique and interesting enough. For example, a comment on a recent news item relevant to your industry can attract multiple inbound links from other commentators and bloggers in the same space.

Since then, of course, things have changed. The only piece of metadata that is especially useful for search engine rankings now is the tag. It is known that Google utilises the phrases in the tag for ranking purposes – though, of course, there is some debate as to what you should actually put in there.

In my experience, what you want to do is put your main keyword phrase near to the front of the tag. For example:

Christmas Golf Gifts and Presents – 118Golf.co.uk

which targets the phrase “Christmas golf gifts” (http://www.118golf.co.uk/Christmas-Golf-Gifts-and-Presents/catlist_fnct200.htm).

As well as this, I always recommend a suitable tag be used, ie:

118 Golf is the perfect place to buy a golf gift or Christmas present for a friend or loved one.

The reason the tag is useful is it can often be used as the snippet of info underneath the heading in your search engine rankings, which can lead more people to click through if it’s attractive enough. It isn’t the case that the tag carries much weight for actual rankings anymore, but it is thought that Google might decide to boost those sites that attract higher click throughs, so an attractive can help with this.

If you develop a site that had many thousands of pages of unique content that is relevant to the search phrases you’re targeting, without stuffing these pages with keyword spam, you will have an advantage over other sites in your sector. One of the main reasons for developing this good unique content is to show the search engines your site is about what you say it is. Primarily, though, it’s about attracting inbound links.

When we talk about content in SEO, it’s often assumed we mean text content. Indeed, as the search spiders find it easier to interpret text content than any other sort, it’s certainly a fact that good quality text content will help your rankings. But if you develop good content that people want to link to that isn’t text-based, you can actually have an even greater effect on your own rankings. Consider the example of www.xe.com. They are the best-ranked site for multiple relevant phrases, such as “currency converter”. If you look at their site, this is clearly not because they have a Wikipedia sized section of text content about worldwide currencies and other relevant topics. The reason they rank so well is because many thousands of other sites have linked to them using relevant “anchor text” phrases. The search engines thus rank them highly because they recognise the “wisdom of the crowd”.

If you can’t develop something as useful as the XE.com currency converter, of course, your best option is to develop great text content that people will want to read. Certainly you should have SEO in mind when you write this content, but the key issue is to write something of genuine interest, that other people around the internet will link to, thus boosting your site in the rankings.

I would always recommend static URLs (eg www.rossjackson.co.uk/seo-services.htm), that are not dependent on query strings or databases. I also recommend using keywords in the URL, though this is not as important as it once was for ranking purposes. Each keyword should be separated by a hyphen, as the search engine spiders recognise this as 2 separate words, thus giving you a slight boost for the search phrase you’re targeting. (Again, not as important as it once was, but still good).

Of course, you can’t always move away from the database-driven nature of your content, so for this I recommend URL rewriting (more info here), which turns your unfriendly URLs into keyword-rich ones. It’s a little complicated to perform, though, so I recommend getting a web developer to help sort this out for you.

In terms of navigation issues, you should make use of your internal linking capabilities to set up a visible sitemap, utilising keyword-rich phrases to act as the actual link (known as “anchor text”). Internal links still pass on link value, and are the easiest for you to control, so you should make the most of them. In recent years “page rank sculpting” has become a buzzword for optimising the value of your internal links, but I’ve never really recommended it and would suggest you don’t bother with it unless you really have everything else perfect.

Two other structural issues that should be in place are a suitable robots.txt file (see here) and an XML sitemap (more here). It is thought that Google favours sites that have robots.txt files in place, and it is known that XML sitemaps are good for ranking purposes – especially if you have database-driven URLs.

My recommendation here would be to register a domain name as close to your chosen keywords as possible. For example, a site promoting discount codes and discount vouchers could register the domain www.discountcodesandvouchers.co.uk. This gives them an instant headstart for these two search phrases, and is not especially expensive.

The use of the .co.uk domain extension is indicative to Google that the site is based in (or at least, wishes to get traffic from) the UK. I would always recommend purchasing the .com extension at the same time, though, if possible – if only to prevent other people getting hold of it.

Ideally, any site targeting the UK should be also be hosted in the UK – though there has been much controversy recently about .com US-based domains showing up significantly in the Google UK results. Once all the noise has quietened down, though, we’re left with the same idea, that UK hosting is best for sites targeting the UK.

Once you have your keyword-rich domain, with the site hosted in the country you’re targeting, you can then also alert Google through its Webmaster Central service, that your site is targeting a particular country, thus giving you maximum opportunity for achieving good listings as soon as possible.

As a specialist, I subscribe to various paid-for keyword research tools, but I find the tool I use most often, and the one that is completely free, is the Google Keyword Tool External. This tool has been around a few years, and is intended to assist AdWords advertisers with their keyword research – hence you being able to view estimated CPC (Cost Per Click) for each phrase.

The way I use the tool most often is to set the results to Exact Match, which gives me an indication of how many times the exact phrase featured was searched for in a recent month in Google. I also arrange the results such that I’m viewing them in order of popularity – generally for Local Search Volume in the UK – and thus get an idea of which are the popular phrases to be targeting with my SEO efforts.

The basic premise is that the guys want to make a film based on a pretty much forgotten Jules Verne story, Clovis Dardentor. They’ve set themselves a budget of £1 million to make the film, and wish it to be self-financed. In order to get such a large sum together, they’ve come up with the idea of selling some of the end credits to the film at £1 / $2 per credit.

While this isn’t an especially original idea – low budget filmmakers have been sourcing finance through approaching wealthy donors for many years, with an Exec Producer of somesuch credit as the reward, and many arts and sports performances are funded at least partly through donations in exchange for a listing in the programme – the way they’re promoting it is perfect for the age of social media.

Their website allows you to both signup to get a credit, plus advertise your own site through their pixel wall (remember the media buzz surrounding www.milliondollarhomepage.com and its creator, Alex Tew, a few years ago?) for a larger donation to the funding of the film.

Where they’ve really managed to tap into the zeitgeist, though, is by recruiting UberTwitterer Stephen Fry, both to appear in their film and promote it through his regular tweets and blog posts. Stephen Fry is well-known for his love of technology and microblogging, plus he’s an accomplished and famous actor, so he was obviously the perfect fit for this project. Another coup is in enlisting the help of Sir Ian McKellen and Joanna Lumley – not previously especially associated with tech fads, but obviously both famous and helpful for promotional purposes.

So the Buyacredit boys have simultaneously made use of 2 of the hot issues of our age – celebrities and Twitter – and bundled them together with a timeless universal desire for fame and recognition.

Could it be repeated? Well, there were countless pixel advertising sites that set up in the wake of Million Dollar Homepage, quite a number of which made good money, so I’d say there is certainly mileage in this concept. Indeed, I can see it being extended and merged with the Exec Producer idea, such that people could pay a larger sum in order to come on board a film production and be taught on the job, whilst at the same time being given that particular credit. (ie working alongside the actual member of the production team whose credit they will share).

For now, though, I simply commend the people behind Buyacredit.com for a brilliant piece of promotion and internet marketing.