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Linking for SEO - Tips and Secrets

Some Google History
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.  They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine.

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Links are the highways that Google and other search engines travel in an effort to determine the popularity, relationship and relevancy of every page and website they come across.

Very generally speaking if a website has a large amount of links pointing to it search engines can assume that others will also find that resource to be valuable. Search engines have evolved from simply counting the number of links (They now look at quality of links, originality of content and other trust factors) but this basic idea still exists.

There are two types of links; "external" and "internal"
An internal link is a hyperlink that links to another page on the SAME website.
An external link is a hyperlink that links to another page on a DIFFERENT website.
External Links SEO
Internal Links SEO Internal links will generally make up your navigation, links to your articles and blog posts, and all the pages on your website. An optimized internal link structure helps search engines efficiently index your content and check for updates, along with ranking your pages for the best keywords.

Optimizing your internal link structure includes having proper categories and search friendly content, featuring your best pages by linking to them more, and taking a look at the anchor text of each link.

Anchor text is the visible text that you click in a link. In this example link: Real Estate SEO, the words "Real Estate SEO" are the anchor text. Search engines associate the anchor text of a link with the page the link leads to (In this example our SEO website WorkingTheMagic.com) and will begin ranking our site for those keywords.

External links on your website send visitors to other websites.  External links on other people's websites to yours are called "backlinks" for you, also called incoming links, inward links and inlinks.

To improve rankings in the search engines the key is to get relevant, quality links from respected websites to yours. The more relevant backlinks the better, especially if those backlinks contain the keywords you are trying to rank for in the anchor text like "Seattle real estate" or "Phoenix homes for sale".

I'll cover some effective linking strategies in future posts and for now subscribe to this blog.

Related Posts:
Evaluate Your Google Competition
8 Tips: Online Lead Capture
SEO to Capture a Major Metro

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Blidget Your Blog in 2 minutes

A Blidget is a widget that displays your blog (Example below to the left). As ridiculous as that is to say Blidgets are a simple - and free - way to drive additional readers to your blog and make it more 'sticky'.

You can make a custom Blidget for your blog in minutes and then share or embed your Blidget on as many websites as you want. Once it's setup your Blidget's views, clicks and subscriptions are all tracked for your use.


5 steps to making a Blidget for your blog

Step 1 of 5: Visit the Make Blidget page at Widgetbox. I've taken a screenshot of the page shown below. Once there, enter in your Blog URL (aka your blog web address) and click "Continue".

Step 2 of 5: Customize the size, color, style, title and caption for your Blidget as much or as little as you like.

Don't worry too much about making it prefect if you can't decide, you can easily change these features at any time in the future.
Step 3 of 5: Chose an image that will appear at the top of your Blidget or enter in the address of an image already on the web.

Add relevant tags and description for your blidget for others to find. Other visitors may want to embed your Blidget on their website, always good!

Click "Publish Blidget" when done.
Step 4 of 5: Almost there. If your Blidget looks good click the big green "Get Widget" button.
Step 5 of 5: Chose from Flash or Javascript code, or from one of the optimized selections for all different types of blogging platforms. Flash seems to work best for ActiveRain posts. Click "Copy".

Now paste the code in blog posts, along your blog navigation bar, on your other blogs or websites, wherever you want your new Blidget to show up!

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Free SEO Coaching Offer

Starting today we're offering one FREE month - no strings attached - of our Silver Level SEO Coaching ($500 value) to any real estate professional who completes our SEO Questionnaire. If you are interested in finding out what it takes to effectively compete online in your market and begin implementing our proven strategies then this is an offer you can't pass up. Limited spots available so sign up now.


About The Coaching Program
  • 1-on-1 Consultations
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Keyword Research and Recommendations
  • Site Audit & Analysis
  • Ranking Report for Relevant Keywords
  • SEO Strategies Updates
  • Design and Content Recommendations
  • Take the Questionnaire

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