1.)  Find a student’s personal webpage on an .edu site and convince him to link to your site.  Offer him an incentive to link to your site.  College students are poor, so offer him a little compensation for the link, and he’ll gladly put up the link of your choice :)  (Make sure to use custom anchor texd!)

2.)  If your site or company provides a service or product, make a page especially for university sites.  Offer a small discount or coupon code on this page for universities only.  Write a press release or pitch this page to your current university customers or potential ones.  Chances are, they’ll link to the page for the small discount :).

Just a few ideas so you can add 2-3 of those .edu links to your link report each month

He couldn’t have explained it better.  In fact he explained it better rapping than many have in writing.

What is PR? PR stands for PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of measuring a page’s (not a site) rank. On a scale of 0 - 10, with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, everyone strove to have the PR of their pages as high as possible. So getting a link from a PR 8 page to your PR 2 page would do great wonders for it in a few weeks. With that in consideration, webmasters and link builders were offering PR 8 pages thousands of dollars a month for a link to their site. However, Google quickly caught on and decided not to give PR so much weight as it previously did because the ease of acquiring high PR links.  Unfortunately, many SEO Consultants, Link Builders, and webmasters are still a little behind and haven’t quite caught on yet. I still often see many seeking links restricting their link qualifications to “PR 4 links and above.” What matters today is relevance, not PR. In fact, I don’t even incorporate a page’s PR when determining its value. Instead, I examine age, # of backlinks, type of backlinks, content, and relevancy. These are the factors that count, not that little green bar in the Google toolbar. If I find a PR 0 page to be more relevant than a PR 4 page, then I’ll certainly aim for the PR 0 page.  The goal with search engines is to appear as natural as possible (that’s what it’s called “organic” or “natural” rankings, not “paid”).  It doesn’t look too natural for a PR 8 page linking to a PR 3 page unless there’s good reason.

PageRank means very little today. It still contains somewhat of a summary of a page’s rank and worth, however, not enough to be taken into consideration as a page’s link value. Here’s a great article on that talks more about the decreasing value of pagerank.

SEM is a whole separate world apart from SEO and Link Building.  It’s an industry in itself, with its own proper strategies and techniques.  You can’t simply buy your way to the top ad listings.  Google has a ranking system and looks for specific factors in your ad.  Someone who paid less than you but composed a better ad will rank higher.

PPC Marketing is actually how I was introduced to this world of online marketing.  I started with Google’s PPC Program, Adwords. Trying to entice searchers to click on ads and to achieve a conversion can be a daunting task.  You have to persuade searchers to click on your ads, then out of the ones that do click on your ads, you have to persuade them to fill out a form or make a purchase.  However, there are experts that achieve great success with such campaigns.

Do you need it?  In my opinion, I think focusing on just SEO and the organic rankings should be the primary focus of any business’s online marketing efforts.  It’s free and can bring much more traffic than SEM in my opinion.  However, if you were to utilize both methods successfully, then you would absolutely dominate the competition.  Searchers using your targeted keywords will only see listings for your business on both the organic (left) and paid (right) listings.

If you decide to go the SEM route, make sure you educate yourself in the industry before you jump in.  You can easily and quickly spend a lot of money with no results.  Be sure to seek an expert or thoroughly study the industry before begin a PPC campaign.

Proper SEO can be implemented with in just a few months depending on the size of your site.  Creating your site in a SEO friendly manner, providing ideal, optimized pages, tags, and content need only to be done once so long as it’s done well.

Proper Link Building on the other hand, can be a very time-consuming process.  In fact, it’s an on-going process.  Links don’t come in a matter of weeks.  The effects of excellent Link Building may not be seen for 3-12 months.  It can take months to plan, develop, and launch a link bait, media, or publicity campaign that can attract you thousands of links.  It can take months to develop relationships with top journalists and editors and persuade them to read over a press release.  It can take months to write articles or develop media that will attract links.  It can take months for your site to get heard.  Link Building is a process that must be continually carried on.

Whether you decide to take it on yourself, bring it in house, or outsource it, ensure that you take on the method which will attract you the most links in the long-run.  One of the first methods I learned to do Link Building was simply finding relevant sites, emailing them, and offering them monetary compensation for a link.  This is only ONE Link Building method, and in fact, has become one of the least used by top Link Builders today.  It is extremely time consuming, and a large percentage of the website owners have been hassled enough by link request emails that they usually just ignore them.  I’m not saying that it doesn’t work at all and shouldn’t be applied, but I’d rather spend 3 hours on composing an excellent piece of material that I can distribute freely to the public that’ll attract links, as opposed to spending 3 hours finding sites to email and beg for a link.  As I said earlier, make sure your Link Building campaign is one that will entice people to link to you.

Link Building is not a quick process and you won’t see the results in the immediate future.  Furthermore, it is critical to achieving top rankings.  The top ranked sites have thousands, millions of links to their sites.  Without proper Link Building, consider your site along with the rest of those struggling to get to the top.  Link Building is a necessary component to reaching visibility at the top of the search engine rankings.

If you have a website, it is critical that you are found in search engines.  You must ensure that you website can be found and read by search engines.  Simply using free or cheap “do it yourself site building” software isn’t going to cut it.  In fact, it’ll probably hurt your website because these sites tend to be very difficult for search engines to crawl and read.  Search engine spiders are just like users and want to find information as easily as possible.  SEO for your site is an absolute necessity if you’re looking for online exposure.  SEO will get your website in front of targeted traffic, in front of the people searching for your business and services.

Whether you decide to do it yourself, or outsource it to an expert, SEO is necessary if you’re looking to launch a website.  Just making a website and placing it online will do nothing if no one can find it.  Educate yourself on the subject.  There is an incredible amount of information and resources just like this blog available on the web to help you perform the proper optimization of your site for search engines.  Familiarize yourself with SEO and learn how you can apply it to your business.

Link Building is probably the most critical factor in your SEO strategy. It is a process towards building your long-term success in the search engines. Small factors will change here and there when search engines update their search algorithms. However, one thing’s for sure is that successful link building will always remain a significant factor in the eyes of search engines. If you have a quality link profile, your search rankings will for the most part hold well in the search engines and rank well through search engine’s constant algorithm changes and updates.

How does it work? What’s it all about? The concept is simple, the more sites that link to your website, the more significance search engines grant to your site. If you have a site talking about dogs, and thousands of sites about dogs link to your site, Google thinks, “Wow, all these dog sites link to this site, this must be an important site about dogs, so we need to rank it high for people looking for information about dogs.” That’s the image you want to portray to search engines with your link profile. A site about cars that links to a site about dogs doesn’t do anything for the dog site. Take a look at the bubble map below:

The Dogs Site is the center bubble, and the smaller bubbles are the type of sites that link to the center bubble. Those are the type of sites you want to acquire links from. This is the image you want to illustrate to search engines. With this image, search engines will see your site as a trusted authority on dogs and as a result, grant it high rank.

Link Building is comparable to an online publicity campaign. The goal is to establish online brand awareness so that sites are compelled to link to your site. It is clearly an integral part in the marketing process of one’s web site. The next few posts will discuss common Link Building strategies.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to SEOmoz.org, “is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.” For those of you who are still lost, in summary, SEO is the process of organizing a site’s content, architecture, and internal and external structure and profile so that the site ranks higher in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, etc.) for specific keywords (the words searches type in search engines to find the information they’re looking for). I hope I explained SEO as best as possible so that even those claiming to be non-tech, non-Internet savvy can understand.

Why is SEO important? Well, the majority of web traffic is driven by the major search engines, which include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL, and Ask.com. If you’re not listed in the first few pages for your keywords, then you’re pretty much missing out on most Internet traffic. In fact, over 80% of searchers don’t even go past the first page. So needless to say, if you’re not on the first page (first 10 results), then you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.

See, this is how it works. Search Engines are like huge library or encyclopedia. When you enter keywords in the search query box of Google, you’re not searching the Internet for information. Instead, you’re searching Google’s database of information. Google and all other search engines have these little things called spiders (some people call it robots) which constantly crawl the Web for more information to add to the database. Each search engine has its own unique search algorithm which ranks web sites (although each search engine has different algorithms, they majority of them take into consideration the same factors for ranking a web site). These spiders use these algorithms to determine the importance and rank for each web site. These spiders are extremely smart I should also add.

So those “internal and external aspects” you need to improve are pretty much the same for all search engines. Such aspects include organizing the web site content, design, layout, architecture, coding, and its public Internet profile (it’s image across the Web). To give you an idea about one internal aspect of SEO, imagine the Title Tag. If you view the title tag of the homepage of my blog (www.bphamlinkbuilding.com). If you view the top of the browser where it’s bold, that’s the title tag, and for my blog, it should say “The Link Building Blog - BobbyPham.com.” That title tag is much more informational than if it were just “BobbyPham.com.” There’s more relevance and more information about the site that a search engine can quickly pick up. See, a search engine can more quickly tell that my blog is about “Link Building” than if the title was just “BobbyPham.com.” That’s one of the factors that go into the internal SEO aspect (most SEO experts call this on-page optimization). Thus, it is important to work on and improve these aspects so that you impress the search engine spiders and rank high for your targeted keywords. There are two types of SEO: White Hat and Black Hat. I’ll go into this just to make sure you know the difference and avoid being penalized for using spammy techniques.

White Hat SEO is considered ethical methods and tactics to improve your search rankings. Pretty much, it’s doing SEO the “right” way. Search engines love, love, and love content, especially research-oriented. A news site or research site that gets updated everyday with new content and information is very ideal. Anyhow, White Hat SEO is taking the time to build good content and organizing in a manner which pleases searchers. By pleasing searchers, you’re also satisfying the spiders (imagine the spider as a searcher, that’s what search engines aim to make their spiders operate like). White Hat SEO is the long-term approach to successful search rankings.

Black Hat SEO is considered spammy, unethical methods to improve your search rankings. An old trick that used to work in the early days of search engines was keyword stuffing. Webmasters used to stuff keywords in the white space their website in white text. So users wouldn’t see it, but spiders could. So in the white space of my blog, it would be “link building” all over the place in white text. Of course, this trick doesn’t work anymore. Search engine spiders have gotten extremely smart and detect most Black Hat techniques. But like spam and viruses, spammers will always find a way. Successful Black Hat SEO brings short-term success, but if Google or any other search engine detects any unethical technique being used, your site will be penalized or banned. Google and search engines hate spam.

Well, that’s SEO in a nutshell. I specialize in one particular area of SEO, however, some consider it the most important aspect of SEO. I specialize in Link Building, which is a combination of internal and external aspects. I’ll go more into Link Building in the next post. I hope this post better educates you as to what SEO is.