March 4th, 2010 by Mike

Getting your business listed at or near the top of Google’s search results can make or break a company – you might assume that this prime real estate comes at a price, and is only the preserve of the most affluent companies, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Actually Google’s page ranking is designed to give prominence based on relevance – regardless of your company size or turnover! – this relevance based system means that achieving a high page ranking in Google can be a matter of careful implementation of search engine optimisation and link building strategies – but what exactly is link building and how can it support effective SEO?

Link building is a pivotal aspect of ‘off-page’ SEO, which is basically all of the optimization techniques that you employ that doesn’t include you on-page content – remember, for successful search engine optimisation you need to think out side of the box, i.e. outside of your website content! In fact link building is so important; that before embarking on a link building campaign you should be 100% aware of your link building strategies, with a view to creating the maximum in traffic to your website (which is one of the criteria that Google will use to rank your page.)

Step 1: Strategise

Like all good business practice, your SEO campaign will benefit from some thorough planning, which should focus on the following key areas:

Firstly you should workout exactly what keywords you need to target; and which will be most effective in drawing traffic towards your site; luckily the internet is very helpful when it comes to keyword research and therefore choosing keywords shouldn’t be too difficult – remember when choosing keywords to always keep your goals in mind, as keywords that are not relevant to your business model will not be effective!

Step 2: Content is King

Once you’ve developed a thorough keyword strategy you’ll need some high calibre content– this be unique copy that seeks to inform as well as optimize; some great ideas for content include blogs, articles or surveys, in fact content creation is so important, why not be a little creative? Perhaps you could produce videos or even run competitions, that’s the beauty of the internet – the possibilities are endless!

Throughout all of your content creation activities you should always ensure that you have quality as a main concern – if it was just as simple as keyword density then Google would be awash with spam pages, as it stands Google is pretty good at ensuring relevance and quality of its prominent pages, so if you do let your quality slip, your page ranking may suffer.

Step 3: Implementation: Social Media Marketing and Beyond

Once you’ve got a good stock of perfectly engineered content all that’s left for you to do is to implement; remember – whilst quality should always be a main concern (for your reputation as well as your page rank!) you should cast your net as far as possible – in simple terms, the more good quality, relevant sites that link to your web pages, the better your page rank! This means that you should research all the potential avenues available for implementation from social media optimisation and networking – to beyond!