Google and SEO: The Real Story
The secret to better rankings and more traffic is being (or looking like) the cool guy in your neighbourhood.
The Neighbourhood
Search engines build their results based upon relevance. Your use of keywords is important, read How To Dial In Your Keywords, but the other major contributing factor is whether the search engine has determined that you are a part of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is all of the related sites to a search topic. A search engine will find out whether you have links from other popular sites within a neighbourhood and this will greatly influence your search ranking.
How to get into the Neighbourhood
Think of the neighbourhood as different ares in town. You need to show the search engines as many reasons as you can that you are a part of that area. The proof that you are in the neighbourhood is how many other relevant sites have links to you (the more popular the better).
This works well for internet marketers because not only does having links within the neighbourhood increase search rankings but it also builds natural traffic from people visiting other sites in the neighbourhood. We need to recognise the sites in our target neighbourhood and leave our mark on them in any way we can.
Cool By Association
Being in the neighbourhood is good but if all your friends are losers, (sites with no traffic) then you wont be cool either. Just like when the popular kid at school hangs out with you, if a popular website links to you, then your ‘cool factor’ goes up.
The ultimate is when the most popular site within your neighbourhood links to you. This is like William Shatner talking to you at a Star Trek convention. An online example would be the most popular blog in your niche linking to your page. Not only does this give you a lot of traffic from that site but also google recognizes your new coolness and increases your search ranking.
To learn how to really establish yourself in the neighbourhood check out the Web Traffic: The Essential 10 Step Checklist post.
Any More ideas?
Hey Tim.. Nice post, I have got couple of questions to ask..
1. Why will my competitors link me in the first place, when they also know that it might harm them?
2. Didnt neighborhood mean sites which are hosted on the same server or links which are placed around my link on a third party site?
Reply
admin Reply:
April 7th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
1: The best idea is to spend your time generating links from complimentary websites instead of direct competitors. However, if you comment on direct competitors blogs and a link is created back to your site they usually wont bother removing it. I think you will also be surprised at how open the sites are in sharing traffic. Assuming your site has good content it is a good idea to link to other good sites. It adds more value to your readers if you link them to another blog post with some great information. However if you are seling a product I wouldn’t reccomend informing your visitors where they can find a nother similar product so you have a good point there.
2. The term neighbourhood is used to describe an online segment. For example car dealer sites, vehicle review sites and car insurance sites are all within the wider Online Automotive Neighbourhood. If you are an Automotive then these sites linking to you will be beneficial.
Reply
Hi Tim,
Nicely and clearly written.
I think good content is becoming more important than links overtime. Links still have some value, but good content is key. Everyone needs to work on their SEO.
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Tim Scullin Reply:
April 11th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Thanks for the comment Gordie. Yeah getting links is too easy so the quality of the links is the key thing, but if your SEO sucks then they wont help either.
Reply
Bronson Reply:
May 2nd, 2009 at 6:18 pm
I have to agree that when it comes to inbound links and link building you gotta keep it clean and go for quality over quantity.
Take care of your backlinks and they will take care of you.
Reply
Tim Scullin Reply:
May 5th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Totally agree, too many people sell out on cheap backlinks but you will see as time goes on, sites with less backlinks sometimes 10 or 100 times less will win! Simply because they are relevant to the search topic. Google doesn’t like being tricked..
Bronson Reply:
May 5th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Absolutely, even in hypercompetitive industries it's possible to get solid page one rankings for nightmare keywords with a decent link profile comprised more of quality than quantity.
[...] This post was Twitted by wendytarr – Real-url.org [...]
Cool and good, there may be actually some good points on that post some of my friends will dsicover this relevant, will send them a traffic, many thanks. Fantatic blog site! Really good stuff below. Thanks
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