The Biggest SEO Mistake - Why You Don't Rank NO 1

Marketing
1

From all (small and big) of my SEO clients I can see that they don’t use they brain at all when setting linking campaigns.

They learned basic SEO theory that is written everywhere and that tells you to make keyword reach titles, H tags, anchor texts.
Then they just try to follow all those steps without thinking or doing any experiments.

Here I want to talk about Natural Link Building.

But mostly about anchor text - one of important SEO elements that can give you negative SEO score if is not done properly.

In one sentence - anchor text need to look natural!
You can not have 99% of links coming to your site with your keyword as that is not natural.

I’m not talking here about some long tail keywords with low competition where you could easily rank with few links here and there and few months domain age, but about top terms that are making big money.
Game is a little bit different in this case.

What I see when small clients are submitting project to us is that they submit just main and/or long tail keywords.
Big clients did the same in past when were using cheap outsourced link building, then we need to fix all that in our monthly SEO service.

Sit down and think how would your anchors look like if you have really good site, with top quality content written by top expert in your field.
Look around how others on internet link to some sites when they mention it on their sites, on forums, on social sites.
Analyze first page of google for your competitors and what they use in anchor and in what percentage (use majesticseo,ahrefs or opensiteexplorer).

You will see big number of anchors like:

  • this page
  • here
  • this
  • visit here
  • full URL as anchor
  • domain name as anchor
  • company name
  • misspelled company name!

Think about this next time when you are ordering some link building service.

Build property with main keyword in title, high keyword density article with over 700 words, few images that have name of image file with keyword (keyword-here.jpg, keywordhere.jpg)…linking from such page with anchor “here” or any other random (non keyword text) is passing link from relative content and looks very natural in eyes of google.

Your site mentioned on other sites without link (just domain name or url without link) is also important factor.
Look how many times Facebeook, Amazon, Youtube are mentioned without linking to it.
What about your site name?

This is just small part of big SEO puzzle.
Still you need to think, analyze and do experiments
about onpage SEO, how frequently to build links and in what volume, links from main site language sites vs foreign languages sites and anchors…etc…etc.

Hope this will help to those of you who are selling SEO services or promoting your personal sites.

Cheers,
Nikola

2

About the keyword density: wouldn’t it be better if we just remembered that there are limits as to how many keywords we can put in a single page of content?

About the anchor texts: I do see a lot of those “click here” and “go to this page” anchors all over the Net. Those sites that are really visible on the search results have anchors that are related to the services that they deliver.

3

Just think “what is natural”…if you have blog and want to write one article about some subject and mention there few good sources, would you count any word when writing ?

4

Good point. I wouldn’t. But I would make sure that it doesn’t look like it’s been made to game search engines. Let’s say you’re writing about an auto dealership business. I wouldn’t put in too much “<name of place> car dealerships” if I can use pronouns to describe them instead.

5

It’s an interesting point, certainly. I agree that “natural” backlinks will have a huge variety of link text, because it’s been created by loads of different authors of different standards for different purposes in different contexts. (Hence why if you google “click here” the first result is the download page for Adobe Reader, because of the huge number of dopey webmasters who have put “To download Adobe Reader, click here” on their sites). Yes, if your links always use exactly the same keyword-rich link text then that is going to look suspicious.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that you should deliberately sabotage your link building by using sub-optimal link text. When trying to build links, you need to focus on real people, so your main aim should be to drop links that will entice people (for whom your site is relevant) to click on them. People first, Google second. You don’t want to sacrifice real visitors to impress Googlebot, because the chances are the Gb won’t be impressed anyway. And remember that if your link is on a page that few real people are likely to look at and see your link as relevant, it’s unlikely Google will give that link very much credit.

Yes, do vary your link text - bear in mind the context and the site you’re trying to get your links on, you’ll almost certainly find that different words and phrases look more or less appropriate in different places, so use whatever fits best at that time. But do that for the people who will be seeing those links, not for Google.

Off Topic:

It’s like someone I knew who was designing a website that featured Edinburgh, and he deliberately included several common misspellings of Edinburgh so that when people typed ‘Edinborough’ etc into Google he would come out top because he was one of very few sites to include that spelling. The strategy didn’t work too well on the basis that most people could spell Edinburgh, and where people couldn’t, Google would helpfully work out what they probably meant to type and show them the results for the correct spelling first…

6

Yeah i agree with your point , but i have one question. if we given the anchor text this page

  • here
  • this
  • visit here etc. here we wont target the keywords. So how can you tell? keywords will improve. because we are not given the anchor text for keywords.
7

My question is :

These days, how can you actually find out what works. Is it this or that. Correct me if I am wrong…It can take quite some time especially on competitive keywords to perform SEO and see results. So to do a completely fair experiment you have to

1: Create a site with some basic SEO. WAIT
2: Do 1 form of SEO on your site
3: Wait
4: Wait
5: Do another form of SEO on your site
6: Wait
7: Wait
8: Google has changed something so all the above carries less weight, so your back to square one.

I am getting to the point where it is absolutely useless to stress about SEO. Follow the guidelines, do the things that need to be done, don’t try and cheat the system and just hope for the best, because all the effort you’ve put in now, in the past or years ago will all be rendered useless at some point in time.

It’s an unfair place Google has put us all in, we are constantly jumping through hoops. Some form of standard should be set, every industry has some standard. I completely understand google are tying to make a better system but at some point a whole host of things should be standardised and decent folk who have worked hard and proper on their site should not be penalised with the next change.

Are they just bolting things on to a system all the time instead of working to set of specifications, do they not sit down and brainstorm all the tricks and if we do this or if we do that. Why, well I believe it’s because they never ever want anyone to guess what they do but…Imagine Coca Cola kept changing the recipe just to keep it secret.

I for one want a fairer system, a system that doesn’t change so many bloody times so we’re all kept guessing for guessing sake. Google are trying to create the best results to the users whilst doing this they are alienating or at least I feel all the people that are trying to make a better site and I would happily abandon them for this one reason…

When does it stop???Surely they should be there by now?? It’s like an API, you don’t drastically change an API so it doesn’t work anymore…

Anyway. I’m rambling on, but correct me if I am wrong as I am no expert, I am just going on the last 9months of SEO hell…

8

Well yes, that’s kind of the point. Google doesn’t want you to be spending massive amounts of time and energy on SEO, particularly on off-page SEO. Google doesn’t want you to worry about link building, about optimal link text and placement, or any of that. It just makes their job more difficult. Sure, they want you to focus on semantic coding, alt text, titles and meta descriptions, because those all help to show what the page is about.

When Google sees 100 links pointing to you site, it wants to know that those 100 links have been put there by the website authors as a genuine recommendation for visitors to look at your site. It wants to know the sites that are genuinely the most popular, not those that have put the most effort into link building.

Any time rules become set in stone, they become easier for people to subvert. That’s why Google keeps changing its algorithm – to refine it, to improve it, and to neutralise the dodgy practices that have developed. If they didn’t, the spammers and scammers would win through very quickly and genuine site owners, particularly small site owners, would be relegated to page 100+. Google isn’t in the busines to make life easy for webmasters. Google’s customers are searchers, and the ultimate goal is to give every searcher the best results for whatever they’ve searched for.

9

Exactly, but they’ve got so many things wrong.

The whole idea of link building, which I, Again, personally think was/is a HUGE factor. I analyzed one of my competitors that suddenly appeared on page 1 and was there for 3-5 months. They have since dropped after this last update to page 2. I had been waiting for it for a long time. The reason they reached page one was because of a huge amount of CRAP backlinks.

Anyway.

Quality is what we are looking for and google keep changing things because they really still aren’t sure how you measure quality. Is it links, is it this is it that?? Make up your mind as to how you do it. As I and you mentioned, just build what you think is a quality site and be done with it, don’t try and fool google or anyone else into thinking your site is quality.

Blog backlinks, even though we all search for them should be banned. Just because I have 1 million backlinks from blog posts does not mean I have a quality site, just because I have 1 million nofollow backlinks doesn’t make my site any less quality. Natural links within context whether dofollow or not are the only thing that should really count and even that can be cheated so we are back to square 1. How do we/they gauge quality.

Whilst google are trying to find out how you measure quality and change this and that, honest folk are suffering. It’s fair enough that the people who try to build things around the SEO criteria suffer but it effects everyone in some small way and at some point in time. Maybe not this update, but you wait until the next or the next or the next where they decide to change things ONCE again.

~They are a clever bunch of people and you would think they would have come up with something that can actually measure a quality site, set that as a certain standard and work things around/into that.

One of their previous updates was to bring fresh information to the user. I search on relevant/recent topics only to be presented with information that is 2years old 1st in the result.

Enough Said.