Stephen D. Gross

Do you know the top SEO technique?

Backlinks are commonly ranked in the top 5 in terms of most important steps for ranking your website or webpage on the front page of search engine results.  So what are the top three backlink criteria for using this critical factor for getting moved up on the SEO ladder?

1. Keyword Relevancy – Make sure the links back to your page are relevant to the page content.  Anchor text,      Title & Meta Tags, and Content all play a valuable role and should be addressed before creating the link.  Keywords are often compared by the search engines to establish relevancy within the link and search engine result page.

2. High Value Links: Establish your links with pages with a high Page Rank value.  PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (”incoming links“). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page. (Click here for more Page Rank information)

3. Avoid NoFollow – Avoid backlinks with Nofollow in the HTML  attributes.  In a nutshell, nofollows are intended to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring. (Click here for more Nofollow information)

Make sure you or your SEO professional understands and implements a strong Backlink practice when getting your website or webpage ranked in the search engines.  Remember quality of backlinks often trumps quantity when getting ranked high in search engine results.

Having trouble with backlinks?  Leave a comment.

Provided by Brookstone Marketing Group

We have been involved with Online Marketing for over 15 years and have seen the dramatic effects on business in general by search engines like AltaVista, Excite, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and of course Google.

However, in our recent blog post, we talked about the seismic changes occurring as a result of social marketing.  To reiterate, the Social Media Marketing channels have risen to the top of consumer confidence and purchasing decisions.  Only word of mouth ranks above Social Marketing in consumer confidence.

So who are the slowest adopters into these rapidly expanding marketing channels?  Yet again, like many past opportunities, small business is trailing far behind in implementing a solid social marketing strategy.  Even worse are the multi-location and franchisers and franchisees.

A strong solid social marketing strategy combined with strong brand and brand awareness is becoming paramount among the soon to be top performers in any business.  Losing control of your message and brand identity can and will cause a heavy burden when attempting to correct or turn around the negativety imposed at a later date.

Most major social marketing outlets offer the ability to brand your business.  Youtube, Twitter, Wordpress, and others offer your business the opportunity to present a common brand.   Smart business strategists are rapidly understanding how to use  online outlets to forward and spread their message and brand in a unified and common approach.

Many large franchisers, institutions, and firms are contractually demanding their franchisees, license holders, and or agents subscribe to a corporate level branding and messaging campaign. Many are even prohibiting the use of individual web pages, marketing campaigns, and content submission.

The window for small business to implement a strong message and brand within the social media marketing platform is wide open!  However we suspect, like many other open marketing opportunities in the past, this low or no cost window might start closing within 1-2 years.

Visit Brookstone Marketing Group, click here.