Beginning early this year, certain search engine made some changes to their search ranking, in the hope of furnishing it’s search users better results, on official google blog it is estimated 11.8% search results will be affected by this update, say it another way, almost 12% of google search results are useless or of low quality. The update was initiated more than a year ago, no wonder I saw a few of my keywords’ ranks dropped like a rock, on the other hand almost all keywords promoted by contextual links are not affected, a few of these keywords ranked better than ever, it’s almost a sure thing that plain link building loses all it’s attraction, at least in the eye of google.
So what exactly is linking campaign the old way? There are a lot of SEO company out there are doing this, they will get links from any websites which accept adding links, these websites will only be updated when new links are being added, it’s safe to assume all of them are trash, we call these sites link spamming sites. The latest google update will definitely downgrade most if not all of these sites, all the links on those websites will have the same fate.
Maybe a few examples will make it clear. In the very beginning, I didn’t know better, I started with this keyword, V Bridle Tow Chain, of course with old way of link building, lately I figured that every site in the campaign had way too many links, worst yet, those sites had no content at all. In the beginning, the ranking of the keyword in question rise pretty fast, finally the rank improved a lot, this was the case until google made the change. Here is another keyword, chain puller , we promoted this keyword with articles and blog posts, almost no plain links, the rank for this keyword is making me real happy. Now contextual links win the battle, then what? Actually this is all about content, when you create unique and quality content, not only people will love to read your stuff, so do the search engines. You may think there are already too many blogs out there, it’s not true, there will never be too many good blogs, take a look at this blog, best smartphones 2011 , I didn’t put too much effort into it from start, but I never stopped posting, now it can even rank the highly competitive keywords. Now you can see, quality blog marketing is much better than plain link building. Now imagine you have your own blog network, for instance Cluster Hook, then it will be easier to do article marketing.
Remember content is king, you just need to create content, get people to enjoy and share your stuff, promote your business with the content, this strategy will prevail in short or long term. Persistence and patience are the keys to success, nothing will automatically improve overnight, be it your business or search rankings, keep writing, publishing, sharing and creating, you will see the day of success. Ezine is one of the best article directories out there, google will index a new article on ezine promptly, popular blogs will get your post indexed as soon as you post it, let look at some aticles or posts which are published and indexed, for example C Clamp, nice writing, good content, published on popular site, all these points make it perfect for SEO.
We’re not finished yet, please remeber, if you don’t take social media account, you’re lost. For wordpress blogs, I recommend twitter tools, sign up for a twitter account and create a new application, link your blog to twitter, then every new post on your blog will show up in your twitter page, it’s simple and elegant, it’s a big loss if you don’t use this tool.