Want links? Google says be interesting
Google's Maile Ohye concluded Link Week with a tutorial on
inbound links. It says basically what SEO experts have been saying
for years: content and inbound links are most important, and in
that order.
Just because it's old news doesn't mean it's bad news. Google's
had a real history of silence on the SEO side of things, and
experts were often left to theorize and test-and worse, try to
game. Google sent a pretty loud signal this time last year by
hitting the PageRanks of paid directories, a move seeming to
confirm basic white-hat SEO tactics.
In her post, Ohye extols the virtues of naturally gained, editorial
inbound links and directly denounces links appear "spammy," or not
"merit-based."
"One of the strongest ranking factors is my site's content.
Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources --
however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google
is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to
contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.
"Given the user's query, over 200 signals (including the analysis
of the site's content and inbound links as mentioned above) are
applied to return the most relevant results to the user."
Ohye then offered four bullet points on how to earn merit-based
links, paraphrased below:
• Start a site-related blog, writing or video, research or
entertainment.
• Be interesting. Be a teacher. (Hey, that should be a recruitment
slogan for a College of Education somewhere! I'll sell it to ya
for the bargain price of $500,000-if a private school, just
$10,000, since as a non-government institution you can't just
print the money you need.)
• Participate in the community surrounding your industry-social
media, blog comments, user reviews.
• Provide useful products or services.
In short: content, content, content, a little participation, and
the links will come.
Source: www.WebProNews.com
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