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I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a quality SEO company that focuses primarily on building links on high quality sites?
So many of the SEO firms are too slick with their sales people and content analysis and research and reports & B.S.
What I'd like is an honest company who will simply help me acquire high quality links.
Any SEO companies out there that can help???
Most SEO companies are also way too expensive. I'm looking for quality @ a value. Can anyone help?
I agree that you need to have deep pockets for quality SEO - and even then, I believe that no one can do it better than you with enough time & resources.
Great content that gets others to link to you from high authority sites.
Make sure you have clean code on your site.
Use H1 tags where appropriate.
People debate whether meta tags matter or not, but they certainly don't hurt.
Create a blog and write unique content about your industry with quality writing.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for your response. I think that makes a lot of sense.
I agree that it is a different story if you have been penalized, but I would try to find out if that is the true reason as to why you have been penalized. It very well may be ... but what else have you been doing that may have caused the problem? Have you hired anyone to get you links recently?
I find that a 20% nofollow rate is good also. You can also try linking in those blog posts to authority sites, such as wikipedia and other .edu sites so that you are not the only page being linked to. It also helps to provide valueable sources that way to the readers.
I agree with EGOL - it is not worth the resources to remove them and most likely they are not hurting your site.These types of links will become inevitable as your site grows.
Facebook, in most cases, reads this automatically anyway, so it's usually not necessary.
The best way to check is by sharing one of our pages on facebook and seeing if the correct Title, description, and image comes up.
In some cases, where you want a specific image to always show or want to show a specific title or description every time, you can use the facebook OG tags to choose what Facebook will show on their site when a user shares your page.
As far as becoming a part of the FB social graph, there is not enough info on it yet as far as I know, but it is possible that in the future, it will give you better exposure w/ facebook if you have their tags installed, in case they choose to expand the functionality of these tags within their own network. But again, most likely, they will be able to extract the necessary info automatically without requiring the use of their tags.
Good answer.
The difficulty for me has been finding guest blog posts. We have some of the best writers in the jewelry, wedding, & fashion industries. But even so, we are having trouble finding blogs that will respond to our queries.
Do you know of any good services that will take on the recruitment process for us?
We all get them ... spam blog comments. People do it to get link value back to their site.
Recently, someone approached me to do this for our site but on niche sites that are related to our content and to provide good valueable comments within a blog post of about 100 words each, and genuinely try to engage.They also were talking about finding blogs that have "follow" links in their comments space, since most do not.
I still declined it because it is somewhat 'grey-hat' rather than 'white-hat' linking, and we want to be above-board on everything.
Although we personally declined this approach, I'm curious your thoughts though on whether gaining links from blog comments from related, niche sites is a good idea.
Personally, I'd rather get a link to a guest post than provide a guest post, because as you said it's more reciprocal that way. But ... I think there's still value in it, because it's not just a link by itself on a links page, it's within valuable and diverse content, so I believe it would still provide good value overall.
Does PR still work?
I have sites that have PR3 and get almost no traffic and sites that are PR1 and get thousands of uniques per month.
My PR on my main sites haven't moved for about 7 years, even though we've grown significantly.
I know lots of you are going to jump in with get the MOZ toolbar, which I already have done, and I agree, it's great ...
But can anyone tell me about what's going on with Google PR?
Is it still active? Or has Google abandoned? I noticed that the Google toolbar is not even available for Google Chrome. That should say something ...
Cameron,
If you can obtain those links and have it appear natural on quality relevant sites, it is as good as a guest post. Just be careful and choose wisely. It works, no matter what anyone tells you. Let's be honest here.
How good is a link from a forum? Do you guys know of any forums in the shopping, jewelry, wedding, or fashion industry that accepts links within their signature or within the post?
I know some forums are very strict about this and others allow you to add your link as an incentive to post on their forums.
Generally, how effective is this in your opinion and any good recommendations of quality forums?
agreed. most of these so-called "ranking sites" have affiliate relationships involved.
Not really. The reason is that know one knows your business better than you and very few will take the care that it requires to build the right campaign. Although the "right" link building company is probably out there, it is much better to build links organically by providing good links and good content.
At the same time, there are a lot of resources you can try that will cost less as well, such as getting listed on aboutus.org and asking for a "follow" link once you've improved your page.
Getting listed on dmoz.org (almost impossible it seems)
Building blog content and applying for guest blogging positions
Creating unique articles to submit to article sites (however, stay away from automated submissions and create 1 unique article per domain that you submit to).
Try free directories.
Thanks, EGOL. That confirms what I'm thinking.
You mentioned image captions. I don't normally use them - do they help? I'm assuming this is for blog posts if its captions?
How hard is it to grab expired domains? I have my eye on a domain that is expiring in 3 days, but I don't think it's quite that simple. Doesn't it go through months of waiting to become available?
Is there an easy way to grab domains that are set to expire? Are the services that offer this type of service good? And who do you guys recommend?
I have heard it's best to have 400+ words of content for strong SEO per page. I believe this is true for the most.
I have a project in mind, however, that I am considering doing 100-200 words of content per page. This is for a glossary of terms for my industry, where I have a unique page for each term that describes what that term means w/ 1 image and a few links to related products.
Is having just 100-200 words going to be enough? Each page will still be unique, original content.
Or is it best to really try for longer articles?
In other words, is there a general rule for # of words per page for search engines to see the page as valuable and unique and to give it good ranking?
If you go to the directory itself and navigate to a category, then click submit on the right it gives you an option for a free submission. I had the same issue myself until I realized that.
thanks! I'll give that a try! we do have several blogs!
Just updated our "About Us" page. Thank you for sharing that. I believe that will help significantly!
If anyone is curious to see it, it is here: http://www.aboutus.org/ApplesOfGold.com
true. thank you for the response!
Well, I'm thankful that I submitted my main website about 10 years ago or so when it was a lot cheaper! And that has remained in there.
I was considering submitting another site, but the other site is not a money-maker at this point, and is more of a personal hobby to some degree, so not worth the fee. If it was $69 like before, I may have considered, and definitely it was still PR6.
Wondering when and why it went to PR4.
Clearly, we see that high authority directories like Dmoz.Org are effective, even if this big monster is practically dead because of how unresponsive it is.
What about other free directories? Is it worth obtaining as many listings as possible in the free directories? what about the paid ones? Is this still good SEO strategy if the directories have at least a PR3-4 or many cases higher?
I'm asking this for an established site, so I understand that it won't help for deep-linking and anchor text, but will it help anyway to get links from these?
I noticed that BOTW.org has gone from a historic PR6 to a PR4 currently.
They also have gone up significantly in price for $69 or so to $149 annually or $299 one-time fee.
This is quite high and with PR4 now, I'm not sure if it's really worth submitting to for this price.
Agree / Disagree?
Personally, I think Google+ is trying to get more attention with going "red" to make it more noticeable. They're having a hard time competing against Facebook and Pinterest and the like.
I would not mind if Google+ took off, as I believe it would be great for our SEO. But Google is best at search and I believe will remain so.
The general rule is to have no more than 100 links per page, so you can probably increase this page from an SEO stand-point and still be OK.
However, you also want to consider user-experience. Will the page look more tidy or be more functional for the visitor at 25 listings per page or at 50 or a 100?
We recently had a similar issue on a site I was working on at http://babynamesdiary.com/baby-names-and-meanings/ - which uses databases for baby name ideas and we opted to go with 25 names per page, but also included a list of name origins at the bottom (which is like category pages) to help both the visitors to the site and also help our SEO.
What I find is that the best method is a balance of visitor experience and good SEO (but always place visitor experience first and the rest should naturally follow).
We also had a similar situation the previous week. This week we seem to have stabilized. I'm trying to figure it out myself as we have been steady with our pages, and actually significantly increasing in content and # of pages.
PS. If this response helps, please hit the "thumbs up"!
it is automatic. thanks. see above reply.
we are auto-generating the feed, but our shopping cart doesn't differentiate between different genders and what color a piece of jewelry is, so any added fields like that we would have to add in manually.
To alleviate the issue, for now, we put unisex for the gender and "metal" for the color and it seemed to take.
We are in the jewelry industry, and for Google product feeds, we list our products under "Apparel & Accessories > Jewelry".
As of the new Google feed requirements, they are saying that we have to choose a gender and color for each product that is in the Apparel category.
While this makes sense for clothes, it doesn't exactly for jewelry because many items are for both men and women, and there's not always a color associated with each product.
I can enter some of these fields manually, but with 5,000+ products, it makes it difficult w/ each update.
Anyone have solutions for this? Or a way around it? Can we just include those fields but leave them blank?
Any other solutions?
I think it has a lot to do w/ your industry and product. Personally, we have shied away from images of people because our community of shoppers are diverse, and we feel that showing certain images of people, rather than the product itself, would limit the image of our brand. But again, this depends on your industry and product.
I agree that testing w/ Google analytics is a good idea to view bounce rates if you decide to try it out.
There are also scripts you can purchase for very little cost and have them install it for you on your server and set up a cron job to have your sitemap run automatically each week and ping the search engines to find your sitemap.
One such service is at xml-sitemaps.com - they can install it for you and set up the cron job as well.
Just make sure you are on a good server that can handle the script if your website is large.
I can't answer you on the reconsideration request and will leave that to someone who can, but I wanted say that in general SEO companies I have found are often expensive and do not always do the quality job that you can do yourself with the right tools. Mostly it's having clean code, good content, and good authority links.
The best thing you can probably do is patiently gain relationships with other websites who will link to you and build good content that others will want to link to; try guest blog posts and keep at it to just keep building.
We have had a quality website for 12 years. We have good rankings and good PR.
But for some reason, I have never been able to get listed on Dmoz.org - it's like they're not even reviewing it. It's not like I got a rejection letter or anything, just a no response and we just can't seem to get listed there. It's almost like the editors for our category are just not responsive or just not around. Or maybe they're a competitor and don't want us listed?
Questions:
1. How important is it for an established site to get listed? I imagine that dmoz being an authority site, it would still be very helpful for rankings.
2. There are dmoz "submission services" - where they claim to list your site the proper way. They don't guarantee their service, since they obviously can't, and you have to pay either way. Does anyone recommend these services and anyone know of a particular one that is up & up?
Any help on getting listed would be appreciated!
Thanks for chiming in. This does clear up quite a bit for me. Ideally, I would like a balance of relevant links & general high authority links.
With that being said, can anyone suggest any high authority sites other than dmoz that I can add my site to that would help?
Well, yes, it makes sense that perhaps they would have a reason to give a boost to a site that could earn revenue for them. But I believe at this point it remains speculation.
Agreed. You should pretty much always focus on exact match for SEO. The best thing to do is to create unique content for both. If you have a blog, those could both easily be two different blog posts. Or if you have a product page only, then put one of those words on your product or category page and the other phrase on your blog pointing back to your category page, since it is relevant and legitimate to do so for both your customers/visitors and search engines.
I agree that this can be what is termed a "Google dance" and it is very unnerving. I would take it seriously and began to examine your code to make sure it is SEO friendly, and that you have unique content, and continuing with link building to that page with your anchor text. It sort of need to "stabilize" and the best way to stabilize it is to make sure everything in the source code is correct and that you continue to link build from quality sites. Don't do anything "tricky" or funny, just try to get people to link to you as best as possible.
I agree with the above responses. How did you manage to get so many "nofollow" links though? 54% is rather high. It won't hurt you as the above members said, but it won't help you either other than that it helps to make all of your other links appear naturally begat.
Do you know what the major source of the nofollow links are?
The best way from what I understand is to continue link building, but do so from high authority sites with an anchor text to that specific page. Anchor text being, "patio umbrellas".
Blogs are a great place for that, because often your links will end up on the home page, at least for a short time, which will significantly improve results.
Try guest blog posts if you have time and have a network and link from authority sites blog rolls as well if you have them available.
Other than that, pray and hope.
I recommend indexing the archives, but using a plugin called "Auto Excerpt Everywhere", which takes the 1st 100 words of your post or so (you can set it to whatever you want), and shows only that in combination with other items that are assigned to that category.
That way, you are getting a summary with a link to the complete post and not duplicating the entire content.
However, I don't know how much content your individual products have, so there might not be enough info to create a summary.
But generally, for regular blogs, this is what I do and it appears to work.
Is it better to get a link from a site with lower PR but related content or higher PR but semi-related or unrelated content?
For example, if I sell shoes, would a link from a PR1 or PR2 shoe or apparel site be better or a link from PR4 website that sells books be better?
I'm not talking about sites with completely unrelated content, but how relevant is PR in obtaining relevant links if I am trying to raise the PR and rankings of my own site?
That's a good reminder: that PR is really only a measure of backlinks. I just wonder how many backlinks is the threshold to get PR4? I supposed to can study some PR4 sites and see if I find a pattern there.
894 unique domains linking to me I suppose is qualifying me for a PR3? Almost 1 million links from those domains combined. I'm not sure how I have almost 1 million links from 894 domains. It's possible someone is linking to me from half a million pages somewhere. I'll have to study it more.
But yes, you are right also that my main focus is profit, then sales, then traffic and conversions. It's just that having high PR will bring me more traffic which will bring me more sales, so I'm trying to increase this.
I didn't realize that PR is 1 out of 200 metrics involved. I thought it was more like 1 of 4 or something.
Thanks for the advice.
I'll definitely look into the links you provided. Thanks.
I think the main thing I'm wondering is based on the # of links we have, the constant daily unique content, at what point should we expect to reach PR4?
It would be nice to have some quantifiable number of unique root domains or some other way to measure how 'close' we are. But I understand that there probably is not. I was just wondering what everyone else thought. For all I know, we might be right around the corner for it at the next major update. Hoping so.
Thanks.
Hi, Ryan, that all makes sense. We do have a quality site and with God's help, we have many first page placements for our major keywords. So we are doing many things right and our brand is continuing to grow. It's just the PR3 has been static for about a decade despite continued growth in our site. We have even grown from 5,000 pages to about 18,000 pages over the last 4-5 years. But still remain a PR3. So I am just wondering ... would love to see our site go to PR4.
I keep hearing that content is king, so we are providing great content that has been unpublished elsewhere along with everything else.