Links are Everything, right?

[jonnyholt]

So I have removed all errors to the site, have the keywords where they go in the title, and yet I dropped a spot.  For those experts out there, are linking domains just everything these days?

[Johnny4B]

Links are aren't that important, quality links are important ... but they are not everything (but they are important to getting the results you want, but don't ignore other aspects also).

But there are other major factors which are as important as well, just adding keywords to titles is not really optimising your website ..

Other factors which are as important is content, content and well content, insure your page contains quality relevant content for the phrase you are trying to rank for.

Insure you pages are structured well and easily acccesabile

Build a social profile around your website, this plays a huge part these days

There is no 100% proof way Jonathon ,but just adding a few backlinks and adding a keyword to a  title is not a sure proof way to get results, you got to work at it.

Oh ,and just to add, your placement is the SERP is not something that will usually stay static, there will always be movement, and lots of factors that will cause this, like your competitor out ranking you and naturally pushing you down .... but dont expect your website to always stay att a spot for a certain key-phrase ... there will be movement

Hope that helps a little

Regards

J

[Chris.Menke]

Words only provide relevance to the search term, they don't provide authority or trust. Generally, removing errors ensures  that relevance is recognized by Google and that the authority and trust from external sources can be spread correctly to pages on the domain.

It may be time to regroup and develop a greater understanding of authority and trust, as applied to links and as applied to social networking and engagement.

[jonnyholt]

thanks for the responses, i just started this campaign last week and was already seeing progress as of this week and then the report came back without the results I wanted.  I know it will take time and Google will better reward natural progression. I guess I just wanted to vent!  I'm went through a page report and fixed some critical keyword placement and will continue what I'm doing because I know based on research here that what I'm doing is right It will just take some time for everything to be recognized.

[JesusD]

Hey Jonathan, i am no expert, but we all struggle trying to rank in good spots. Link Building or Earning in fact is a very important part of the SEO Process. If you already covered the SEO Basic such as the site architecture, on page factors (title, content, text) you should engage on a link worthy content and link marketing campaign complemented by a social media campaign.

Anyways, it all depends on what your ultimate goals are. If rankings are your goal, you should `pursue a link earning campaign, along with a content strategy. We all struggle with rankings, so it should be an ongoing effort in order to master rankings.

If you havent seen this video, i recommended it a lot. It focuses on the types of links out there and which we should pursue. Future Proof Link Building

Hope it helps in some way.

[AlanMosley]

Here is what works for me, with very few links.

Make sure your site score a perfect crawling score, I use the Bing api (you can get most of this using Bing WMT or IIS SEO Toolkit) for this. You will never get a perfect score using a CMS.

Use html5 tags and schema.org to clearly mark out your content, leave the search engine in no doubt what the page is about, and what is what in the page, once again you will never achieve perfection here with a CMS.

Use internal linking to it full potential.

Have original content, make sure it is clear and do not over optimize it, fine line here.

In short have good content clearly marked up as to what each peace is(html5 schema.org), clean code so that the search engine can easily work out what the page is about, what is content and what is layout.

[JesusD]

great advice!

what is the "best practice" for internal linking? what do you recommend?

regards!

[AlanMosley]

Get your link text correct for a start and a read of this page will give you some background that will help.

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

[JesusD]

thanks! will do!

regards!

[jonnyholt]

I work almost exclusively with Wordpress, is this even possible with  "All in One SEO" plugin?  Also internal linking meaning linking on a page I own to another page I own?  I'm coming to SEOmoz from MajesticSEO and the vocabulary is fairly different so I'm finding myself lost on a few term.

[WebRefresh]

Hi Jonathan.

Internal linking is linking to another page within the same domain. On your homepage you may not go into giant detail on something specific but you do cover it in a blog post. You would link to that post from that section of text on the homepage copy. It's all about continuing the user experience and passing on the authority of your homepage. Check out this post from SEOmoz for a more in depth explanation.

Also, I'm finding that our biggest ranking increases are coming from great content on the homepage and also throughout the site. I've seen link building also give increases but usually slower over time. Great content can bring the rise and link building should hold you there and move you up the final few places. A search engine's aim is to rank sites that it thinks a user will want to see and will find interesting and useful. I think great content and info is the key to this.

Hope this helps bro!