Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My recommendation is to think about where your target audience / customers gather. You want to be where they are. This is going to vary greatly depending on your market/niche. Look for authoritative link opportunities from sites relevant to the website you're trying to promote.

An entry in a local directory is great for local tradesmen, but not so good for enterprise level business consultants.

Do your customers care that you're in DMOZ? Would they be interested in a review in a trade journal about the benefits your service/product can bring to their business?

Remember it's not just about links to improve rankings, it's about attracting relevant traffic to the site. So links that also get you direct traffic are also a win!

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Hi Stephen,

Do you believe your ranking is being affected by spammy/low quality or artificial links? Are you jumping on the disavow tool for a reason or is this a pre-emptive measure? Have you considered or tried to get any links that you are concerned about removed manually?

Google recommend that you use the Disavow tool only if:

1. your believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site

2. your confident that your site's performance in the search results is being harmed

DA alone isn't going to tell you which sites are spammy, artificial or low-quality. As Chris mentioned you'll need to take a broader view and look at the linking pages, their link profiles, the anchor text they're using their relevance to your site. (If someone said, hey I saw your link on site x, how would you feel about that?)

A link doesn't just provide authority, but also relevance, both in it's anchor text and context. You'll need to look at how natural these are, not over-optimised exact match/site wide/keyword anchor text and from a legitimate site as far as Google and your customer/audience are going to interpret it.

Just because a site has low DA, doesn't mean it's a bad place to get a link from! Some markets/niches are very small. Sites in that niche may be likely to have few links BUT they attract a highly relevant audience. While a link from one of these sites may do little to boost your domain authority it may give you some great exposure and drive a small amount of highly relevant (or high intent) visits to your site.

Make sure you know which links are passing you traffic. After all, we're not really here just for the rankings, it's the traffic we're after. You don't want sever the link that's passing high value visitors/customers.

Look at the back link profiles of your competitors (not just one or two) to get a feel for what is natural in your market/niche. Don't just look at the top ranking sites though as this can give you a skewed impression. Look at those businesses that are (respected) business competitors - not just the ones that are competing at the top of the SERPs.

As EGOL says, build great content (or offerings) and if you're going to build links do it to promote your content to your target audience.

You might also find this article on Link Profiling of interest:

Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity

And one final point - Domain Authority is just a Moz metric, it's only ever going to be an estimate how Google views the "link equity" of a site.

Something it's easy to miss...

Spend time to understand who your target audience is, what they're interested in, what motivates them and what do they care about...  Don't fall into the trap of defining your target audience with generic terms like "30 something professional" or "stay at home mum" - that doesn't do anyone any favours.

The more you really know about the people you're trying to talk to - the easier it'll be to do the stuff on your list and if you understand them properly you'll know how to do it in an authentic, engaging way that's relevant to them.

Don't lose site of the fact that a link isn't just a link, but should/could also get your referral traffic too (if it's relevant, in the right place and gives people a real reason to follow it. And really, it's all about the traffic isn't it?

Hi Shabbir

As you've encountered, as you rise up through the rankings it becomes harder and harder to displace those ahead of you.It's a bit like running a marathon starting at the back of the field. You can get to a point where no matter how hard you run, you're never going to catch the guys who started before you.

Ranking for product pages can be insanely tough - even with unique product descriptions...

Brute force link building can only take you so far and increasingly you've got to watch out that your backlink profile isn't going to come back to bite you.

Without knowing what niche you're in it's hard to provide specific advice, but here are some thoughts:

1. You're getting traffic, but how much of these are new visitors and how many are returning visitors? What can you do to get more of those visitors to engage and take action. How can you turn these visitors into loyal returning customers? This can be difficult if you're selling a commodity on price alone.

2. Go broad and think of your long-tail. Instead of focusing on the head-terms that become increasingly difficult to improve, think about growing your long tail by adding content to your site. This can for example, take the form of Frequently asked questions, how-to guides, tips etc or other more creative ideas. It's the richness and depth of thiscontent that'll earn you traffic from queries you would never target individually.

Just remember that these pages still have to work hard to move your visitors towards your site's goal and becoming customers.

Your long tail can deliver more traffic than your head-terms combined. The downside is that the commercial intent may not be as strong for some of this traffic so you'll need to work hard to convert this traffic into customers.

3. Instead of targeting those people who are looking for your products, write content for people who are trying to find answers to the problems that your products solve.

4. Guest blogging just for links doesn't really help you establish your site as an authority and you're missing a trick if your not getting your content in front of your potential customers. Where do your customers hang-out? Can you write guest articles that will attract traffic to your site rather than "just a link". You've got to understand what you're audience is interested in and resist the urge just to tell them what you want to tell them!

Hope this helps,

If you want people to click on these snippets in the serps, also remember that you want to make the titles as appealing as possible. It's not just about ranking, but click though too!

I suspect that shorter, more straightforward titles, that closely match the search query, are going to perform better.

Take a look at what Amazon do for example (picked at random!):

Something like this in the H1:  "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case / Cover With Magnetic Clasp for NEW Amazon Kindle / 6 inch / 2011 generation / Book Style - Black,TeckNet,MT-183-Black"

changes in the title tag to: "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics"

Agree with the others. Don't worry too much about fluctuations - it's when you don't bounce back up again that you need to be concerned. Keep an eye on overall trends, and for competitive keywords keep a close eye on the competition.

Look out for new-comers in the SERPS, and look out for new content.  fresh page can out-rank older pages but may weaken over time.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the job's done once you achieve a high ranking. You need to stay ahead of the competition.

Good luck!

Do you need this service? Do you have a problem getting your site indexed?

As Casey said, as long as you follow the guidelines search engines can quickly index your site. Building some good links from good authority sites can help search engines find you.

Google webmaster tools tells you when you sitemap was last processed and you can see your crawl stats to see how many pages are being crawled/day.

If your site isn't getting indexed, then I'd try to find out the route cause rather than pay for a "search engine nagging" service like this.

It's not just the search engines you need to consider. Is the speed of your site affecting user experience? Are people giving up because it's just too slow? How many abandoned sessions are you getting? Do you have any opportunity to get feedback from your users?

The "plan" doesn't look much like a plan... more like a list of (as already mentioned, low value) seo tactics to me.

Has anyone suggested tackling some less competitive, but related keyword terms first? It's easier to climb the tree from the bottom than to try and jump onto the top of it and you get to pick some low-hanging fruit on the way up.

What is important to the business - ranking for these highly competitive terms or more traffic/conversions now. Don't lose site of the business goals.

If you look at the sites that are currently ranking for your competitive search terms, can you honestly say that your site, your content delivers better value to the potential visitors and deservers to rank up there?

Also remember that it's not just about search ranking but getting the click through from the SERPS. Even if hyphens may not be a factor as far as Google is concerned - remember to think about how the human being will think when deciding which link to click in the SERPS.

A long generic, keyword rich URL with no brand identity and lots of hyphens is going to look pretty spammy to me. (It's not JUST about the hyphens!)

That said, for a two word domain the hyphen can really help with readability.

Another thing you may also have to factor in is any brand guidelines or brand consistency requirements. Depending on the customer they may have guidelines that constrain your use of hyphens or what words you can join together or even the order of words/brand names.

From the On-Page Analysis help:

"The On-page summary automatically generates reports for any of your campaign keywords that rank in the top 50 of your primary search engine. The URL that it grades is the same URL that appears in the search results.

For instance, if you have 75 keywords ranking in the Top 50, you should have 75 On-Page Reports. This generation happens automatically within 24 hours of when your rankings are updated."

You can find the help here:

Web App: On-page Reports

SO, in answer to your first question - are any of your pages ranking in the top 50 for any of your keywords?

You can also run an On-Page Analysis on any page against any keyword by using the tool from the "Research Tools" menu. It's here:

On-Page Report Card

Hope this helps.

If you don't want the footer link from them, can you ask them for a single links somewhere else? Don't just dismiss the opportunity - especially if there's an opportunity to get a  good relevant link.

The other thing to consider is not just the value (or risk) of a link for SEO, but also the direct traffic you might get. As a footer link you may not get a lot, but how many visitors would it take via this link before it's worth more than the extra link equity? How qualified would these visitors be? Are they likely convert?

What is the relationship between your site and the popular one you've been offered a link on? Is there an obvious connection that visitors to the sites are going to see?

That's all well and good, but how do you get the average man on the street to switch?

For example, my dad has never "chosen" a search engine in his life. He just goes with whatever he browser defaults to / manufacturer set up as a default and failing that "google" because it's the only one he's heard of... He thinks any weakness in the results returned are because he "must have types the wrong thing."

It would be really nice to be freely toggle all the factors your mentioned on/off (and set defaults) so that you could have the search that you wanted.

If the articles on prweb.com don't have any links then they're going to struggle to get any page authority.

I've not done much work with press releases, butI always thought that the idea of press releases was to try and get your article picked up by other websites etc who will then also link back to you.

Isn't the goal here to get some high authority links on other sites (not just prweb) and even better, to get your article in front of your target audience and maybe earn some referrals too? I wouldn't expect many people to go looking for articles on the prweb site.

You could get trapped in a vicious circle if you start link building to your prweb articles - where do you stop and at the end of the day, wouldn't you be better off building links to the root content from lots of domains rather than from the one prweb.com domain? I thought the main idea was to try and earn links on the different sites your press release gets republished. The trick is to get your press release republished.

As with all content - are you press release articles link worthy? Do you provide a reason why someone would want to visit your site for more information because it's not all about search traffic! Have you written the press release in a way that makes it as easy as possible for someone to re-use/re-publish it on their site?

Also, how do you increase the odds that you get a link back when your press release is used? I guess you can include some relevant links in the body copy rather than just in the footer.)

As I mentioned, I've not had a lot of experience with press releases. Would love to know how people have used them successfully.

Good luck!

Agree with Robert, however you chose to manage / present your images is up to you and will be dependant on the number of images and how frequently you're uploading etc.

What matters more is giving your images context and meaning by (as Robert says) great captions that describe the image, good titles that help make your the images accessible to those using screen readers and search engines.

Grouping images by category and adding a good category description that helps provide context can help.

Hi Steven, I don't think you're missing anything. I think you'll just need to joining the rest of us waiting with baited breath for the next linkscape update to see how we'll we've been doing with our link building. The good news is that you can always spend the time building more links!

In a recent blog post from Rand, he mentions:

"As part of those efforts, we've been working toward an experimental index that leverages a more search-engine style crawler that crawls fresher pages/sites more often and less fresh stuff less frequently"

So maybe there's hope! The blog post is here:

Interim Linkscape Update for January

It is frustrating when you're working on a new site though!

If all these dentist have exactly the same content - how is a prospective customer going to decide which one is best?

"We're just like the next guy" isn't a Unique Value Proposition and isn't going to help your business stand apart from the crowd.

Unique content is harder, but it's so much better than generic "insert your practice name here" boiler plate content.

It would also enable us to see how much better these additional factors make the search results with out own eyes and not have to rely on Google's promise that they do. Show us the evidence and let us come to our own conclusions!

At the moment it's a bit like a kid being told to eat their greens...

Keep in mind how people stumbling upon sites like this may perceive you site/brand.

For people trying to find a domain for their business these kind of operations are rather annoying and can feel like exploitation!

From a visitors perspective, if you've got links to deep pages, then it would be worth creating redirects to the relevant content on the new site.

If someone follows a link from another site with anchor text along the lines of "see this great article about x" and it just goes to the homepage, the visitor is going to find it rather jarring...