SEO Newsletter October 2006

SEO Know-how

Search High Newsletter October 2006

by Paul McIntyre

What is link building?

Hi everyone,

Here's our October newsletter to help you increase business through your website.

Good luck with promoting your website and increasing business.

Any questions?

Just ask!

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In this edition of the Search High Newsletter:

1. What is link building and why is it important?

2. Now, you can have detailed analytics. What’s that, then?

3. Fancy doing SEO in-house?

4. Further comment on our SEO Blog Site.

5. What do you want to see in following newsletters? - win a free consultation.

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Your Host - Paul McIntyre ( mailto:paulm@searchhigh.co.uk)

Welcome back…

Our main article this month looks at Link Building, asks what link-building is, why it’s important, the potential pitfalls and how to approach it successfully. It’s a critical area, so you can really benefit from a serious long-term link-building strategy.

This month, we also look at Web Analytics - collecting data to understand exactly what your website visitors are doing on your site, so that you can amend your site and campaigns to improve visitor conversions.

We then ask if you fancy having a go at SEO yourself, and recommend one particular tool to help you do this.

1. What is link building and why is it important?

When search engines rank your pages in their results, they take many factors into account. One of these is the value it assigns to inbound links to your site. But not all links are equal...

Clearly, you’re going to tell the world that your site is the best site ever. But then so does everyone.

So one factor that matters is what others think about you. The search engines measure this, using calculations around a factor known as link popularity. This isn’t just the number of links into your site from other sites, but the quality of these links, their destination page and the relevancy of their source to the landing page on your site.

There are two ends of the approach to link building. One approach, taken by many short-lived SEO (search Engine Optimisation) companies is to pay for links (with your money) and to maximise the number of inbound links from link farms or FFA sites (Free For All). In the short term, this approach may give you a small hike in your rankings. In the long term, it may get you banned from appearing in the search engines.

The other approach, to which we subscribe, says that you should make your site a natural, relevant link magnet. Make your site content the best you can. Make people want to link to your site. You can even identify those sites whose visitors may benefit from visiting your site, and offer these sites such a link. Make it so that they can’t resist.

You can use a tool such as Arelis, now included in IBP9, to identify potential link partners, to find relevant contacts and to email these sites’ administrators.

Whatever you do, if you want to improve your rankings in the search engines, you need to be aware of the influence and power of inbound links, and build the best site you can to attract others to link to you, from quality, well respected sites.

If you need some help or advice, you know where to find us.

For other useful articles on SEO, go to our SEO Articles page

2. Now, you can have detailed web analytics. What’s that, then?

Web Analytics are simply detailed statistics about the precise behaviour of visitors to your website. They can offer intuitive, insightful analysis of your web site usage. They show you campaigns, site navigation patterns, Pay Per Click, SEO and ROI stats instantly. And they can make a massive difference to fine-tune your website and its ability to stop losing visitors before they have done what you want them to do on your site.

Search High now offers these Advanced Web Analytics services.

You’d be amazed at the detail - we can tell you exactly which search terms your visitors used to arrive at your site, which pages, links or graphics they clicked on, where they entered the site, where the left the site, how long they spent on each page, and so on.

We can even monitor e-business transactions and online sales and show your conversion rates, cost per visitor acquisition or costs per sale, and so on…

Our Web Analytics offerings make it easy for you or your marketing department to perform desktop data-mining activities that are difficult or impossible to implement using traditional web analysis methods. We can offer this as either a fully managed service, or we can provide you with a system to use internally.

Whether you need a log file analyzer or hosted software, we have a solution that's sure to fit your budget...and your brain.

If you would like to know more, just ask and we’ll send you more information on this highly effective tool.

2. Fancy doing SEO in-house? Then download a free trial copy of IBP9 to get you started. This effective tool is a good introduction to DIY SEO.

4. SEO Blog updated - we have an updated blog site giving thoughts and tips on optimising your website for high search engine ranking. Do please visit the SEO Blog, and feel free to leave comments or ask questions.

5. What would you like to know about marketing your website successfully? Let us know and we'll try to include the best requests in future newsletters. The best suggestion each month wins a free consultation, specific to your business.

If you need help on any SEO issues, call us, without obligation, on 0845 734 6580

Search High - Professional Search Marketing

That’s it for now. Until next time, we wish you more visitor encounters of the relevant kind.

Feel free to forward this email to anyone else that you think may benefit from our straight-forward advice. Please help us to spread the word.

Paul McIntyre
Search High Ltd

0870 734 6580

"Search High provide managed SEO services, pay-per-click management, SEO training and mentoring."

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