Some overlap with SEO.

Obviously there is some overlap with SEO. There is no point in writing great content marketing pages, and then leave out all the keyword phrases that relate to that topic. On the other hand content marketing is about serving the user above all, so the keyword strategy, needs to always bear that in mind.

Your website could come up high and receive qualified traffic

As well as getting extra visitors from the +1 clicks, it is very likely Google will be using the data from those clicks as a strong factor in deciding how high it ranks a website against someone's personal profile at Google. This could mean if you are getting a number of +1 clicks on a page and someone who is logged into Google is doing a related search, you may come in on a very high position for them on Google and so get a highly qualified visitor.

What people see is dependent on +1 settings in your Google Profile

However depending on your Google Profile settings, your social connections as outlined above may see your recommendations and you may be able to see theirs.
You may be thinking this is all well and good, but how does it help SEO? Until recently the +1 button only appeared on the Google search result, but now Google have opened it up for web site owner's to add it to their own web pages as well.
This means if you have good quality content people can recommend it to their friends very easily thus offering you another source of qualified website traffic.

How does it work?

Google +1 is linked in with Google Social Search which helps you discover relevant content from your social connections on sites like, Google Reader, Google Buzz, Twitter and even your own Google Contacts.
So if you like a web page you might click the +1 button which would show an anomous public +1 state (people would see the +1 count but not have access to know who'd clicked it).

What is Google +1?

At the end of March 2011, a new button started appearing in the Google search results. It had the Google colours along the top and a simple +1. So what was this button?
Basically it is similar to the Facebook Like button, but focused on the Google search results. In simple terms it allows searchers that are logged in to a Google account, to save information about their searches and also see recommendations from others.

Link building can give you a lot of benefits

Links provide your business numerous benefits that will pay back your investment several times.

Quality links improve your website’s search engine rankings so that you can get ever-increasing web visitors and sales. The more you come into view in search engine results, the more web traffic you’ll obtain and better reaction you’ll acquire for all your marketing initiatives.
Quality links enable you to  have direct visits to your website since people click on those links to enter your site, so again you obtain more sales and traffic. Even better, if the visitors have just been reading about your business on an outside site, they’ll have a positive feeling about what you offer.
Quality links set you up as a leader. Irrespective of the market you’re in, there’s a casual group of websites that your possible customers will visit. When they frequently see links to your website, they’ll probably think of you as a leader in your market.
Quality links hell to get further quality links. Once you are recognized as a leader, other websites will want to talk about you, your business, your website, or comment on your offered products and link to you—asking for nothing!
Quality links will keep on working. Unlike advertising, links frequently stay in position and keep bringing you more traffic and sales for a number of years to come.
Quality links join you with people. If somebody has taken the time to link to you, it means that they are involved in what you are doing. That gives you wonderful opportunities to know the people following websites that link to you and build relationships for shared benefit.
Getting worthy links to your website is one of the most useful marketing strategies that you can think of.

Producing resources and setting up alerts

Likewise, you can insert a white paper, video, or an info-graphic (visual representation of information in an easy and attractive manner), initiating Google Alerts on the theme, and begin contacting people. Anytime a query about the subject arises online, there is a chance to answer their queries with a link to your own resource. This is a nice strategy because the answer is totally on-topic.

If you utilize this method, be sure to be as supportive as possible. The resource itself is supposed to be extremely useful, of course. However, if it doesn’t answer every facet of the question, make sure you speak about those openly in your e-mails, comments, etc. Don’t let it sound like a sales pitch.
Updating others’ content

Are you familiar with content that can just continue giving? This is the content on which you wish to keep investing, with corrections, updates, etc., to keep it appropriate. It is a general practice to refresh the best content you have, keep endorsing it, and enhancing it.

But updating your old content can also be a task, and that’s where you come in. Rather than submitting your guest post, why not get in touch with a blogger? Have with you a motivating update or fact that will assist in keeping one of their top posts interesting and fresh.
Try looking and searching for some more general terms linked to your keywords and visiting various blog posts you can come across. Focus on those posts that already appear to have an enormous appeal.
Customizing a widget

A web widget occupies a section of a webpage and executes something helpful with information taken from other websites.
You may not be a coding expert with the skill to set a master widget that everybody desire to download. Nevertheless, it’s fine to have the design or coding skills essential to modify a widget so that it fits into your site’s appearance and branding.

Try looking out for blogs around your niche that employ widgets you are familiar with. Give those widgets a pinch so that it fits the website better, set a link, and present the new take on that widget to the blogger. This is particularly powerful for well-liked blogging topics that do not focus much on the technology industry.

It means be moral and ensure that the blogger is responsive in linking back to your website. There’s no cause to hide this. As long as you recognize how to work with people cordially, it shouldn’t be a trouble.
Purchase Display Ads

With the help of display ads, it’s possible to target websites where site owners and bloggers are most likely to creep around. This way, you may put your website in the minds of the viewers that have more power online, influence, and links. You only require paying when the visitors really click on those ads.

Many SEOs are reluctant to spend funds on ads since they just usually generate short-term gains, but if you are using ads for building links, this doubt isn’t logical anymore. The only problem you should be worried about is whether or not your time is being better invested in outreach or paying for those ads (or a blend of both).
Working with experts

There is no ground for creating content in isolation. In fact, most of the time, the best content is the outcome of collaboration. Involve best experts in the making and modification of your own content prior to it going live. If you are involving more experts, it means you have more opportunities to generate additional links.

However, you should not try to make this too large. The more and more people you involve, the less loyalty you can get from everyone of them, particularly if you are on the way of automating your outreach.
As an alternative, tailor your outreach e-mails and keep the reason clear why you want to contact them. Don’t expect a lot from them and let them know that they will also be gaining something out of this exchange.

Competitive link building strategies

Here are some techniques that will facilitate you to build links.
Inventing a phrase and setting up an alert
The idea behind this strategy is to create a new buzzword, and make it catch on, and then keep links as a result. Since not everyone who is using that phrase will send a link your way, you can initiate Google Alerts to be updated. If it’s obvious from context that users are talking about the phrase you coined, this can be a big prospect to make a link.

Now, if your website doesn’t have the coverage to obtain a buzzword out there, this may seem like a useless exercise. If your marketing is targeted to the right people, and the slogan is attractive enough, this could well be sufficient to start receiving the phrase in use by a lot of users in the online community.

The process of link building

I have included the following steps to help you determine how the link building process is carried out normally, to get better search engine rankings.

Strategy: It involves setting sensible objectives and planning the tasks that are required.
Measuring the success: It is related to how to systematize yourself and calculate your progress.
Current situation: It is related to assessing who your competitors are, deciding  what’s  link valuable  for  your  own business  and surveying your current internal and external links.
Networking and vision hunting: It is about how to look for link prospects, gather contact details, and build your relationships.
Content creation: It is about the content that you create, which will be a source for bringing your most precious links.
Promotion: This phase is related to creating link requests, utilizing online PR and social media.
Monitoring: It is concerned with how to monitor and report on your progress.
Google and the links’ power

It’s indeed hard to believe it today, but Google was once a small start-up. But the blow Google made was instant, because they constantly delivered superior results than the traditional and well-established search engines.
And  they  provided better results since they  realized the  structure and quality of links. Linking a page can give an ideal view of its genuine worth.
So pages that had high-quality links would be naturally more precious than pages that did not.

Google now directs the search engine marketplace, and to be winning online, you just need to be winning on Google. And it implies putting power of links to your site.
 

Link Building For Websites

Regardless of size of your business, link building is the SEO practice that can play a vital role in boosting your SEO ranking and contributing in your website or business’ success online.

Getting valuable links does take much effort and time. However, anything that’s valuable in business takes certain effort and time — link building is one of those.
 

Examine your analytics package

Observe what words or phrases are resulting in more visitors to your website. This analysis will give you an idea of what words and phrases are actually helping you in getting ranked well in search engine. Also, you can also have an idea about more keywords to add.
The development of a website in a search engine–friendly manner is essential so that search engines can easily locate and index your web pages, which organize your provided information and provide clues to search engines regarding the subjects your website belong to and to avoid potential pitfalls.

On-page SEO also refers making every page of your website optimized by content for both search engines and people.

In the next section of the book, we will explain the importance of content for making your website search engine friendly and what SEO practices you can pursue in this regard in order to get higher search engine ranking

Qualify your qualifiers.

You may be interested to add a qualifier such as “free” since a lot of people are searching the word. Though someone looking something for free does not mean that he/she is looking something to buy. Unless you actually offer something for free, it’s best to keep away from the word “free” as a qualifier.
 

Search Engine Optimized Content Creation

Search engines are becoming smarter day by day. They are becoming stricter in their ranking criteria and focus a lot on content of the websites they rank. You must keep in mind that search engine are getting better in judging high quality content. In this landscape, it implies that you must produce high quality content that a visitor would like to study with interest.

It also denotes that the content you create needs to be put in a logical and organized manner eliciting an encouraging search engine reaction. You might have heard this phrase before that “the content is king”.
It is a reality yet a good search engine optimization depends upon the quality content that has been correctly setup within the Google Webmaster Guidelines and contains value for readers who will share that information with their friends.

Creating SEO content is not difficult. Though it does require a number of basic SEO skills and knowledge yet if you are good at writing and have carefully generated your targeted keywords, the task is not that difficult though.
I have included the following simple steps that you should consider while creating SEO-friendly content for your website. Follow these steps and make your site content rich.
Step 1
Develop a structure that can solve a problem related to your target market. Whatever your target market is, there is always an individual who wants to discover more, read more, and develop. You are the “specialist,” so what are you waiting for? Start sharing that knowledge and help others to learn.

Step 2

Take an idea from the above-mentioned step and start writing about it. Solve the problem. Inform your reader how do you do it. The people who read the information you provide and desire to do it on their own will do that anyway, either with or without your written words. You have to share your knowledge to gain reliability and establish yourself as an industry specialist.
Trust me, buyers today are highly educated. Whenever they do search any website as a potential seller, they want to know that you are a professional and you can meet their requirements. Your forums, website, or blogs are great ways to inform them that you can fulfill their requirements.

Step 3

The third step is based on keyword research, which we have already discussed in a previous section of this book. This is the time to ensure yourself about optimizing your content with those keywords able to give you desired results.
There are a lot of keyword research tools out there, as I mentioned before. Get help from those. Go for the one that works best for you. Find a list of keywords that is related to your website and though it may not be the most competitive one but still has a significant amount of local and global searches each month.
Warning: Do not go for keyword stuffing, hiding text, spamming, and other black-hat  SEO  practices.  The Search  engines  can  easily  identify  the content integrated with black hat techniques.

Step 4

This step is about HTML tags and coding. This is the stage where SEO gets bit more technical, so I will simply say that you are required to incorporate your chosen keywords all over your content and HTML meta tags (description, title tags, and headers).You can study the Google Webmaster Guidelines to get your tags.

Hint: There is a character limit you need to follow, so be careful.

Step 5

The  content  should  not be  just  optimized  but  be fresh  as  well.  After knowing “how” to create a successful content, you need to create high quality content on a regular basis. It’s quite fine even if you refresh it just once a week.
But you have to make sure that content generation is steady. Your visitors and readership depends upon the frequency with which you put content on your site. If you begin posting daily, this is something your readers will start to expect; and if you cannot maintain your frequency, they will soon lose interest and not return. It is better to post just once a week initially, develop your readership gradually and then increase posting frequency later as you can.

Step 6
Link building and baiting is the sixth step. Link building will be discussed more comprehensively later in the book. It is necessary that you make your
readers connect to you easily. Gadgets and widgets are great ways to construct backling. If you can expand them on your own (or hire someone else for this), then you should certainly be doing that. Or else just make sure that the whole content is link friendly. What I want to say is that you can make a fast HTML link box, ensuring that your URL strings are fresh and not messy with so many unknown characters that are not logical.

Step 7

Integrating social media with your website and the content it contains is another important step. Social media link building will be discussed in the next section of the book. Integrating social media means after developing high quality and valuable content, you should make it for your readers to share! Integrate it with Twitter, Face book, and other social networking websites.
In today’s competitive world, it is very important that you give readers a mean to share your content. Search engines are not just indexing social media sites and platforms, but the popularity of social media sharing is something they also take into consideration

Off-Site SEO

Off-site SEO is related to creating links for your website or page on
social media channels. It also takes into consideration the analytics so
that you can decide what’s been effective and what is not being able to
produce desired results, and using that information to keep improving your
SEO efforts. So, we can say that it basically focuses social interaction
and link building.



Let’s discuss both the categories in detail so that you can have a better
idea about some of the most widely adopted SEO techniques that even large
businesses have been pursuing in order to expand in the market by getting
higher Google rankings and beating others.

By reading next few chapters, you will come to know about those techniques.
Also, from the perspective of start-ups and small-business owners, it’s
beneficial to implement these SEO practices.

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO practices focus on building a search engine–friendly website
and writing optimized content for it to get a better Google ranking.
On-site is the basis of your website’s SEO. With no on-site optimization,
off-site optimization is useless

Categories of SEO

The goal of this book is to help you understand various SEO techniques and
lead you in the correct direction for designing and pursuing the right SEO
strategies for your own business.
From this section of the book, you are going to dive into a technical but
interesting world of SEO.