3rd February, 2013
Recently there has been a move away from traditional anchor text based links towards social signals, linkage and a clear focus on relevance and associations key to earning successful links. Here at Tidy Design, we firmly believe in creating great content that offers real value to users – and using this as a basis for earning links.
The importance of connecting interested customers with your business is what good marketing is all about. Links have their use as a medium to gain visibility online, but the bigger picture remains that of building awareness – getting people talking about what you do and the products and services your company has to offer.
Recently, the introduction of semantic search engine developments have led to changes in the way in which existing keyword strategies are employed in SEO work.
Semantics changes the way that search engines work, enabling Google to map associations between content to deliver more effective results to users. Key to this process of course is creating understanding around the type of content that the user intends searching for on your site.
Creating an association between why a user is searching for content and the information they are seeking enables Google to improve search engine results, offering suitable offers and guides alongside these.
The importance of clean data cannot be overestimated. The Penguin algorithm was introduced to help clear up spam links to aid clarity.
Search engines effectively reward those working in alignment with the new system, so relevance becomes increasingly important when it comes to creating good search results. Understanding of this factor enables you to market to your advantage.
In computing and comparing the relevance of different links in relation to the likeliness that they will be clicked on, font size, position and colour are all taken into account, in addition to the co-occurrence of words and phrases.
To enable Google to understand the meaning of words, it will look at pages that mention the same phrase to view what else is mentioned and build up word associations in context to assign authority to links as relevant.
Utilising Social Media such as Twitter can be a great way to reach people with your blog posts and fresh content, enabling you to specifically reach a certain target audience.
Kerry McPhail