SEOTops

Insurance company Gocompare.com look to have secured there place back in the top 5 positions of googles SERP’s for the keyword “car insurance”, After being heavily penalised by Google for practicing blackhat link building techniques involving link purchasing to boost there PR. It is said to be that although they were dropped for about six weeks it shows they have cleaned up there act and have received only minimal punishment from Google. A little warning to Go Compare is that they are very lucky and this shows the reason why you should always perform SEO as per Google’s guidelines.

It is reportedly stated that Go Compare actually lost about 84% of there traffic giving there competitiors a major income boost over the past few week, it is also sending a spark warning as to how powerful Google actually are for either making or braking an online business.

Dmoz the worlds greatest and largest human edited directory has been a debatable subject on all terms in our community but what really are the SEO effects of getting listed in one of the worlds most reliable directories.

Well to begin with if you dont already know DMOZ is a human edited directory meaning that the editors will only accept top quality sites related to there industry, this has caused not only caused a lot of knit picking but it feels as though somewhat alot of favouristism has been awarded to say for example “editors friends”. Lets just put it this way if you are looking to get listed in a freelance area of the directory and the editor also owns a freelance site and may see you as competition then there is no way they will accept you. We feel that although DMOZ can create could quality links as alot of directories extract listing from there, including google. Dmoz has nowaday become somewhat of a black market whereas if you know the right people or have the right funds your going to get listed just CLICK HERE and take a look at this its terrible.

Our conclusion is that Dmoz a few years ago was well worth every effort and can still get you a heck of alot of backlinks, but you should not become obsessed with getting listed instead concentrate more on your link building campaigns and overall if you stick at it you wont feel you need DMOZ at all.

Remember if you want to rank well, getting listed in one site wont do this for you so:

D = Do,

M = More,

O = Optimization

Z = Zestfully

As we all know link building is the major and has been the major hot topic in the SEO world for years.

Lets go back to the beginning before the existence of the artificial intelligent search engines, with very smart and clever algothirms. The old days were great the only way to really get your site noticed was word of mouth - posting your link in forums and other discussion so that people would actually be interested and click on your site. Nowadays the links are still there but are perceived in such a different way now we need to obtain them links not to be clicked on but to be picked up by the search engines spiders. Here we have a look at ways to obtaining these:

Natural Links

Natural links are the best way possible to obtain rankings but are very hard the key is to keep writing unique relevant content and eventually people will start linking back to you. Another half natural way is to submit your sites to top directories this will cause a bounce on effect as most small directories extract content and listings from the larger ones giving you quality one-way links.

Paid Links

Paid links is very much disapproved by most major search engines due to the fact that links are meant to be given to you in a natural way by webmasters because they enjoy your content or what you have to offer. Purchasing links does some what the opposite as it is like paying your way up the SERPs. In the end we all know that gaining links naturally is a very hard task these days as there are billions of web pages, so the best advice fo buying links is find sites that do not tell the whole world they are selling links as the search engines will find out and penalize every site that is involved.

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal Links have also been somewhat devalued by the search engines lately especially with google due to the same reasons as above, we still think reciprocal links do still have slight value so try and get links that are the same theme as your site and related to the users - and again try to just obtain these via one on one discussions with the webmaster in question.

Three way links

We feel that three way links are a much better alternative than reciprocal linking as there is more weight on these sort of links due to the fact that the site that links back to you, you do not have to link back to them. e.g If we link to www.wordpress.org and they link back to us from a totally different site they have.

Article Links

Article links are a very good way to obtain natural backlinks especially with the rise of social media sites. The way to do this is write a great article or a news flash on your niche. Submit them to sites such as Digg or Propeller and once popular they will bring you in a ton of natural backlinks which the search engine will love.

So whatever ways you decide to do remember stick to the search engines guidelines, as you can never trick them.