Does the link building have to be done every month? If I don’t do it every month, does that mean my site will fall by the wayside again?

Once a site is optimized, does a person have to keep re-doing the optimization? If they don’t keep paying an SEO… does it mean the site will again fall into ether-land?

Below Are My Answers:

Think about your online efforts – website, optimization, link building and Facebook, etc. as marketing and advertising. In comparing and assuming the ads work, if you stop buying ads, do they still keep working?

You stop buying ads and the customers you get from the ads stop! So it all takes maintenance and attention… either you do it or you hire someone.

Link building gets it's best results to increase your position on all search engines from being ongoing. Just like your website is never done, adding links to your website is never done either.

If you were to just not do any link building, your site would eventually fall in rank for 3 main reasons – 1. Google gives sites with increased links and new content better ranks; 2. The competition is doing online marketing, and… 3. Some of the old links will disappear.

Your rank comes from the content on your site and the links to that content. That's the big picture. There are lots of details after that but in the big scheme, continually adding content and getting more links to your site will keep your rank growing or stable.

A simplified but useful way of looking at things is to examine your current linking. In this case, the site being discussed shows about 60 links right now… (these numbers are approximate from Yahoo Site Explorer)

To compare, the top 10, page one SERP competition for "keyword term" pages – range from 70 to 7,000 links to that page on their sites (not the whole site.) To get you on the first page for that term we have to get you more than 70 links to your subject page. That guideline applies to each page and subject.

We could build you thousands of links in the next week, but I know that will get your site sandboxed (penalized) by Google, ie. not showing at all in search. We do it gradually, safely and through watching the traffic, attend to each part of the site as needed.

Another thing to keep in mind is what will the competition do in response to your increase in web marketing? Chances are they are going to spend more money and time optimizing and advertising! It's competitive out there.

For instance, I know from many conversations that business people are pulling their ad money from YellowPages and using that to do online marketing. Google and Facebook are the new YellowPages for local small businesses.

Once your pages are optimized there is no need to redo them. We don't use any gimmicks – what we do on-page works now and for many years to come.

One of the most powerful things you can do to make your site rank is how links are distributed ***within your site!*** While most of the SEO advice on the internet is talking about "on-page" factors, sitemaps and link building, etc., (and these are important…) the site navigation that you build your site with and then use to focus attention from customers and the search engines is one of the most important SEO steps you can take.

Planning With Site Navigation in Mind

One way of looking at it is like this. What site naturally has major authority in the given subject area you are covering? Yours! So internal links to and from your most "important" pages will help other pages on your site rank.

Shaun Anderson over at Hobo SEO use an easy to understand analogy to describe this. Think of links like a heat transfer system.

To quote, "Links are like lasers. When you link to a page, you heat the page you are linking to. If your site was measured in heat, you could see the heat-map of your site pages, once all the links have been accounted for.

Links to a Page Heat It Up

You control where the heat is by which pages you you choose to link to and by which pages you link from – it’s a simple premise which seems to get results.

Once you have created a search engine friendly navigation system for your website and Google has crawled and indexed it, you now have “hot” and “cold” pages according to Google.

Internal Links Transfer the Most Heat

Hot pages are created when you link to them. The more you link to them the hotter they get. The more links to a page from the others, the hotter that page.

Typically, you’re home page is hotter than the rest of the site, and indeed this is generally the hottest page on the site. In my example, I only have a couple of real sales pages – the rest are just introductory pages to my sales pages – these are generally a bit more targeted and geared to the theme of this site – seo. Anybody interested in my services or looking to hire the company will definitely want to read these pages so I make sure I tell Google, these are important pages I’d actually like the visitor to be presented with.

In the model above, I wanted to ensure my sales pages were the hottest pages on the site, so made sure my site tells the search engine this. If I can’t be bothered telling a search engine what’s the most important pages on my site, can I expect Google, Yahoo or MSN to figure it out for themselves? Actually, Google wants you tell them what’s the hottest pages on your site in Webmaster Tools these days.

Sure, you want as many pages in the main index as possible. A new site however doesn’t have a lot of heat to spread around, so ensure your sales pages are optimized properly and are the hottest pages in your structure, because odds are some pages will be marked “cold” and put into the supplemental index.

Cooler pages can be drawn into the main index by increasing the heat of your site root by getting links from other websites – other hot spots.

You can heat up a cold page by linking to it from the home page.

I make sure my “hot pages” are as optimized as possible for the type of search engine result pages I’m chasing at any given time.

At the beginning of projects, I like to get a handle on which pages are or need to be hot, especially with new sites or sites without a lot of link-love. You can’t control much, but this you can do.

Thinking like this when I am thinking about navigation helps me, I think, build a site for visitors, which is the ideal scenario. I want visitors to see my sales pages. Same with Google.

Once you’ve optimized a site, it’s time to get those hot pages optimized for your main keywords and get some links from other sites."

Read more: Optimize Internal Website Navigation For Google | Hobo

• Boost your local authority with the Google Local Business Center (Google Places)
• Gets relevant local links about your business to your website
• Being listed in these increases your chance for a customer review on the sites that offer that increasingly important feature
• Each of these directories get visits and your listing will be seen and you'll get more visitors

One of my favorite online bloggers on local search and online marketing is Tom Crandall of Phoenix. His blog is called SemReportCard. His posts are long and detailed… kinda like some of mine – but his are filled with more meat!

Tom recently published a killer article on 30+ Online Business directories To Ramp Up Your Local Search Marketing Campaign . It's good and his illustrated explanations of how it works are worth a read.

Unfortunately, most of the Directories cited in his article are US only… we just don't seem to be worth the effort up here in the frozen north. That's OK; we'll be friendly as heck while we do our best to dominate the upcoming Winter Olympics.

Here's our list of 24 or so Canadian/Vancouver useful citation sites that we use for our clients… Most of these links go to the signup page and some you'll have to look for!

If you have any to add, post them in the comments below!

411.ca
Shop in Canada
Canada Direct info
CanPages
ZipLocal
WebLocal
AllPages for BC
GreaterVancouverWebDirectory
GoLocal BC
BC Business Directory
Profile Canada
Vancouver Net
Really Made in Canada
Canada Space
Local Vancouver
Genie Knows
Vancouver Web Search
Shopping Finder
Hot Frog
Daki Taki
N49
Brownbook Canada
Find Here
iBegin

As true as that statement is, as most things in life, the devil is in the details. What kind of content and how much? What kind of links, from where and how many? How do you get them?

Links to your website are generally estimated as being from 60-80% of the reason for your natural search ranking. So building links is the key to where your website ranks. Building links is easy; except for the hard work part! You're busy with your business – you really don't have time or the expertise to build your own links in enough volume to dominate your niche on the search engines.

How Do You Build Links?

Where do you get links? Most important of all, since as a small business owner with "never enough time and never enough money" how would you determine who is a good candidate to build links for you?

Angela Moore at Link Princess recently wrote about Interviewing Potential Link Builders. She outlines some basics about interviewing to find someone for the long run. Her article assumes that you are an expert link builder. I would strongly recommend that you understand the basics of link building in order to hire someone to do it for you.

What I would add to what she has written, is to test your prospective link builder. Set them a task and see how they do; make it hard enough to be a fair but tough test — pay them fairly for their time! Did they complete on time? Did they get it all done? If it's tough, some things will not be completed. What excuses were offered?

This test can tell you a ton about them and whether you want to work with them long term. Oh, and watch for our link building series upcoming…