SEO Information

By Julia Gulevich

I've been working at company's website search engine optimization for some time and I've always thought that the content of the website was everything. It seemed to me that a combination of keywords, meta tags, and actual content was the magic formula and that a wise balance of these components would guarantee one of the top positions in Google search results.

At present it seems that having good quality website content is not enough to rank well in Google. I have read numerous articles about SEO and discovered that SEO experts and many webmasters considered link building as the main SEO strategy. It seems that everything is about backlinks now. The site which has more backlinks from other sites wins. So, I decided to focus on backlinks.

How to get backlinks? The first thing I thought of was web directories. Web directories are online catalogues which accept the links to websites and sort them by different categories accordingly to the site content. There are directories that will add your website absolutely for free. Some directories require a submission fee. Others will ask you a reciprocal link in return. There are directory submission services on the Internet. So, if you don't have much time, you can outsource your site submission to a third party company. If you prefer managing your link building process by yourself, search for a directory submission tool.

I used free website submitter to add my site to directories. Such tools already have a database of web directories so you don't need to waste your time for searching the directories on the Internet. I submitted my site to about 2000 directories in a couple of days. Link submission software also allows you submit your website with different anchor texts and descriptions so each submission looks unique and more natural. The directories place your submission to the validation queue. It can take days or even weeks for your link to be approved. So, be patient and don't expect an instant improvement of your site PageRank in Google.

Another good idea is Wordpress Blogs. Blog users can leave comments on the articles and stories they read. To leave a comment, you are asked to provide your name, URL, email address and comment itself. When your comment is posted your name becomes a link to your website. The key is to use your keywords as your name (although not all blog owners like it). So, I started posting comments in blogs that are relevant to our company's business. In order you don't take me for a spammer, I want you to know that I only posted a comment if I had something relevant to say. I have to deal with email spam every day so I hate spam whatever it is. Post a comment only if you have something of value to add to the discussion and not just to get backlinks. You can read the comments which are already posted by others and follow suite.

As my goal was to improve our company's website rank for "my example" keywords, I put my keywords as my name and for my URL obviously a link to our site. Then I posted my comment. Like directory submissions blog comments are pending for approval. Now I must admit I made a blunder (yet I was doing it for the first time). I should have saved the links of the pages where I posted comments. You see blog owners may not like to see keyword links in the comment "Name" field and will promptly delete the comments. Other blog owners may not like the link in the name and will remove it. So, because not every comment is approved, you should find the blogs where the comments are posted and save them. You will return to those blogs later, post another comment and get one more backlink.

So, I worked at this for about two months. As I had other work to do, I didn't dedicate too much time to find blogs and post comments. I managed to leave 2-3 comments a day. After a couple of months I noticed that our website was listed higher in search results. Now it is on the first page in the results for my keywords.

I should say that it's not a 100% guaranteed method but it is one of the possibilities to get a higher rank in Google. How much money could I spend trying to get listed? Now I get what I was looking for for free. And I hope someone else can benefit from this. Blog comments may stand as one of the truly free ways to get the search engine ranking you desire for the keywords you want. Isn't it a beautiful thing?