These cases are generally the result of bad linkbuilding. There are so many varying opinions and resources for linkbuilding that as a novice web marketer, you can easily travel down the wrong path. The problem with all of the advice you find across the web, is that most of it is outdated.

For example: A year ago, it was extremely popular for marketers to try and use deep-linking (linking to pages inside of their site instead of the homepage) as a means to boost the rankings for those particular pages. Well.. this became common knowledge, spammers took advantage, and now that tactic raises red flags. If you are a blogger reading this, you know that more often than not, when you link to a website, you reference the name of the site, and link to the homepage ( e.g. Fermentation Wine Blog ).

Here are some more linkbuilding concepts that you should avoid:

1. Reciprocal Linking – Yes.. it is great for cross promotion and comradery among bloggers and other sites, but it serves very littly, if any, purpose for SEO. If I give you an apple, and you give it back to me, we net 0.
2. Directory Submissions – Unless it is a high quality directory, you’ll most likely be establishing a relationship with spammers, and do much more harm than good.
3. E-zine articles – If you want to write content to increase your SEO, write it for your own site. The rss feeds from E-zine articles get scraped by spammers, and duplicated thousands of times across the web. Next thing you know, it looks like YOU duplicated the same article and put it out everywhere, and YOU are the spammer.
4. Excessive Submissions to Social Bookmarking Sites, Commenting on Blogs and Forums – ONLY do this if you have legitimate comments and stories. Otherwise, your site is reported as spam.
5. Links that cost less than $10 – If someone tries to sell you links for less than $10, they are most likely going to do all of the things that I just said not to do, and charge you for it. Then you have to hire someone to clean it up.
6. Rapid Linkbuilding – If you are using legitimate means to linkbuild, but do it too quickly, the search engine Gods feel cheated, and you will get banned from the search engine.. (your site doesn’t even get indexed anymore)

Obviously the overarching concept here is that if you want to do linkbuilding, you should do it legitimately by having a great site with great content. If you need some help, let us know.  If you want to try linkbuilding on your own, we recommend Blogsvertise… please be sure to use this affiliate link so we get credit for telling you about their great service!

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• Search Engine Optimization
• Duplicate Content and SEO

Keyword Discovery and Analysis:
This is the first step to a proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Campaign.  The goal of the Keyword Discovery and Analysis is to determine the keywords that will provide the best Traffic on Investment.  We start off by developing a list of “seed” terms, which are the words/phrases that best represent the results you wish to optimize your site.  We use these “seed” terms to generate a comprehensive list of alternatives which may also be used by your target audience in searching for your site.  After developing this list of keywords, we analyze them individually to determine not only the quantity and quality of the traffic they currently and historically generate, but also the competitiveness of these terms.  We conclude by providing you with the list of Keywords, and our recommendation on those we feel would provide your best return on investment.

Onsite Performance:
How your website is designed and deployed plays a large part in how well your site ranks in the search engines.  When conducting our Onsite Performance Analysis, we evaluate your site from a search engines perspective and provide you with specific recommendations on how to correct the problem areas.   Our Onsite Performance Analysis addresses the following major areas of your website:

• Meta Information
  • This is the descriptor information that you are able to give to the search engines.  It is important that the Titles and Descriptions you provide are concise, unique, relevant. This is one of the most common starting places for onsite SEO.
• Site Content
  • How well is the content of your site written?  Is it unique page to page?  Is it unique to your website? Do your pages contain the best keywords, proper density, and best placement?  Are you using the image descriptions in your site as a means to further provide “guiding” information for the search engines?  We answer all of these questions and more.
• Current Incoming Links
  • It is important to understand what type of links are pointing to your site.  There are many types and qualities of links that can benefit, or even sometimes hinder, your search engine rankings.  We evaluate the number and source of the incoming links to your site, including the anchor text currently being used.  This helps in obtaining a greater understanding of your current situation, and provides insight for linkbuilding.
• URL Structure
  • How are your URL’s formed?  Do they include random strings of text, and characters that would be meaningless to any human reader?  This portion of the analysis addresses URL canonicalization issues, query strings, and other items that will help your pages display as more relevant to particular terms.
• Server Settings
  • This analysis takes a close look at your DNS settings to ensure you are using the proper CName and A records for your domain and subdomains (www.), MX records, and similar items.

Offsite Performance:
There is only some much that you can do onsite to optimize your search engine rankings.  The final, and one of the most crucial tool for SEO is linkbuilding.  If done properly, it can be a valuable tool for increasing your search engine rankings.  If done improperly however, it can be extremely detrimental to your rankings, and possibly even cause permanent damage to your domain name.

• The Logic of Linkbuilding
  • Modern search engines place extensive value on the quantity and quality of links to your website for several reasons:
    1. Each link provided to your site acts as a vote of credibility.
    2. The anchor text used for that link gives contextual reference to your site
  • Some types of Links are better than others:
    1. Links that come from sites relevant to yours
    2. Links that are used in context to your site
    3. Links that come from higher PR sites
    4. Links that contain anchor text relevant to your site
    5. Links that can be followed by the search engine crawler
    6. Links that come from .edu or .gov domain names
  • Some types of Links can hurt your website:
    1. Links that come from link directories
    2. Links that come from penalized sites
    3. Links that appear to be spam (no context)
    4. Links from sites associated with spam
    5. Links that are built to quickly
• Our Method of Linkbuilding
  • GrapeThinking has developed a large network of bloggers across many industries who write about lifestyle, travel, wine, technology, products, financial advice, family, holistic health care, and more.
  • When we are contracted for linkbuilding, we check the bloggers in our network against the criteria mentioned earlier to ensure that we build only the highest quality of links.
  • We then pay these bloggers to write articles/reviews about your products or website, using specific anchor text (determined through Keyword Discovery) for their links to your site.
  • This method not only generates the links that we need for SEO, but can also generate traffic and clients to your site from the articles.

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