2012 – A Year Of Turmoil
In years gone by in the wonderful world of SEO, ranking for keyword phrases was quite a bit simpler than it is today. Can I get an amen, people? Can I get an alleluia?
Those were the salad days, the proverbial Garden of Eden. Those days gone forever, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t crush it online.
We all need to simply acknowledge that some big changes have occurred in our industry. And remember, within big change there is big opportunity. So, let’s crush it, shall we?
If you’ve been doing SEO for any amount of time you already know all about Google’s little, evil laboratory and all the changes they’ve been throwing at us, things are getting more and more complex every day. And, you know what? That’s just fine. Things are peachy when you can measure what Google is up to through vigorous testing and roll with the punches. Think relevance, my lads and lassies.
Relevant Sites Didn’t Matter As Much In The Past
So, what is Google up to exactly? Well, in the past Google didn’t look very hard at offpage contextual relevance when critiquing where a website was getting it’s links from. They didn’t seem to care. A link was indeed just a link, no matter where it came from (barring receiving links from gambling and pornography sites, which have pretty much always been a big no-no in case you might have been wondering.)
So, as the practice went an SEO could get a link with the anchor text — “sports car” — on a website about giraffes and they’d be good to go, especially if the page was a high Page Rank (PR) page, with low outbound links, on an authority site, and so on and so forth. Most of you know the drill.
Things have changed a bit now. These types of links still work (raise our rankings for our chosen keywords), without a doubt we all still need high PR links from authority sites, and outbound links on a page are still a factor as well. But these non relevant links don’t work as well as they used to.
Google realizes that sites about giraffes may link out to sites about sports cars at certain times, and if we take a look at big authority news sites and some big authority sites, well gosh, these sites link out to and receive links from many different sites; with authority news sites relevance becomes pretty much impossible…and, you know what? These sites still rank quite well for many various keyword phrases.
Google knows this, so they know that they will probably never completing devalue links from less relevant pages/sites. Following me? It’s all about weight.
Now Relevant Links Hold More Weight – They Are Critical To Killing It In The SERPS Now
Google has become more sophisticated and is using a lot more discretion in “weighing” where we’re all getting out links from, in rigorous testing more and more professional SEO’s are finding that getting links from relevant sites holds a lot more weight nowadays. If you do some testing right now for yourself, it’s very likely you’ll find the very same thing.
Links from relevant pages and relevant websites have more weight, no matter the anchor text or the PR on the page. It’s long been suspected that Google was heading in this direction, now it’s simply been confirmed. And SEO’s that are using relevant sites for links are killing in the search engines right now. They’re crushing it. Game over.
Therefore in 2012 (and beyond), getting links from relevant websites and relevant pages (relevant to our own site’s content) has become even more important to ranking highly. And it appears that the direction that Google is taking right now that this will become even more important in future updates.
Guest Posting – So Much More Important Now – Cozy Up To Your Competitors
So, where do we get our links? Do we set up a bunch of web 2.0’s (blogspots, tumblrs) with relevant content and link back to our money sites? No way! Not a chance! These are akin to link farms. These simply aren’t the best links anymore, Google knows that these sites are often used by link spammers.
Right now they’re looking very closely for links from actual competitors, sites in your same niche. Doh! That sounds kind of scary, right? Competitor sites. That’s right, they’re looking for links from other sites in your niche. It’s time to get cozy with your competition and work together.
So, how are we supposed to get these sites to link to us? And why would they want to link to us? They’re are competitors after all. A-ha! Great questions, you’re one smart cookie, aren’t you?
You get sites to link to you by writing content for their site. You want to write high quality content for other sites in your niche and give it to them, in exchange for a link back to your site. In fact, you can do guest posts for other sites and have those webmasters guest post on your site as well, it’s very much a win-win situation. The more the merrier.
Google really wants sites to link to each other, gone are the days where we don’t want to link to other sites (this has been true for quite some time). We actually rank higher when we link to sites in our niche. Of course, many of you may have known that already, just a refresher.
Bottom Line – Links Are About Traffic Not The Link
The old guest post is more important and valuable than ever before. People are killing it with guest posts right now because these links are so powerful. It’s much less about the amount of links right now with Google, it’s about funneling traffic to the right places from the right places. Google loves that. They love relevance.
The fastest and easiest way to find guest post opportunities? Well, using software is the answer there. With a good, speedy, reliable piece of software you can scrape Google for potential guest posting opportunities. And while many other sites are building crappy web 2.0 links that don’t count for much, you’ll be building links with real weight. You really are a smart cookie.
