Online Marketing Today

We have a domain that does quite well in a sense of ranking for our targeted phrases. It is about 5 years old, all done by hand and has undergone several design changes in that time. We like to think it is a clean and reputable site to compliment our business.

Our terms are quite geo targeted to various cities and the country itself. From event planners in Spain to business hotels in Barcelona to team building activities in Madrid etc. We do not get a massive amount of traffic, several thousand a month although continually slowly growing. We could I believe get more ‘generic’ less targeted traffic by using less targeted titles but we prefer the lower bounce rates on this site.

Up until a year or so ago we displayed via Google and similar tools a certain number of back links and that number used to grow steadily. We have not had any major campaigns for link building as it has been a small growing company that just as things were getting better cashflow has suffered like many in the recession recently, so budgets have never been great let’s say.

Over the last twelve months I estimate, these backlink reported numbers have dropped dramatically. The content grows slowly and the traffic grows slowly and all is quite steady on that front but the drop in links is a concern and we worry about consolidating our positions.

• What would be your recommendations in this situation be?
• Should we not worry over it seeing as traffic still visits?
• Should we run linkbait campaigns, advertise more on busy sites but with pages that get rarely seen at unrealistic rates?
• Invest more in social marketing?

Would love to hear your thoughts on backlinks for established websites and what direction might be best to take on a small budget. Thanks, regards and keep up the good work” ~ Clive – Conference Coordinator Spain

Hi Clive,

Thanks for your question.

This isn’t anything to worry about and you’ve ultimately answered the question yourself…

“The content grows slowly and the traffic grows slowly and all is quite steady on that front…”

If you haven’t seen any decrease in visitor numbers (in fact you say you’re seeing slow but steady new growth), and your new content is being picked up, then you’ve got nothing to worry about.

Backlink tools have become notoriously inaccurate over the years and Google is the most inaccurate. It stopped showing all backlinks along time ago – an indirect admission that backlinks are that most important aspect to high search engine rankings.

You know, they say there are about 200 different factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking websites – that may or may not be the case – but regardless, incoming links are at least 75% more important (if not more) than all other factors combined.

Just to give you an example, Google shows there are only 49 incoming links point to www.onlinemarketingtoday.com when using the link:www.domain.com search query.

On the other hand, Yahoo Site Explorer shows there are over 81,000.

I know for a fact that even Yahoo Site Explorer isn’t showing all incoming links that point to this domain (it’s over 10 years old now) – but out of all of the tools out there it’s the most accurate available.

Your domain shows about 1,200 in Site Explorer, and about 51 in Google.

Figure that one out – the domain your own now has over 80 times the volume of incoming links, and yet Google shows that you have more incoming links than this domain. That should speak for itself. It’s not even worth looking at the backlink results Google shows.

Having said that, I need to point out that just because Google doesn’t show them, it doesn’t mean they don’t know about them and take them into consideration for search engine rankings. Quite the opposite in fact.

With all of that said and done (not to worry about this), if you want to start improving your search engine rankings by building more incoming links, and you have a small budget to work with, your best bet, if nothing else is to do the following…

Signup for an account at OnlyWire.com.

Its $25 per year – less than the cost of a dozen of my preferred poison – which by the way, you’re welcome to shout me a round of.

This will automate your content distribution to most of the key social bookmarking websites, and several of the key social networking websites.

You do have to signup at each of these sites manually, and then load your data into your OnlyWire.com account – a process which can take a few hours – but from that point forward it’s automated.

Then try to have at least 1 new article created and distributed via an article distribution service each and every week for an entire year.

Include strategic keyword terms and backlinks in your article resource box (and in the article itself if at all possible).

If you hunt around you’ll find writers that will charge about $10 per article – so 52 per year is about $520 which is crazy cheap (even double the price and it’s still cheap).

If each article is distributed to 200 different websites over its lifetime, there’s 10,000 new incoming links you’re adding to the website each and every year. Some distribution services will place each article on 700+ different websites.

You can also post these articles to your own website / blog (even if it’s not in a prominent position and you don’t really want your visitors to go there) – then push them out through the OnlyWire.com service automatically.

It really is as simple as that.

The trouble is most people give up after they’ve created 4 articles and haven’t seen magical results. It’s about slow, steady, continuous promotion in order to get good results in the search engines with article marketing – and it’s probably the most effective and accessible way to build a lot of incoming links on a low budget.

Hope this helps.

PS: If you want to shout me that round, my PayPal email is the same as the one you receive my newsletters from ;-0

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