When you are trying to rank a site, there are several levels to go through. First, when you have some content, you need to get the thing indexed and build up some initial links using social book marking and RSS submissions. You then move into leveraged link acquisition. I think Web 2.0 is the thing that you logically pursue probably shortly after that leveraged stuff. I wouldn't call it level three, maybe level two and a half.
There is a level three, but there is no panacea for level three. Level three is just finding good quality places to get links back from. That's when you or someone you're paying is going out there and finding links manually, building rank links from high quality sites.
For me personally it doesn't make a lot of sense. From a time perspective, I know there are companies out there that do it. I would much prefer to own my own assets and build them up over time and then point those assets at my own sites. The fundamental of business strategy is the word control. You need to be able to control your destiny and be able to influence things. To the degree that you are reliant on getting links from those other sources, in some way you have less control.
Ultimately you should be trying to build up your own assets so that you can influence the results and get the results that you want. Level three is, what I tell people, is going to be manually getting links from people. Level four is really moving to the next level moving to build up your own assets. Level four would include building your own network.
There is no level five. I mean you becoming the platform that people are getting links from. You, being the next Wikipedia or something like that, you being the next Web 2.0 site, potentially.
There are many different strategies you use going from the initial, let's get it indexed to some leveraged methods and then also we use Web 2.0 and the next level up, going out searching for those really good quality links through some sort of content exchange or providing articles to have published. The next level obviously, level four is building the network and really owning those links. For what it is that we do, there's quite a bit of work there. Some of it we outsource and some we keep in house.
We have our network of blog sites. To be honest we don't use them for ourselves. It's our testing bed, our laboratory so that we can test strategies just for the development of our own SEO product. We know that whatever we're doing is working, or when we hear of something, we can test that it works. The reality is that for our own business, we do very little SEO. It's the cobbler's son with no shoes sort of thing. It's quite funny.
For us we do very little of that. What it boils down to is a discussion between SEO and business. I think the fundamental question to ask is, most people are asking what is the minimum I can do to get the biggest impact in my life, and while it's a good question to ask from a technical perspective, it's a bad mentality to have. It's a much better mindset to say, how can I serve the maximum amount of people?
What we say is, creating content should be part of every single business regardless of what your strategy is. Creating content, having conversation, creating fantastic value, serving as many people as you can through the value that you're delivering through blog posts, through videos, through audios, through whatever form it takes, through software, put as much value out there as possible.
Now you're going to put that content out there anyway. So why not put that content out there in the most leveraged optimized way possible? If you just put that content out on your own website and you don't link to it and no one ever finds it, you're not creating value for people. Value is created when people see the stuff that you're putting out there.
Look at everything you do and make sure if you're going to do the work once, with a little bit of extra work you can receive a hundred times the reward, particularly if you're disciplined about doing it with every single piece of content that you put out there.
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