Let us assume I was a single woman looking to date or marry a perfect guy (not really, I am happily married for 15 years with 2 kids) and I knew exactly what I was looking for in a  guy. There could be a large number of proposals for me but if I do not have an idea about what this “perfect” guy is for me, could it be possible for me to get him? It is important to get the right kind of visitors to your site (and in the above scenario, the right kind of guy).

If I was still trying to figure out what the perfect guy is to me, I am in the initial phase of buying which is called “knowledge gathering” or learning about the subject.
If the guy would give me sufficient details about him and his information looked impressive, there is a higher chance that I call him up and set a date with him. Long tail keywords usually convert better because they catch people in the buying/conversion cycle.

If somebody is searching for a specific keyword (that is important to you or your business), it is important that your website shows up in the search results page at a good position.

If you are bidding for a keyword through advertisement, bid higher to reach to a better position or consider keywords that are more specific/targeted for your business.  For e.g. the keyword “insurance” would be used by a large number of advertisers and to reach to a top position might cost you a good fortune (which you may or may not be able to afford)

Type of Searches

Searches can be classified into 3 categories including

• Transactional searches: Identifying local business, making a purchase online or completing a task
• Navigational searches: Visiting a pre-determined destination and sourcing the correct website URL
• Information searches: Researching non-transactional information, getting quick answers and ego-searching

Links

For search engines, links are like streets between different locations(pages). Through links, search engines discover how pages are related to each other and the associated relationship.

The link signals include

• Global popularity: The more popular and important a site, the more links from that site matter. Linking to Wikipedia means that site is popular and important
• Local/Topic-specific: If your site is linked from a site with a similar site or community, it is treated with higher relevance
• Anchor text: One of the strongest signals the engine use in ranking is anchor text
• TrustRank: Earning links from highly relevant domains can result in a significant boost to the scoring metric. Universities, government, websites and non-profit organizations represent examples of high-trust domains
• Freshness: Link signals tend to decay over time. Sites that were once popular often go stale and eventually fail to earn new links
• Social Sharing: Although search engines treat socially shared links differently than other types of links, search engines notice them. Social shares are not considered the same as links.
   

Link building basics

• Natural links: Links that are given naturally by sites/pages that want to link to your content/company
• Manual (outreach) link building: SEO creates these links by emailing bloggers for links, submitting sites to directories or paying for listing of any kind. Examples include filling out forms for submissions to a website aware program or convincing a professor to include your resource in syllabus.
• Self-created, non-editorial: Creating links through guest book signing, blog comments, user profiles. (Pursue with caution as they can be considered spam)
   

To end this post, following are examples of link building strategies:

• How do you get your customers to link to you
• Build a company blog. Make it valuable, information and entertaining resource
• Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking
• Be newsworthy
• Find directories or listings of relevant resource