Short while ago google had changed their ranking algorithm, the reason cited is that google wanted to provide more relevant results, google engineers published blog post which indicated there were 11.8% organic search results will be affected, put it this way, google thinks about 12% of it’s search results are really bad and need to manipulated. They planned and started the update about one year ago, maybe that’s why some of my ranks dropped out of first 10 pages, on the other hand almost all keywords promoted by contextual links are not affected, some of the keywords even ranked better than before, it’s almost a sure thing that plain link building loses all it’s attraction, at least in the eye of google.
What is old way of link building any way? a lot of marketing companies did and are doing the plain link building, they add your links to those linking websites without context, the only updates on those websites are the new links, and most of them are useless, we call these sites link spamming sites. Now google algorithm probably will weed out these sites, all the links on those websites will have the same fate.
Examples will be great for explanation. When I got into online marketing long time ago, I started promote the keyword, Drum Lifter, at that time almost every body was doing plain linking campaign, a lot of sites I used had too many links, worst yet, those sites had no content at all. In the beginning, the ranking of the keyword in question rise pretty fast, eventually the keyword could be found on first page, the party was over when google updated it’s algorithm. Here is another keyword, chain puller , most back links for this keyword are from articles and posts, not too many plain links have been built, the rank for this keyword is making me real happy. Now contextual links win the battle, then what? It all boils down to content, as long as you dole out high quality content, your rank will improve over time, since search engines are another kind of readers. How do you do it? Writing articles and building blogs, such as this interesting blog, top smartphones 2011 , I build it as a hobby and kept adding good or mediocre content, and to my surprise, I have high ranks for some of competitive keywords. As far as SEO concerned, article marketing with great content is the way to go. If you can build a group of your own blogs, such as Laser Level, you will have the power to push any sites up in search engines.
Remember content is king, you just need to create content, share the content with people, and put your keywords in the context you’re good to go, as long as you don’t stop doing this, you will win over customers and search engines. Persistence and patience are the keys to success, you shouldn’t expect things to improve overnight, be it your business or search rankings, keep doing what we have to do till the end of world. When publisinh articles, I prefer ezine, a new article will be indexed and cached in less than an hour, and some popular blogs will get your post indexed in minutes, there venues are ideal for promoting your site, let look at some aticles or posts which are published and indexed, have a taste of this one, Laser Level, quality content, nice presentation, indexed by google, all these points make it perfect for SEO.
Last but not least, the social media is the must have channel for your marketing effort. For wordpress blogs, I recommend twitter tools, get a twitter account and API keys, set up API credentials in your twitter tools option, you should choose to post a tweet for every new post, it’s easy and really useful, no one should miss this tool out.