Beginning early this year, google made some changes to their search ranking, in the name of providing more relevant search results for it’s users, on official google blog it is estimated 11.8% search results will be affected by this update, say it another way, almost 12% of google search results are useless or of low quality. The update was initiated more than a year ago, and recently I see some of my ranks were lowered considerably, on the other hand almost all keywords promoted by contextual links are not affected, a few of these keywords ranked better than ever, it’s safe to say that old way of link building is doomed.
Now what on earth is plain link building and how do people do it? a large percentage of SEO firms will do this, they add your links to those linking websites without context, the only updates on those websites are the new links, it’s safe to assume all of them are trash, 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.
A few real world examples will help to explain what I said. When I got into online marketing long time ago, I started with this keyword, Traffic Cone, of course with old way of link building, a lot of sites I used had too many links, and the worst thing is that those sites are linking sites only and had no content, not even crap content. In the beginning, the ranking of the keyword in question rise pretty fast, lately the keyword link stayed on the first page for a while, the party was over when google updated it’s algorithm. Here is another keyword, chain pullers, we put the link in relevant context, not too many plain links have been built, you can imagine how this keyword ranks. So contextual link wins this time, what about future? It all boils down to content, so if you create great content, you will attract readers as well as search engines. You may think there are already too many blogs out there, it’s not true, there will never be too many good blogs, take a look at this blog, baby stroller , 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 we can see, quality blog marketing is much better than plain link building. Now imagine you have your own blog network, such as E Tracks, then it will be easier to do article marketing.
Remember content is king, you just need to create content, share the content with people, promote your business with the content, your effort will reward you handsomely in the end. Whatever you do, you will need persistence and patience, nothing will automatically improve overnight, be it your business or search rankings, let’s keep building and maintaining our blogs until end of the day. One of the best articles directories is EzineArticle, google will index a new article on ezine promptly, 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, let’s look at this one, Car Dolly , nice writing, good content, published on popular site, this article is a good example of article marketing.
We’re not finished yet, please remeber, we have hot social media now, no one can afford to not using them. One thing you can do for your blogs is to install twitter tools, sign up for a twitter account and create a new application, set up API credentials in your twitter tools option, then make sure every new post will post a new tweet, it’s easy and really useful, it’s a big loss if you don’t use this tool.

