I had an interesting conversation on a forum the other night about the ranking of articles by the search engines. Some people were saying that they had great success and were on the top of Google and others were saying that no matter what they did they could not rank their articles at all. It was then suggested that some articles were shown and this is where things got interesting.

The articles that appeared to be ranking well were targeting keywords that should have been quite hard to rank for as they had a few thousand searches a month and there was a lot of competition. The articles with low search or termite keywords with not much competition were nowhere to be found in either Google or Yahoo.

When analysing the different articles further it was mentioned that one had a lot more stop words than the other and that this was probably causing the difference in search engine rankings.  Both articles had around 450 words in content so should have been considered by the search engines as quality content but on further investigation it showed that the better ranking article had less stop words than the other.

The article that was not ranking even though the keywords that were being targeted were low competition had almost 300 of these stop words in the content.  What this meant was that a majority of this article was ignored by the search engines and the words that were not were just single and long tail keywords.  This then meant that the article looked as though it was keyword stuffed and to Google and Yahoo this automatically raised an alarm and was therefore virtually ignored.

The other article on the other hand, even though it had over 200 of these words that get ignored had been formatted in a totally different way.  What the author of this article had done was to use semantically related keywords so keeping the quality and relevancy of his article.  This gave Google the content that it wanted and was therefore rewarded with a top search engine ranking for this article.

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Having a good link building strategy is essential if you want to achieve a top search engine ranking for your website.  Strategic link building in the eyes of google includes diversifying your links so that they do not come from just one avenue.

What this means is that you should not just link from say social bookmarking sites alone as this is classed as not having natural links and will often get your site ignored by the search engines. This in turn will mean that it will be harder to improve search engine rankings for your site.  Using automated link building tools is also not a good thing to use as they can only pull links from one source type.  So not only does this not look natural but you have no control over what sites these links come from and with the new Google Panda update many sites are now blacklisted.

Good link building campaigns will include using the following sources, press releases, social bookmarking sites, article directories and website directories. Having links from these different sites are seen to be natural and your site will then get an increased search engine ranking from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Press releases are one of the most powerful ways of getting your message across about a product that you have released or one that you are promoting. You do however have to make sure that your press release is not a blatant advertisement, so checking out previously approved press release samples for correct formatting should stop yours from being rejected.  Making it more informational and leaving it so that the reader is wanting to know more will get it accepted and also make them more inclined to click on the link to your site.

Press releases are often best written by a third party as they will have a more unbiased view than if you wrote it yourself. If you do decide that you want to write it then having a look at some examples of press releases to give you a feel for how they should be written.

What you do not want to do and again this is something that will often get your press release rejected is to link directly to a product you are promoting as an affiliate. Warm your reader up with the press release and then offer them a link to a page on your website which will sell the features and benefits of the product or service that you are promoting. By the time the reader has reached this stage and if you have done things correctly they will have turned into a prospective customer and will click on your affiliate link.

On the other hand if the product or service that you are writing about is your own creation then you can link to it directly and your press release will more often than not be accepted. Again remember not to try and sell in your press release.

Although press releases are powerful on their own remember you need to remember that you want the links to your site to look natural. You should therefore incorporate links from social bookmarking sites and directory sites to ensure that you give your site the best chance of the increased search engine ranking that you are looking for. Remember that traffic is the lifeblood of any online business and without good visibility for your site, the chance of people seeing the products or services that you are offering will be severely limited.

“Backlink Builder” is a product that has just been released onto the market and using this link building strategy will definitely put you in favour with Google, Yahoo and the other search engines.