Knowing that, (and taking for granted that you’re already familiar with keyword research)  focus on one or two keywords or a single keyphrase per page and use that keyword/keyphrase near the beginning of your title.  Also use your keywords/keyphrase in several locations in the text of the page including in an h1 heading and once or twice in each of the first few paragraphs.

limit your title tag to 85 characters or less

limit your title tag of each page to include only the keyword/keyphrase, one or two geographic placenames, and the company name (use the company name at the end of the title).

Balancing all of the above factors and still keeping your page title under 85 characters (including spaces) is what will set you apart from your competitors.

Your meta description tag shouldn’t be longer than 200 or so characters and using a properly constructed sentence or two, it should broadly describe the theme of the page, it should employ your keywords, some keyword variations, thematically relevant terminology, and perhaps, even a call to action.  Your meta description makes up a substantive portion (if not the entire portion) of the snippit of info that lies below your link in a page’s listing the search engine results page.

If your site is a year old or less,  it is still very young compared to most of your competitors.  While your site is maturing, work on some of your social media profiles like yelp, merchant circle, kaboodle, twitter, linkedIn, and Facebook.  Develop those profiles fully, get yourself well-versed in how to make full use of those platforms, and use those sites as a means of networking and very gentle marketing.

When you’ve finished with the most important parts of your on-page optimization and in between working on your social media profiles, do this search on Yahoo: link:www.domain.com (replace “domain.com” with individual domain names of competitors that show up in Google’s results for your target keyword searches).  The results of those link:www.domain.com searches will show you what websites are linking to your that competitor.  While many of those links will be worth little or nothing, some of them will have value–a rough guide is simply does the page that contains the link have any pagerank at all–and if it does, see if that site will include a link to your site as well.  (The whole link building topic is too complex to be discussed in any detail here, but call us at Metapilot if you want more help in that area).  Besides sites with some page rank, focus on ones that are local to your location.

Since all your traffic won’t come directly from the algorithmic search results, on’t forget to get your site included in the local business/local search/maps feature that Google, Yahoo, and Bing provide.  Make sure you get your site listed in those places and to help you show up near the top of those local listings, make sure you submit your site to these places: yellowpages.com, superpages.com, citysearch.com, local.com, and infospace.com.

Actually, before getting to which link building method is best, keep in mind the reason for actually doing link building in the first place: Link building is done because search engines typically rank a website that has more popularity and authority higher than a site that has less popularity and authority. Popularity and authority, simply put, are measurements of how many other POPULAR and AUTHORITATIVE sites link to the site in question.

For example, a link from small directories that no one goes to except to submit a link to their own site does not have much, if any, popularity or authority because few other sites on the web care to link to a boring little directory. I mean, how often do you stumble across a directory site and say “This is exactly what I was looking for, let me spend some time reading this and let me put a link to it from my own site because I’m sure people who come to my site will love to have this information”? Not often, I would guess. (There are, however, small numbers of niche directories that do have value to others and that do accumulate popularity and authority because people actually link to them.)

On the other hand, websites that have legitimately informative information that answers questions and provides real value to visitors is much more likely to accumulate its own links–and thus its own popularity and authority. If you get a link TO your site from from a site like this, your site will then gain a little popularity and authority. If you get a link to your site from MANY sites like this, your site will gain much more popularity and authority. Search engines will then start to recognize that your site should rank higher than similar sites (such as your competitors) that don’t have as many links from popular, authoritative sites.

How Link Building is Done

O.K.,  now for which link building method is best. As mentioned above, sites with content worth linking to accumulate links from other websites. Put another way, if YOUR site has content worth linking to, other sites will find it worth while to link to it. Thus, creating content on your site that others want to link to is the key to successful link building.

And that is the hard part–how do you create content for your own site that others will want to link to? Once you figure that out–whether it be a particularly creative video, a useful software tool, a well thought out and informative articles, a unique product or service that others find valuable and/or fun–you’ve completed the hard part of link building.

After that, it is a matter of finding and communicating to website owners who would have reason to want to link to your valuable resource. Typically those would be people who own websites and/or blogs in a similar niche as your site and who’s visitors and readers would like to know about the fun, important, or otherwise valuable content you have created on your site.

Of course finding and communicating with these site owners is a skill and an art in its own right but the better the content you’ve created for your site the easier this becomes.

So anyway, that is the best link building method, in a nutshell. Create worthy content on your own site then let others who have websites with visitors who would be interested in consuming that content know about it and ask that they link to it. It is challenging and time consuming but that is why links are such a good measure of the popularity and authority of individual websites and why search engines use those measurements to help decide which sites should rank higher than other sites. Good luck to you.