There are many ways to create back links to a website, and they are all valuable. Reciprocal linking probably takes the most time, because this is the type of link building where you display someone else’s link in exchange for them displaying yours. This sort of relationship works best when the link building occurs between two sites that include similar, but complementary content. After all, if a site has content that is basically the same as yours, then you are competitors for a niche, and wouldn’t want to promote each other, but if the sites have nothing to do with each other, fans of one site won’t be inclined to click on the link of the other.

Contextual links are increasingly valuable, as big search engines like Google tweak their spiders to avoid cheap, massive directories. High quality, unique articles that mention your site and mentions on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter all increase the possibility that your site will be seen and visited. This sort of link building can also be time consuming and tedious.

Although link building is a great way to gain visitors (especially since quality back links increase your page rank on search engines) it can be exhausting and time consuming. Many web-based businesses find that it is impossible to focus on both their business and link building, especially when they are first starting out. Link building is a full time job in and of itself, which is why a link building service is necessary to help you promote your business.

Status Media is a link building service that does it all. Think about it: do you even have time to create accounts on all the major social media players like Facebook, Stumble Upon, Reddit, Twitter, Google Plus and all the rest, let alone keep these accounts alive and working for you on a regular basis? If you did all that yourself, the quality of your site would likely suffer. That’s why Status Media is the link building service you want—they’ll do all the work, and you’ll reap the rewards of more visitors, and more conversions.

Link building is just as important as ever—but the way to do it has changed. Rather than spend 75% of your time engaged in promotion rather than running your business, you can hire a link building service that has been in business for over a decade and is at the forefront of SEO. Status Media is that link building service.

Most people will consider their friend’s opinions about a product or service when making purchasing decisions, so this presents an opportunity for firms to reach a wide audience of potential customers, who will have seen that their product or service has effectively been given a “thumbs up” by one of their own friends.

This means it is vital for firms to invest in their Facebook optimization, as well as in their SEO, and to ensure the content of their sites is interesting or entertaining enough to motivate a visitor to click the “Like” button.

According to Facebook owner Mark Zuckeman, users make around 1 billion “Likes” every day, which represents a huge, and very valuable, amount of personal data. Having access to a record of what a user’s preferences are when it comes to cars, clothes, music, holiday destinations, restaurants, or any other product or service, is what every online advertiser would love, and also every search engine.

Microsoft’s Bing and Facebook have now gone into partnership so that Bing can incorporate Facebook’s “Like” data into it’s search results. When a user searches for something, there will be a dedicated section on the results page showing sites “Liked” by your Facebook friends”, even showing the name and profile picture of that friend.

This sets Bing apart from Google and could increase it’s share of the search market considerably. Where Google has used links between websites as a key measure of a site’s credibility and relevance, and SEO specialists have employed link building services to improve search results, Bing has the ability to offer a much more personal search experience where Facebook optimization becomes key, and “Likes” replace links.

“Two years ago big brands were experimenting with us,” she said. “They started buying with us a year ago. Now they’re going big.”

Facebook recently reported it had reached the 500 million member mark, and with every new member that signs up, comes fresh new pages on which to place ads. And half it’s users return to the site every single day, creating a great opportunity for advertisers to have their ads seen multiple times. Despite this, however, advertising prices have remained stable so far.

Display ads, which usually appear as boxes of pictures, text and video on webpages, are the main source of Facebook’s ad growth, and according to EMarketer Inc, spending on this type of advertising is expected to increase 13% to $8.56 billion in the US this year.

Finding ways to monetize social media and convincing firms to invest has been a difficult task, but it seems that advertisers are now really taking this avenue very seriously, and with a target audience of this size, it would be very difficult to ignore.

Most companies use an SEO specialist to handle their brand’s online presence, and employ link building services to assist in a number of ways. To integrate Facebook and other social media into an online campaign, the link building service can be used to place text links on third party websites, linking directly to the brand’s social media pages and advertisements.

Link building services are most widely used to boost search engine rankings, however, and form a vital part of an overall online advertising campaign.

Although Google hasn’t stated exactly how it will incorporate this new software and information into it’s search service, it claims that it will “…create a new, easier way for users to find better flight information online, which should encourage more users to make their flight purchases online.” It says the move is pro-consumer, and will benefit passengers, airlines and online travel agencies, and will ultimately drive more potential customers to the airlines and travel agencies’ websites.

Google also has an advantage in this area as it is a highly trusted site, and this could encourage people who were previously reluctant to book online due to trust issues with smaller sites, take the plunge.

Many travel industry insiders, however, are worried that this will give Google too much power and could give them too much influence over the industry, though Google is still honoring existing agreements that ITA has with it’s partners.

In the future, it is possible that Google may decide to sell flight tickets directly, which would pose a considerable threat to it’s competitors, and increase the need for them to bolster their online activities, and visibility, through traditional SEO techniques like link building.

Google’s foray into the travel market is long overdue in the eyes of some, and Microsoft already has it’s own Bing travel search service.

Experian Hitwise, used by SEO specialists as a source of search data and analysis, has been monitoring the top 20 “downstream” industries from Google since 2006, where it already noticed that travel was one major area that Google had not branched into. A list of the top 20 downstream industries for June 2010, available from the Hitwise website, shows that Google has involvement in almost all of them, barring travel.

Google is the number one source of traffic to travel agencies accounting for 15% of upstream clicks in June, and accounting for a huge 32% of all upstream clicks to destination and accommodation websites.

These figures clearly highlight the ongoing importance of an effective SEO campaign, using techniques like employing a link building service via a digital agency, to ensure that travel firms maximize their positions in search engine results. No online travel company can seriously expect to succeed without it.

Here are five different types of link building and the reasons for employing them:

TO GAIN MORE TRAFFIC

Your aim may simply be to gain more visits to your site from internet users. The best way to do this is to research other sites, which are relevant to, or compliment, your own site and which are already receiving a decent amount of traffic. There are a number of online tools and services which can assist in this research such as Google AdPlanner or Compete.

By placing links on these sites, you are increasing the chance of receiving visits to your site by potential customers of the right type – almost like an online referral. For this type of linking a mixture of free, paid, dofollow and nofollow links can be used.

TO BOOST SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS

The aim here is to increase your site’s performance within search results for specific keywords and the main job of an SEO agency. For example, if Statusmedia wishes to rank highly for “link building service” the links would be placed using link building service as the anchor text.

The links need to be dofollow and can be placed on blogs, directory submissions, signatures on forum posts, publishing press release articles and gaining organic links on relevant external sites.

TO BOOST PAGERANK

PageRank is widely regarded as one of the best ways to gauge a website’s importance to Google. PageRanking runs on a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest. It is gained by having links to your site from external sites, and the higher the PageRank of the site where your link is placed, the more it contributes to increasing your site’s PageRank. “Link Juice” is a term commonly used to describe the feeding of PageRank from one site to another.

Online tools like SEO Quake let you view site’s PageRank and help identify which sites may be best to try to gain links from.

TO IMPROVE YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION

It may be important for you to simply boost your company’s profile online or to bolster your reputation as a serious business. The placement of links in this case, will centre around using your name or company name as the anchor text, and linking to various parts of your online presence such as social media profiles and blogs as well as your main website.

The links themselves could be placed within your own website linking, for example, to your Facebook profile or Twitter stream, or linking from any one of these components to another. The overall aim is to bring as much positive information about your business and website to users attention via search results.

TO STRENGTHEN YOUR BACKLINKS

By creating links back to the pages upon which your backlinks are placed, you can strengthen the overall power of your backlinks. Socially bookmarking pages your links are placed on is one simple and effective way of doing this. It encourages the search engine’s crawlers to come back to your site regularly to check for updates, which in turn can increase the frequency with which your page is cached.

There are also a number of SEO practices that should be avoided. Five of these are listed below:

CREATING BAD LINKS

Link building is probably the most important technique in SEO today. Having links to your website from other quality, relevant websites boosts your site’s reputation in the eyes of Google. Conversely, if there are links to your website placed on inappropriate, weak or unethical sites, this can damage your SEO campaign. Google particular dislikes “bad neighbourhood” sites – sites that link to adult content, medications or gambling. Also ensure that links you place do not have “no follow” attributes as these have no SEO value.

PUBLISHING DUPLICATE CONTENT

Google monitors the content of websites to check that one site is not copying content from another. This could apply to any written material on your website from news stories and information pages to blog articles. It is also advisable if you share the same content over multiple domains ie you own both .co.uk and .com, to set up a redirection from one to the other, otherwise Google will see this as duplicated content. Google penalizes websites that are deemed to be displaying duplicate content.

KEYWORD SPAMMING

In the past, it was common practice to fill your website with dozens of keywords, with multiple slight variations. Google is now well aware of this practice and no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique. Any SEO agency will also be aware that this technique is outdated.

USING INVISIBLE WORDS

In a similar vein, hiding keywords by placing them on your site using the same colour of ink as the page background will no longer fool Google. Any effort to do so will not affect your page ranking in any way.

DOING ANYTHING THAT APPEARS UNNATURAL

Search engines are reaching a stage in development where they are becoming able to identify what is and isn’t natural. Excessive use of any SEO technique will flag to the search engines that something isn’t right.

The key to a successful strategy is maintaining a balance of different techniques that fit together in a natural way. Firms need to ensure they employ a reputable, established digital agency to manage their SEO campaign and gain the results they desire.

Air travelers were forced to seek alternative means of transport by land or sea, or simply wait for the ash cloud to pass in hotels and paid accommodation, in the hope they would find replacement flights once conditions were resumed to normal.

The quest for alternative travel, accommodation and information on the crisis took place for many on the internet. Online competitive intelligence firm Experian Hitwise, reported significant increases in internet searches for many travel and volcano-related search terms.

In the week ending 17th April, 10,000 different searches containing the word “volcano” were performed by internet users, ten times the amount for those searches from the previous week. Those companies whose websites appear highest in Google’s results, and likely received the most internet traffic, will be those who have most effectively employed an SEO agency to boost their online presence.

There was a 45% increase in the number of UK internet visits to aviation websites, including airline and airport homepages, as travellers desperately searched for alternative flights and updates on the crisis.

UK Searches for the term “eurostar”, and visits to the Eurostar website, increased by 67% in the week, and in France the search traffic increased by 22%.

Ferry companies also saw a rise in internet traffic, with a 59% increase, and car hire firms saw a 9% increase.

The top 10 fastest moving travel industry search terms for the period were:

1) easyjet
2) ryanair
3) Manchester airport
4) Heathrow airport
5) British airways
6) Easyjet.com
7) Eurostar
Travelodge
9) Gatwick airport
10) Flybe

The impact of the crisis on search behavior of internet users, highlights the importance of having an effective online advertising strategy. All these firms invest heavily in search engine optimisation to ensure that they can easily be found in search engines, and it is at times like this that the investment in SEO, through a digital agency, can pay dividends. Individual parts of the strategy, for example making best use of a link building service, add to the success of the campaign.

All in all, the crisis has cost the aviation industry 3.3 billion dollars, two thirds of which has been at the cost of European airlines, and according to reports by UK’s Centre For Economics And Business Research, this loss could result in an increase of 5% in airfares.

Despite this, a survey of 1010 holidaymakers by TNS RI Travel & Tourism, has found that the crisis has failed to deter the majority of people canceling or postponing holidays, with only one in ten looking at canceling their Summer holiday.

This tailoring of results obviously means users get a more refined search experience, which could make use of the search engine faster and more convenient, as well as generating a potentially regular visitor/customer for the website in question.

However, from a digital advertising agency point of view this creates a potential problem, which could affect the effectiveness of an online lead generation and SEO campaign. This is because, with personalized search activated, when a company checks it’s Google ranking position, the tailor made results are specific to that user and not necessarily the same results that their customers will see.

So, when checking it’s actual rankings, a company should deactivate peronsalized search. In order to do this, follow these steps:

1) Sign out of Google

2) Click on “web history” in the top right corner of the search results page

3) Click on “disable customization”, bearing in mind this will prevent personalized searches for anyone that uses the computer

Also be aware that if you clear your browser cookies, this will reactivate personalized search.

1) A fan page is recognized by Google as a legitimate website that links back to your website. This means that anyone could come across your fan page in a search engine query and any subsequent traffic will ultimately increase ranking of both your homepage and your Facebook fan page.

2) It costs nothing to create a fan page and you can create as many as you wish. For example, a fashion retailer could create a fan page for each of the designer labels it stocks, or for it’s Spring/Summer collection and Autumn/Winter collection. Google recognizes them all.

3) A standard Facebook profile allows a maximum of 5000 friends, but a fan page has no limit and therefore allows a business to reach as wide an audience as possible. This audience is only limited by your ability to attract new fans, and the larger the fan base, the greater the opportunity for online lead generation.

4) With this massive potential audience, you have the opportunity to spread viral media quickly and effectively. If you post something that catches the attention of your fans, they may post that on their own profiles, to their own friends, therefore reaching a whole new audience, who in turn could become fans.

5) You can contact all your fans in an instant. Any message, like notice of a new product launch or advertising campaign, can be posted on the fan page and instantly seen by all your fans at once, in the same way, but perhaps more efficiently, than an email marketing campaign.

6) Because you are directly available and contactable by your audience, you can gain instant feedback about anything you choose and make valuable market research, for example a food manufacturer could canvas opinion about what new flavour of sauce they should launch or a compensation company could canvas it’s fans about recent accidents and generate personal injury leads.

The disadvantages of fan pages are few, but should not be overlooked:

1) Fans can post negative comments about your company, which can be seen by all the other fans and could be potentially damaging. It is important to address negative comments or complaints as quickly as possible.

2) Content must be regularly updated in order to keep your fans’ interest. This is an ongoing job, which requires time and investment.

3) Once you name your fan page it cannot be changed, so it’s important to choose something that sets the right tone and image for the company.

4) Setting up a fan page alone is not going to draw a million fans. The fan page must be promoted properly, for example the URL added to company stationary or emails sent to customers announcing it’s launch.

Given that fan pages are free to set up and very simple to maintain, there is no reason not to use them and the potential benefits are huge. Any digital advertising agency should manage it’s client’s social media presence as a vital part of it’s online advertising campaign.

Essentially this means the user will be able to decide whether they wish to visit the website before clicking on the search result proper, or if the information they require can simply be seen in the snapshot, could eliminate the need to visit the actual site at all. The screen shot of the web page will actually relate to the specific part of the page that the search result relates to.

For example, if a user were to search for link building services and found the Status Media website in their search results, the Instant Preview would show the specific page, and part of that page, which relates to “link building services”. This eliminates the need to visit the site directly and search through several pages to find the location of the information. It could also prevent a user from accidentally choosing the wrong website when clicking search results.

This will speed-up the whole search process and can eliminate the need to go backwards and forwards between search results and websites. This is an extension of Google’s recently launched Google Instant which displays search results as the user types their search query.

Google says that preview images should load in less than one-tenth of a second, an incredible speed, largely achieved by pre-loading the preview images, which are already stored in it’s Web index, in the users browser in the background.

From an advertiser or SEO specialist point of view, this could mean that it becomes more important to have visually appealing web pages, across a site, as Google users become drawn to the sites whose snapshots are the clearest, or perhaps most colourful or show the best photographic images.

It could also have a negative effect on users, if they choose sites which are the most visually appealing, without knowledge of the site’s quality, and miss out on sites which are less visually appealing but may contain better quality information.

Overall, this seems like a great innovation which will enhance the search experience for users and continue to give Google the competitive edge of it’s rivals like Bing. Search engine optimization, or SEO, continues to be at the forefront of firms’ online advertising campaigns.