Social Media Blog: Conversational MarketingA blog that disects conversational marketing via social media.

I am not going to lie to you.  Achieving high rankings in Google is no easy task; and if someone tells you that it is, they are lying through their teeth.  Back in the days, reciprocal linking, link farms and free for all linking schemes used to be the trend; and believe it or not, it used to work. Not any more!  Google has finally wised up and began considering such tactics as manipulative and spam. Today, search engine marketers have to find other tactics to achieve high rankings in the engines.

Google is Smarter Than You Think!

In other words, Google can now figure out with the help of its intelligent, rocket scientist algorithms, if a website owner is randomly buying links for the purpose of manipulating their search engine rankings.  How they do this, I have no idea.  It’s no surprise that Google hires top notch, triple PhD, no life having engineers (jk).  I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Google will know what we are physically wearing while we are searching on their site. The direction of this new trend is becoming very clear; that is, Google wants to see natural incoming links from relevant sites that are linking to you because you have a value added product or service that would benefit their website visitors. 

How to Achieve High Search Engine Rankings

From real life practical experience, I have identified three, highly effective strategies to increase your incoming links. It’s a really simple concept and easy to do.  The added benefit is that it will also attract highly relevant traffic to your website, which just so happens to be inline with Google’s desire for customer focused search engine marketing.

1.  Articles

Marketers have been using article syndication (sometimes referred to as article marketing) to promote their product and/or service for years.  Just recently, however, article marketing has began to grow in popularity because marketers now understand that consumers are tired of being marketed to and that building relationships with them is much more effective. Additionally, article syndication will result in higher search rankings with keyword optimized content; natural incoming links, and drive targeted, relevant traffic to their website.

One thing to remember when writing articles is that the “tone” of the article needs to be relevant to your specific industry, educational and objective.  It should not be just another advertisement like those you see on late night television. 

2. Press Release Distribution

A well written press release that appeals to the media’s craving for a good story and that is properly optimized with keywords that you want to rank for can earn you not only valuable media attention and new clients, but also increase your natural incoming links.

3. Blogs and Social Media Optimization

The search engines value blogs because they are often updated with new content.  The more you post valuable content, the more frequent your pages will be crawled by search engine spiders, and the faster the updates will appear in the search results. The result will be an increase in search engine rankings, more subscribers to your blog, and strong credibility in your industry. See Lee Odden’s blog marketing tips for more on blog marketing.

Social Media Optimization is the practice of implementing changes to a site (or blog) so that others can easily link to it, tag it, post a comment to it; and then submit it to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon; with the chance of your content becoming viral . The result is more visibility in the above mentioned sites; more exposure on Technorati, inbound links, and an increase in targeted traffic.

4. Great Content

Of course, great content will naturally produce a ton of inbound links.  Content can be in the form of thought pieces, white papers, flash demos or rich media content, free downloads, or free online tools like SEOMoz’s Page Strength Tool. The ideas is to have content that engages others, educates and informs; and provides value to the readers.

Relax, Achieving High Search Engine Rankings Takes Time

Stop complaining. I know we live in a world that thrives off instant gratification.  It’s true that employing these strategies takes time; however, are you willing to sacrifice banishment from the search engines if you engage in “questionable” search engine schemes and tactics? Of course not.  Achieving high rankings in the search engines is an organic process. But, I can assure you that if you follow these simple strategies listed above, your investment will yield positive results – with your search engine rankings and your bottom line.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, article syndication, article distribution, article submission, blogging, blog marketing, social media optimization, socialmediaoptimization, smo, search engine optimization, seo