Houston SEO Strategic Link Building
The Guide To Getting Better Results!
Houston Off Page SEO Services
In the previous chapter, we unpacked the formal for creating content for your website. The on-page portion of our SEO accounts for 30% of the work, while 70% is authority and citation development through strategic link building.
A link is when another website points back to your website. But when it comes to links, it’s not the QUANTITY of the link your website has but the QUALITY that will determine where Google chooses to rank your website.
Whomever has the most inbound links wins!
In this chapter, we will share a part of our secret sauce for gathering off-page credibility so that you begin to gain trust with Google. We will also share technical SEO, a topic rarely discussed but can hurt your entire marketing strategy.
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This is a custom-tailored plan so you can generate more leads, sales and profits. My team of local SEO experts and I will do the following for you
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Create a free customized keyword list
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Free Website Evaluation
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Complete SEO analysis that will show you why your website is not ranking at the top of the search engines.
What Are Backlinks
Backlinks also referred to as inbound links, are a form of off-page SEO where another website links to your website, creating a trust signal and, if done correctly, allowing other people to discover your business.
Building High-Quality Inbound Links
Building excellent inbound links to your site is hard work. Many Houston SEO companies resort to spamming blog comment sections and other unethical practices that are ill-effective and can ruin your SEO efforts. The best way to determine if you want inbound links from another website is to look at their site. If the website seems illegitimate, it’s not worth the risk. Here are a few ways we recommend acquiring inbound links.
Free Directory Listing : Getting your site listed in local directories will positively impact your local SEO efforts. These sites are free and easy to obtain a link from and will boost your placement in the search engine result pages.
When you get a directory listing, ensure that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) information is accurate and up to date. Another added benefit to having your business in the local directories is that they are generally free of charge and provide you with a citation.
A citation lays the groundwork for local SEO in Houston. Citations are a crucial factor for relevance. Because Google wants to give their users the best local businesses for each search query, it’s a good idea to acquire as many citations as possible so Google will begin to recognize your business. Then, as the spider bots crawl the internet and see that several reputable sites list your business information, Google will send local searchers your way.
There are three ways to enter your NAP information into the directories. You can either have a dedicated staff member enter them manually, which takes longer, or if you do not have the time, consider hiring a Houston SEO company to manage your local listing.
If you decide to take the do-it-yourself route, heed this advice; consistency is key. It’s essential to your success that the same NAP information is being put out across all sites and that you fill out each submission entirely.
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Google My Business
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Bing
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Yahoo
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Local City Search
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Yelp
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Home Advisor
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Yellow Pages
Association Links; Many contractors and attorneys are members of industry-specific associations or the local chambers of commerce. Take the time to visit their website and get listed in their member’s section. This will give you additional citations and the opportunity to link their website to yours.
Another way to get inbound links is to create informative content and ask the industry to post your article, including a link to your website. When it comes to off-page SEO, you want to utilize your Houston network, including relevant, non-competing businesses that can add more credibility to your website.
Local Vendors: The next thing you can do to increase your website relevancy is to consider the suppliers you purchase from. If you are a regular customer with them, ask them if they have a section on their website where they mention resellers.
Social Media: Create an account on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms to list your business website for free.
Competitive Link: One of the ways to outrank the competition is to get the same or similar links to your competition, some tools will aid in your research, such as Ahrefs, or you can go to Google, type in “city name + your service,” and find out who is in the top position. Remember, the leading website didn’t get there by accident, and they will not get that title up any quicker than Mike Tyson would. So are you prepared to step inside a digital boxing ring? If you would focus on running your business rather than acquiring backlinks, hit the button below to speak with one of our Houston SEO consultants about our local SEO plans.
Technical SEO Houston
Technical SEO is a beast that is best broken down into digestible pieces. Technical SEO refers to activities that directly impact how search engines index and crawl your site. An example would be site speed optimization and structured data. Technical SEO is often forgotten because it’s frightening for non-techy people, but if you want to be at the top, you cannot overlook a single element. The first step to improving your technical SEO is knowing where you stand by performing a site audit. The second step is to create a plan to address the areas where there is room for improvement.
Implement SSL: Search engines prioritize secure sites, making it one of Google’s 200 ranking factors. If your site is not secured once you purchase your SSL certificate, you will want to migrate any non-SSL pages from HTTP to HTTPS. You will know if the small lock in the upper corner of your page secures your site.
Set a URL Structure: The beauty of creating your website is that you can make the rules. What’s important is that those rules follow a unified structure, like a roadmap. For example, give your URL subdirectories that indicate where the URL leads.
• Use lowercase words
• Use dashes to separate words.
• Use keywords
• Keep them concise
Once you complete your URL structure, you’ll submit a list of URLs as an XML sitemap to the search engines. Doing so gives search bots additional context about your site, so they don’t have to figure it out as they crawl.
Create an XML sitemap.
XML Sitemap: Much like a blueprint for a house, a sitemap is created to help Google search bots to understand and crawl your web pages. Consider it the blueprint for your website. Once it’s completed, make sure you submit your sitemap to the three major search engines. Many people overlook Bing and Yahoo, but we generated leads for our Houston SEO clients using both, and it’s free to sign up.
Crawl Budget: Your crawl budget refers to the pages and resources on your site that search bots will crawl. Because the crawl budget isn’t unlimited, make sure you’re prioritizing your most important pages. Here are five ways to maximize your crawl budget:
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Keep your sitemap updated and submit it to the appropriate webmaster tools.
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Remove duplicate pages.
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Fix or redirect any broken links.
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Make sure your CSS and JavaScript files are crawlable.
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Check your crawl stats regularly and watch for sudden dips or increases.
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Make sure any bot or page you’ve disallowed from crawling is meant to be blocked.
Utilize Robots.txt: When a web robot crawls your site, it will first check the /robot.txt, otherwise known as the Robot Exclusion Protocol. This protocol can allow or disallow specific web robots to crawl your site, including specific sections or even pages of your site. You may want to block specific bots from crawling your site altogether. But, unfortunately, there are some bots out there with malicious intent — bots that will scrape your content or spam your community forums.
Regarding indexing, search bots crawl your site to gather clues and find keywords to match your web pages with relevant search queries. But, as we’ll discuss later, you have a crawl budget you don’t want to spend on unnecessary data. So, you may want to exclude pages that don’t help with your local SEO.
No matter what, your robot.txt protocol will be unique depending on what you’d like to accomplish.
Breadcrumb Menus: Do you remember the childhood fable Hansel and Gretel, where two children dropped breadcrumbs on the ground to find their way back home? Well, they were on to something.
Breadcrumbs create a trail that guides the journey liens take once they land on your site until they exit. It’s a menu of pages that tells users how their current page relates to the rest of the site.
But this is nit just helpful to your visitors but also search bot. So, breadcrumbs should be visible to users so they can easily navigate your web pages without using the Back button and have structured markup language to give accurate context to search bots crawling your site.
Check your SEO log files: You can think of log files as journal entries. Web servers record and store log data about every action they take on your site in log files (the journal). The data recorded includes the time and date of the request, the content requested, and the requesting IP address. But what does this have to do with SEO in Houston? Well, search bots leave a trail in the form of log files when they crawl your site. So, you can determine if, when, and what was crawled by checking the log files and filtering by the user agent and search engine. This information is helpful because you can determine how your crawl budget is spent and which barriers to indexing or access a bot is experiencing. To access your log files, you can use a free tool. For example, our Houston SEO agency relies on Screaming Frog. Indexability Checklist As search bots crawl your website, they begin indexing pages based on their topic and relevance to that topic. Once indexed, your page is eligible to rank on the SERPs.
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