Sound impossible? Believe me its possible and I have proof! With the constant changes in Google algorithm, the link quality and quantity factor is slowly becoming less important. Don’t get me wrong because I still think it is the most important part for SEO, just not as much as before. Heres whats been happening in the past years with link building aspects:

Link Building History

- In the old days, webmasters would just link all over the place, whether they link to related sites or unrelated sites, no one would really care. If the quantity of links is what the algorithms want then they got that. Obviously this is manipulating search engines, so Google says “enough is enough, link to related and relevant sites you goofballs” (okay maybe they didn’t say that, but something along those lines).

- So being the smarties webmasters are, they start doing mass link exchanges with related sites and of course over time, niche markets online expanded rapidly, so now big bully Google says “reciprocal link exchanging is a scheme, whether it is 2 way or 3 way, we will still catch you! Get natural links”.

- Recently, it has gone to the extent that you are not allowed to sell or buy links on your site. We know search engines love 1 way links cause they think its “natural”, so the hell with it, I say keep buying 1 way links (but be careful, don’t have keywords like “paid post”, “sponsored ad”, or anything similar).

Obviously there is the focus on natural organic growth for Google, and it seems to be more and more important these days to have super quality content. Look at your own site and if you think “hmm I wouldn’t link to my site” then fix it. Make it more presentable. Touch up your content.

Get To The Top of SERPs Without Links

So how do you exactly get to the top without link building? SEMhints.com only started last week and it is already at the top for the keywords “sem hints“. Here are 3 points for you to look at.

1/ Place your main keywords in the URL - For my site, it “sem hints”. Later on, if I want to boost my rankings for PPC, I might have a URL - http://www.semhints.com/ppc-hints/ and focus on the keywords “ppc hints”. Now don’t go all nuts about it, cause it doesn’t work every time. Only for keywords that are not very competitive and this is where you need to do your keywords research either through wordtracker, overture keyowrds, or any other tool you know of.

2/ Keywords in h1, h2, h3 tags etc - Your main keywords should be in h1 tags and I would always have sub titles through content and even h3 sometimes. Don’t spam your page with the main keyword though, use similar words, related words or synonyms.

3/ Meta title, meta description, meta keywords - It’s like filling out a quick form when you fill out personal details about yourself, but really spend time on this and pick out your keywords carefully within all 3 tags. There is a lot of weighting on this for Google and its also what people will see when the results come up in the SERPs (except meta keywords of course).

4/ Content - Keep it natural, free flowing and always have quality in mind. Would people read this? Most people would look at the title and if its not interesting they’ll leave. If you catch their attention, then the content is where most of your keywords are. Might not have as much weighting but still a crucial part of SEO. Review your content when you finish and tweak a few keywords. Simple things like changing “it”, “he”, “she”, “they” etc to the keywords your targeting can make a huge difference.

5/ Image alternative text - Again, not a major factor, but it all adds up when Google looks at a page as a whole. Make sure the alternative text is filled. If you don’t have a picture, find one! Pictures always make a page more appealing. If conversion is a factor for your site, place your picture somewhere near your “buy link” or wherever you want the user to click.

Keep in mind you only have to do this once for your pages while link building is forever. You might as well get this right the first time so you don’t have to gather as many links as you would if you didn’t have any of these factors in place.