One of the sites that I manage, logodesign.com, has been rewarded nicely in the rankings. And I think what has had the most impact in our SEO strategy has been the fresh blog content. We still do link trading on this site, but have taken a less aggressive approach.

Here are a few reasons why I think the fresh content through our blog has helped our SEO efforts.

1. When you post more than a few blogs a week it kind of primes the search spider bots and keeps them coming back often.
2. Posting fresh content tells the search engines that your site is alive, well and continues to add value
3. With the right strategy blogs can become a wonderful way to attract backlinks. We have found that some blog entries will bring a slew of one way backlinks from high-traffic authority sites. And believe me, those are the best backlinks.
4. Because the blog can be syndicated through RSS feeds, we can keep our readers up-to-date with the latest news and information and take advantage of the RSS backlinks.
5. Every time we post a blog wordpress functionality automatically pings blog search engines and lets them know we have new content.

Don’t let your site appear stale to the search engines, keep updating your site with new content.

One of the sites that I do SEO work on is an authority site in the design industry. It has maintained a consistent #1 ranking for the last two years for a high-traffic keyword phrase. Just recently we were able to develop a way of obtaining 1000s of one way links each month. Under normal circumstances, with a non-authority site, I wouldn’t see much movement in the SERPs until after a few months of link maturation. With this site however, I have noticed that it has moved up for a number of high-traffic keyword phrases quite rapidly.

I have good reason to believe that authority sites, sites that Google’s algorithm already trusts, do NOT have to wait for links to age. These sites receive backlink credit almost immediately. Of course, this pretty much makes sense. If Google already trusts the site, then the backlinks attributed to the site must be legitimate backlinks.

The tough part, however, is getting a site to an authority status.

I’ve been cranking out link trades for a few years now. I’ve emailed thousands of webmasters and have put up thousands of links. I have also removed hundreds of links because of link cheating, sites going down etc. I have created link management systems to automate the process and follow up on links. I have even hired overseas “link building experts” to do the job for me. Um, just a word of advice, sometimes if you want it done right, do it yourself.

Anyway, can I just say I’m tired of links? I’m definitely experiencing link building burnout. I’d love to say goodbye to the hassles of link building forever, but unfortunately link building is one of the key elements in search engine optimization.

There is however some serious hope on the horizon. After two years of development lavalinx.com is almost open for beta. Lavalinx allows link building experts to initiate and manage reciprocal, triangle or 3 way, and one way link trades. I’ve been using the beta for a few weeks now and it is hands down the best link trading system available on the internet. I’ll let you know more about it in the weeks to come.