Link Building 101 February 9, 2010
Posted by admin in : internet , comments closedTwo of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.
In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.
We will start by giving you an understanding of the basics…
Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. To have a link within the same website is called an ‘internal link’. An ‘external link’ takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The meaning of ‘backlink’ is that your site is being linked to from another website.
There are 4 different types of links:
* URL Link – This is simply a website url that is a link.
* Text Links (aka static links) – This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)
* Image Links – An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.
* Dynamic Links – These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have ‘extra codes’ to perform special functions.
(these types of links can appear in many different forms)
It is important to be able to recognize these types of links, even if you are not familiar with web design and programming. You don’t have to memorize the codes, just learn to identify each type of link.
What links does is to provide navigation for human visitors and for ’spiders’(aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit and ‘index’ your website. This means that they gather information about your site in order to list it in their search results.
When the search engine spiders index your website, they follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It’s important to know that search engines cannot follow ‘dynamic links’ and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says ‘no follow’.
The place where ‘no follow’ is commonly found is in the “meta tags” section of the website. Meta tags are basically information that only the spiders see and not for the human visitor. You can see the code for any website in your browser by choosing ‘view source’. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)
If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.
What different kind of links could you get?
There are 2 types of links that you can get:
* One-way links – A one-way link is when another website links to you and you don’t link back to them.
* Reciprocal links – A reciprocal link is when a website links to you and you link back to them.
To search engines one-way links are usually much more valuable than reciprocal links. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, etc.
However, there are links that the search enginges rates as ‘no value’ links, even though they are bringing you boatloads of targeted visitors every day…
Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the better. However, building links takes time and energy and if you focus on getting ‘high-quality links’, you will get a bigger return on your investment. 50 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective than 1000 ‘low quality links’.
What’s a high quality link? – Links that brings you Page Reputation (which shows the search engines that other related websites consider you to be important), and links that give you PageRank. Sometimes both together and sometimes not…
To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain links for targeted keywords. That is why it is important to start with keyword Research.
If your website is about “bird watching”, the first step is to ‘do keyword research’ and find out which keyword you should aim for. While you could just start getting text links for the keyword phrase “bird watching”, if no one is searching for that – you won’t get any visitors. There’s no sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no one is looking for.
Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you might want to pick a “lower hanging fruit”.
This is an excellent free keyword research tool. (The numbers you see are searches/day.)
Another important part is making sure your page is optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are focussed on building one way links to your site but the links have anchor text which doesn’t even appear on your page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely assuming that you have some competition for your targeted keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn’t matter).
In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or maybe you are building one way links to your site but they are just url links and not anchor-text links. A site that has more high-quality(anchor text) links than yours is more likely to get a higher ranking.
Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have anchor text which includes the primary and secondary keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word with their keywords. The relation between all the words on your site is what their algoritm looks for.
So to make one way link building worth the effort the content has to be. The first thing you want to do is to optimize your sites for you visitors. Then, you can go through and “sprinkle” your keywords. Then, go out and get one way links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords, ideally getting most of these links from websites that are related to yours.
Yes, Google also looks at the relationship between your website’s content and the websites that links to you’s content. Fewer links to your business site from other business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more links coming to you from a site about video games..
Don’t make these link building mistakes:
* Don’t spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites with no PR.
* Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. Site Wide links is something you should be extra careful about. If your website only has a few backlinks one day and the next day you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.
* Don’t spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.
*Important is to NOT get “No-Follow” links, since they don’t bring any value to your site.
Happy Link Building!
Link Building 101 February 8, 2010
Posted by admin in : internet , comments closedTwo of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.
In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.
We will start by giving you an understanding of the basics…
Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. To have a link within the same website is called an ‘internal link’. An ‘external link’ takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The meaning of ‘backlink’ is that your site is being linked to from another website.
There are 4 different types of links:
* URL Link – This is simply a website url that is a link.
* Text Links (aka static links) – This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)
* Image Links – An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.
* Dynamic Links – These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have ‘extra codes’ to perform special functions.
(these types of links can appear in many different forms)
It is important to be able to recognize these types of links, even if you are not familiar with web design and programming. You don’t have to memorize the codes, just learn to identify each type of link.
What links does is to provide navigation for human visitors and for ’spiders’(aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit and ‘index’ your website. This means that they gather information about your site in order to list it in their search results.
When the search engine spiders index your website, they follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It’s important to know that search engines cannot follow ‘dynamic links’ and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says ‘no follow’.
The place where ‘no follow’ is commonly found is in the “meta tags” section of the website. Meta tags are basically information that only the spiders see and not for the human visitor. You can see the code for any website in your browser by choosing ‘view source’. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)
If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.
What different kind of links could you get?
There are 2 types of links that you can get:
* One-way links – A one-way link is when another website links to you and you don’t link back to them.
* Reciprocal links – A reciprocal link is when a website links to you and you link back to them.
To search engines one-way links are usually much more valuable than reciprocal links. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, etc.
However, there are links that the search enginges rates as ‘no value’ links, even though they are bringing you boatloads of targeted visitors every day…
Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the better. However, building links takes time and energy and if you focus on getting ‘high-quality links’, you will get a bigger return on your investment. 50 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective than 1000 ‘low quality links’.
What’s a high quality link? – Links that brings you Page Reputation (which shows the search engines that other related websites consider you to be important), and links that give you PageRank. Sometimes both together and sometimes not…
To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain links for targeted keywords. That is why it is important to start with keyword Research.
If your website is about “bird watching”, the first step is to ‘do keyword research’ and find out which keyword you should aim for. While you could just start getting text links for the keyword phrase “bird watching”, if no one is searching for that – you won’t get any visitors. There’s no sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no one is looking for.
Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you might want to pick a “lower hanging fruit”.
This is an excellent free keyword research tool. (The numbers you see are searches/day.)
Another important part is making sure your page is optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are focussed on building one way links to your site but the links have anchor text which doesn’t even appear on your page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely assuming that you have some competition for your targeted keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn’t matter).
In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or maybe you are building one way links to your site but they are just url links and not anchor-text links. A site that has more high-quality(anchor text) links than yours is more likely to get a higher ranking.
Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have anchor text which includes the primary and secondary keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word with their keywords. The relation between all the words on your site is what their algoritm looks for.
So to make one way link building worth the effort the content has to be. The first thing you want to do is to optimize your sites for you visitors. Then, you can go through and “sprinkle” your keywords. Then, go out and get one way links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords, ideally getting most of these links from websites that are related to yours.
Yes, Google also looks at the relationship between your website’s content and the websites that links to you’s content. Fewer links to your business site from other business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more links coming to you from a site about video games..
Don’t make these link building mistakes:
* Don’t spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites with no PR.
* Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. Site Wide links is something you should be extra careful about. If your website only has a few backlinks one day and the next day you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.
* Don’t spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.
*Important is to NOT get “No-Follow” links, since they don’t bring any value to your site.
Happy Link Building!
SEO Hints on How to Optimize a Website – Advanced SEO Tips February 6, 2010
Posted by admin in : internet , comments closedIf you learn how to optimize a web page properly using these SEO hints and tips, then you will never have to pay for traffic again. The profit that your visitors bring you will go straight into your bank account.
You no doubt understand all the basic stuff, but in case you are new to this, let’s first have look at these basic SEO hints and tips, since many seem to omit them from their web pages. The most important are the HTML tags that are used by search engines to determine the relevance of your page to the search term used by the search engine’s customer.
Note the term ‘web page’, because many people don’t realize that Google, along with most other search engines, doesn’t list websites, but individual web pages. It is essential that you understand how search engines work if you want to learn how to optimize a web page.
I am going to refer to Google, not only because it is the biggest of the search engines, but also to save the bother of referring to search engines all the time. I will refer to Google, but take that as meaning search engines in general. Here are the main SEO basics:
a) The TITLE tag. This appears in the HEAD portion of your html, and is not actually seen by your visitors but is the most important tag on your web page because the spiders place very high weight to it. Use your main keywords here, and also any other text that will inform Google of the theme of your web page.
b) Heading (H) tags. Your page title should be placed within H1 tags, and should contain the same major keyword as you used in the TITLE tag. Your subheadings, if any, should be bracketed with H2 tags. I don’t use any of the lower tags, from H3 down, except perhaps H3 very occasionally. Any text with H tags will be regarded by Google as of specific importance, and most weight will be given to the lower numbers (H1 and H2). Don’t place eberything within H1 tags, or that will reduce its emphasis and Google will ignore the tag.
c) Text enhancements: Use bold, italic and underline enhancements sparingly, and where you one again want to stress the importance of certain keywords.
d) Your keyword density should be concentrated in the first third of your web page. Don’t use too many: I get good results with under 1% overall keyword density, but using the main keyword in the first 100 characters, once in the last paragraph and once more each 300 words but concentrated in the first third of the page. Thus, an 800 word page will have the keyword three times in the first 250 words and once in the last paragraph.
e) Meta tags: the only meta tag worth using is the description tag, which is used by most search engines in the description of your web page in their listings. Google mainly uses it exactly as you write it. The keyword tag can also be used, but few search engines are thought to use it: Google does not. Any other meta tags are a waste of your space. Anybody that claims differently is wanting to sell you something.
These are the basic hints on SEO, now here are some of the more advanced SEO hints and tips that will teach you not only how to optimize a web page, but to understand the way that search engines work. These are less obvious, and generally not used by beginners to search engine marketing.
f) You should use text links from one page to another on your siet. Search engine spiders love text, and fancy graphics or java links might look great, but don’t get you kudos from the spiders. Stick to text if you want a good listing: there’s no point in fancy graphical links if you have no visitors to use them.
g) IT will benefit to you use as liuttle code as possible on each web page compared to the amount of text: maximise your text:code ratio. Your code to text ratio should be minimized as far as possible because . . . yes, you’ve got it! Spiders love text!
h) Another good SEO tip is to focus on your off-page linking. It is possible to get a #1 spot on Google with no content: just loads of links coming into your web page from other websites. Not just any websites, but authority sites, so reciprocal links to and from web pages not directly related to your niche are a waste of time, and can even harm you. Link farms can positively damage you.
i) Use anchor text for your links where at all possible. Google shouldn’t have to work out what your web page is about: tell them. Hyperlink your keyword to your website, but don’t use the same form of keyword from every webpage linking to yours. Mix them about so as to keep the links fresh.
j) And lastly: keep adding pages to your website. A single website containing 80 pages will likly provide you with more visitors that two of 40 pages due to a higher overall Google listing from the former as compared to both of the 40 page sites. Refresh your content frequently by adding new pages, but don’t ignore your older pages: rdevise these now and again with new vocabulary. Google detests stagnation.
These are just a few SEO hints and tips that can teach you how to optimize a web page. There are many, many more. Some quite basic, others very much more advanced than the above. However, you can’t get everything free!