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How to Lower Your Serp With External Links July 27, 2010

Posted by admin in : Online Promotion , comments closed

So you understand the importance of gaining inbound links for your web site, and you’ve set out to get your link placed in all the directories you can. Great, but before you start, think carefully about the link you are going to submit. Are you about to LOWER your search engine ranking by placing all your keywords on someone else’s site?

When submitting links, there are 3 basic bits of information that are required: the URL, the Anchor Text, and the Description. The URL is pretty obvious. This need to be either the address of your site (http://www.after5webdesign.com for example) or the address of a page in your site (http://www.after5webdesign.com/directory/index.php for example). A link to a page other than your main index page is called a "deep link". These are very good, but not all directories allow deep linking. Your Anchor Text is all the text between the A tags. For example, in the link My Web Site, "My Web Site" is the anchor text. The description is the bit of un-linked text that is before or after the link.

Now let’s take a general look at how a page is ranked. First, a spider grabs all the text in the html document and this text is subjected to word commonality algorithms. Common words like "the", "a", and "and" are ignored, but other words are counted and totaled. For example, this article uses the words "link" about 21 times, "submit" 6 times, and the phrase "search engine" 5 times. Therefore it would be a safe bet for a computer to assume this article is about submitting links and/or search engines. Thus when someone searches for the phrase "submitting links for search engines" this article could be one of the results. On the other hand, because of my examples, this page uses the word "prom" 15 times, search engines will likely determine this is also a valid result for that search term.

Another factor that comes into play is what other websites say your page is about. If you’ve viewed a cached Google search result and seen the phrase "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page:", that means that the anchor text on other sites contain that term, but that term doesn’t actually contain the term. Another example of this in action can be seen by searching Google for the term "Liar". What’s the first result? A biography of Tony Blair! This is because several pages have pointed a link to his biography and used "Liar" as the anchor text. Because the term liar appears in the links anchor text so frequently, Google assumes the page must be about "Liar".

Let’s look at an example of how to shoot yourself in the foot with link submissions. Suppose you have a website selling prom dresses, and you submit your link to a directory using "My Prom Dress Store" as the anchor text and "Prom dress, prom tips, prom ideas, what to wear at prom, prom music, prom night, prom, prom date, prom dresses, prom planning" for the description. You have done well with the anchor text, because you used your "prom" and "dress" keyterms in the anchor text, but you then proceeded to add your "Prom" keyword to the page another 10 times. This directory page will now have at least 11 occurances of YOUR keyword, and only one of them is used to point to your site! Further, the directory will likely have several other sites listed in your category which will means even more occurances of your keyword. Congratulations, you’ve just helped the directory rank better for your keyterms, and since their site contains links to other sites, you’ve also helped your competition.

Purchasing Links on High PR Sites March 11, 2010

Posted by admin in : Online Promotion , comments closed

Some webmasters who own sites with high pagerank (PR) earn a significant amount of money each month selling links to other webmasters who have sites with less or no PR.

You can go to eBay or another auction site to purchase these links usually on a monthly basis. What happens when you purchase the link is that the webmaster will put a link to your site on the high PR site.

Then, since spiders visit high PR sites more often than lower PR sites, when the spiders visit the high PR sites they will find the link to your site. This will count as a backlink to your site and may help in getting your site indexed and attaining a high PR.

While this may sound fine and dandy, there are several issues to consider:

1. The site’s index page may have a high PR, but the page your link goes on may have lower PR. So always be sure to check the PR of the actual page your link will appear on. Just install the Google toolbar at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/ so you can check the page where your link will appear.

2. You need to find a website that is about the same subject as your website in order for your link to be seen as “relevant.” So if your website is about dog training, then you should link it on a website that is about pets at the very least and preferably about dogs; a site about dog training would be ideal. You DON’T want to put your link on a directory page or “link farm.”

3. Find out how many links will appear on the same page as yours. When the search engines visit, they split the PR of the page among the links. So if there are a 1,000 links on the page, you can be sure your site will get very little notice. Ideally there should be less than 10 links.

4. Next, make sure you specify the anchor text for your link using your site’s keywords. If your site is about dog training manuals, then you will want your link to appear with the keywords “dog training manuals” as the anchor text. Often the webmaster will also allow a short description which you should write with your keywords at the very beginning of the description. Don’t ever let the webmaster tell you that you can only list your URL.

5. Also, be sure to check the uptime on the server that hosts the website. If the spiders can’t get to the site, they can’t get to your link.

6. OK, so now you’ve paid your money and your link is on a high PR page with only a few other links and it has exactly the right keywords in the anchor text. How do you know it stays there? You can go check out the page every day. You can enter link:www.yourdomainname.com every day. You can also use a free tool like http://tools.seobook.com/general/link-check/, which also gives you additional tools for linking strategies.

Buying links is probably not the easiest and most cost effective way to get backlinks, but if you have more money than time, it’s one way to get your website indexed quickly. You should not, however, overlook all of the many ways to obtain high-quality links, such as writing articles for article directories!