SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

So you want to get ahead of the competition on the search engines, and you decide to use a link farm. Stop! Theres danger in link farms as with all SEO methods that seem to good to be true.

Your website shouldnt link to, or be linked from, websites with any of the characteristics of link farms. Link farms are web sites that have been set up for no reason other than to contain masses of links, exploiting search engines link popularity algorithms. They serve no real purpose, other than getting everyone who joins to link to and from them and boosting the rankings of everyone involved. This is a big problem, as most people consider it to be nothing more than search engine spam.

Do not get link farms confused with directories which are excellent places to get your site listed. The difference here is that a directory attempts to provide its users with a nice organized way to get to the information that they want while a link farm simply posts a ton of links (generally at cost to the linkee) and serves no purpose to anybody on the web.

Avoid all link farms and similar sites! If you try to use one then the end result could be a ranking penalty, or your website might even be banned from the search engine altogether. Being banned from a search engine is a terrible loss for your site and will generally lead you to creating a brand new site out of sheer necessity.

Remember: the number of links to your site isnt as important as the quality of those links. Youre trying to get people with real, quality sites to link to you. There are even rumors (which are being validated daily) that Google is implementing a quality control algorithm for links which includes the amount of time that a link has existed between two sites as well as the reputations of the two sites based on how many links they send out. For example, if you have a link from a site that only links to three sites all together and this link has stood strong for months, Google will consider it a valuable link. On the other hand, if you get linked to by a site with a massive number of links, Google could care less. Remember, Google is the Santa Claus of the internet, its always watching.

Free for All (FFA).

An FFA is a links page where anyone can add a link quite similar to a link farm. Dont be fooled into listing your site on these or linking to them. Many programs will submit your link automatically, to hundreds of FFAs all over the web. Dont use these programs! The search engines will steer clear of your site for a long time if you do.

Who Should I Link To, and How?

Be very selective about your outbound links and your requests for inbound links, and avoid any site thats anything like a link farm. Look for websites that have similar subjects to yours, good rankings and good traffic. Depending on the topic, they might be hard to find but then you should find it easier to rank highly in these topics.

Once youve found a few good sites, the next step is to email them and request a link. You should, of course, offer one in return. You will run into some opposition with this method and you will sometimes be ignored completely, but you should have a reasonable amount of success. We cant stress enough, though, that you should be careful about which sites you link to, and check your links regularly.

The Bottom Line.

Link farms are dangerous to your website and a complete waste of time. They can bring your business crashing down by getting you banned from the search engines. You should be concentrating on real marketing methods even though theyre not a quick fix, they can work if you give them some time.

There are many real ways to get traffic to your website, and using professional methods can give you a big increase in traffic. Using link farms and FFAs is a good way to get yourself nowhere fast.

First, go to the search engine where you want to check your sites ranking, and enter the keywords you want to check. Your result pages will come up, and you will need to look through them until you find your website. SEO experts recommend that if you arent listed in at least the top 20 then you should continue to optimize, as most people wont look any further than that. This is simply common sense. When you are determining if your rank is high enough simply think to yourself, Would I look for this long for this page?

You will want to do this with each search engine and directory until you have some idea of where you are. Check your website’s rankings regularly, because changes to algorithms can affect them drastically and quickly. Keep in mind also that thousands of new web pages are added daily, and many of them are actively trying to get ranked ahead of you. Thats right. There are thousands of other in on the same game as you so you must keep sharp. Your competitors may be reading these same articles and using these same tricks!

If you cant find your website in a search engines results, you should enter site: your domain name in the keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere in the search engines index. If all you get back is a blank page, then youre not in the search engines database at all you need to wait longer. This trick of typing site:www.yourdomain.com also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed on each particular search engine. The more pages that are indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.

It you find that your website is miles away from the top 20, dont be discouraged you can change that! You may need to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good content is the best way to increase your chances of getting a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be with search engines.

Search engines are a perfect example of the chicken or the egg. In this case, there is an answer! Search engines attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important, not the other way around. This is why it is so important that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it.

If you want to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html.

If the search engine has indexed that particular page then it will come back with a description of it. If it hasnt then youll see a message saying something like Sorry, no information is available for that URL.

On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page.

You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.

Top25web.com is one such search engine-ranking tool. You can find out where your website ranks in Google, Inktomi and AltaVista for free. You can also analyze the results of a particular keyword search, to create a plan for improving your sites ranking.

URL Ranker offers instant, online reports of website rankings in 17 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, AOL Search, MSN, AllTheWeb and AltaVista, again for free. It will tell you if your site is listed in each engine, and tell you the ranking if it is.

These tools alone offer an excellent way of checking your sites rankings. Once you know where you stand, you can continue with your SEO plan, and move on to other aspects of marketing too.