The Value of Good Link Partners.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 13-10-2009

0

As you already know, good link partners are vital to the growth of your website. Without good link partners you wont be ranked highly in the search engines, and you wont receive the traffic you need to gain new customers and make new sales. Building high-quality links to your website helps it to succeed.

Websites that maintain good incoming links will get many targeted visitors from their link partners. These link partners are also a good source of information and can offer value for the visitors that come to your website more often. The idea behind link partners is to find web sites with complementary content so that you enhance your web site. For example, if you sell computers, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to link to a site that sells printers.

Linking to your competitors is much more dangerous. The fact of the matter is that when you link to your competitors you are handing them your business. They may be handing some of theirs back to you, but the trade off simply isn’t worth it. If you are in a situation where it is your product or theirs, do not link to them. Aside from the obvious issue of losing business to their site, you may even lose the returning link if you don’t keep an eye on it.

When dealing with link partners, theres virtually no point unless you get reciprocal links. These links make your website look good, as well as getting you targeted traffic from users clicking on the links. When you are optimizing your site for key words, however, it is important to link to sites that provide more information regarding the content that you have provided. In cases like this, the link is already helping you. If you get a returning link in addition it’s like killing two birds with one stone.

With good-quality incoming links, you will benefit greatly from the increased traffic to your site. Most major search engines rankings are at least partly based on the number of quality links pointing to your website. Google, HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi and more all use link popularity in their formula for calculating rankings.

The value of your link partner’s sites will be very important, as many of the search engines use this in determining how relevant your site is to the terms that are being searched on. A site with a page rank below three generally isnt worth exchanging links with. Then again, if the site is on its way up, it might be a good idea to get in on the ground floor. If you are curious as to whether a site is going to be accumulating a higher page rank in a short period of time try going to http://www.iwebtool.com/rank and punching the sites URL into the backlink tool or the page rank predictor. These will show you how many links the site has going to them and will let you know what the page rank could be within the next three months.

You must always keep an eye on the value, and use value-for-value exchanges only. Make sure that your link doesnt get removed from any sites you link to, and remove your own link to them if it does. Many people will agree to link with you and then remove your link after a week or two. If you leave your site linked to them, then theyre the only one benefiting.

Good link partners are hard to find, and it will take some time for them to respond. You may have to contact them more than once, and probably wont take you seriously if you just ask them to trade you links. It is important to provide them with information relating to your company and let them know why your link will be worth while to them. If you are serious about SEO, you will be able to let them know that you expect your page rank to explode within the next few months and you may be able to accumulate links this way.

Its important for to make sure that you links are checked on a regular basis. Of course you dont have much control over the incoming links, but you can still do whatever you want with the outgoing ones. You should immediately remove any links that dont work, as they can and will bring your search engine rankings down.

By understanding how link partnering works and maintaining good quality links on your website, you can increase your targeted traffic and improve your sales. After all, isnt that the whole point of having an online business? Just remember that your website, like any other business, takes time and effort to make it succeed, and any little way you can speed up the process is good as long as its not against the rules, of course.

5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 03-10-2009

0

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you dont know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they arent getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you dont have much reason to keep a link if you arent getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure its still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someones site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your sites content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says Disallow and has the URL of their links page, then theyre not letting spiders index that page. Dont exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being cloaked, and report it to the search engines if it is. You dont want to get involved with these people better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesnt necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldnt be more than 20 links if the site breaks this rule, dont even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking theyre helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them dont even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. Theres no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

Advanced Link Checks.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 12-09-2009

0

View the source of each and every page: is there JavaScript and CSS on the page? Remember that spiders may not index pages that have more than 10k or so of JavaScript or CSS embedded in them. Spiders dont enjoy getting tangled up in JavaScript. So as a general rule you should avoid putting out prompts and alerts using JavaScript every time that a page loads. Because of this rule, it is also wise to avoid link partners who do so on the pages that they link to you from. If anything looks fishy, it probably is.

CSS wont give you many problems. If you are going to use CSS, it is best to link to it from another source. Create a separate CSS page and use the tag to work it into the head of your HTML. This method will keep your file size down considerably, and since you will probably be using the same CSS on several pages, decrease your bandwidth usage. Normally a large quantity of CSS within the document isnt indicative of any suspicious behavior on the part of the linker. If you feel that you are, indeed, suffering from the fact that the site uses such an excessive proportion of CSS on the page itself, suggest to the webmaster that he/she may want to create an external CSS document and link to it in his/her header.

Check that you’re still on the domain you clicked on a link to, and you haven’t moved to another site or a subdomain. Some people will move you to another domain while telling thats their site and your link is there, relying on you not checking the address bar. This trick is all too common and happens to folks who are new to SEO every single day. This sad fact will continue until people begin to catch it every time.

If the domain has changed, delete your backlink to the site in question immediately and then email the webmaster with your complaint. If the webmaster does not fix the problem you may even want to request that they remove the link as the site may wind up discredited as a link farm or some such thing that you do not want to be associated with for fear of being banned from many popular search engines with technology used to combat link farms.

On a related subject, when you check your back links, make sure that these links appear in legitimate places. If the site is completely dedicated to linking to other sites and doesnt seem to be a directory or something similar you will want to get your link removed as soon as possible. There is no time when one link is worth the risk of being permanently banned from any popular search engine. Aside from the traffic that you will lose from that one search engine, you may wind up red flagged so to speak. It seems to be common practice among search engines that if one finds faulty activity the rest seem to find out soon afterwards.

Overall, if it seems dodgy, leave it alone. Its better to sacrifice one link in caution than to destroy your sites rankings by accepting one youre not sure of. There are hundreds of situations aside from link farms that can and will give you trouble. It would be impossible to list every scam as there are people who make their living (or seem to anyway) in creating and executing these scams. Whenever there is a new form of SEO technology that cant fail, you should watch out because it is almost guaranteed to blow up in your face. The only truly powerful and guaranteed method of SEO is to make your site valuable to your visitors and then let it fall where it may in the realm of the search engine.

It is difficult, after you have optimized your pages and submitted them to search engines and directories, to sit back and wait, but there is not much that can be done aside from attempting to accumulate links from good, solid places. The work that you have done is bound to pay off sooner or later as long as you stay honest. When it comes to the world of SEO, honesty is, indeed, the best policy.

Understanding the Google Dance.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 17-07-2009

0

Whats the Google dance? Well, its really just a fun phrase for when Google updates its index. This occurs regularly, once a month, and can cause a lot of movement in rankings, meaning that its come to be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated by others. The update isnt just one sudden switch, though, as each index update takes several days to complete. During this update the searches seem to dance between the old index and new index thats the Google dance.

So why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results from over ten thousand servers, and they cant all be updated at once Google would have to go down for the update. Instead, each server is updated with the new index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior in the page rank process if two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually Google will get you into your proper place. Generally, if you behave, you will not be thrown down for long by the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the process of updating its index for your server (or for the servers of your favorite link partners.

One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Googles index doesnt work this way its a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly. This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally wont suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last index.

The 10,000 servers that Google uses are distributed between seven datacenters all over the world. Google doesnt keep all of those eggs in one basket they want to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive. If part of Google goes down, people can still use the search engine and as I said before, this allows your site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding your sites index happens to go down. The datacenters that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some of the largest datacenters in the world with each of its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world if all were combined into one.

You see, the time-to-live for www.google.com is only five minutes that means that Googles IP address can change every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that ten thousand servers is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.

The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless youre looking for your websites ranking, youd never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.