Search Optimization School

JenSense had a post linking to 25 Tips to Optimize Your Blog for Readers and Search Engines over at Search Engine Land.

There were some great tips in that article, like using feedbutton for your rss widget, and using feedblitz.com to allow users to subscribe to rss posts via email. I hadn’t previously known about either service. Read the entire article for all 25 tips. Sometimes the best tips come after the article – in the comments that readers post. One reader added a link to his own 25 tips for blog marketing, a short list – but a worthy read. Another posted about a service for users to get blog posts via text message through open.4info.net, something I hadn’t considered before.

Also, quite a few comments talk about the value of participating in comments after posts. As I already said, sometimes I find the most valuable information in these comments, and I add something worthwhile whenever I can. But even if you only thank the author, if you leave your web site address you just created a link back to your site. This alone helps search engine rankings, but if you have an insightful comment with valuable information, users are likely to follow that link back to your site. Actually, in one of the comments I found a link to this blog posts about never blogging alone – or the ‘long tail’ of comments. This guy went through his logs and found that 26% of his blog traffic was directly from posting comments on other sites.

Read up and implement some of these great tips, and integrate them into the regular postings in your blog or site. A little hard work every day will blossom into a well known authoritative blog in no time!

When someone goes to the search engine and types in keywords the most important thing to that user is to get the most relevant results they can. Nothing is more frustrating than searching for hours for information you need and not being able to find it. Google has the corner on the market when it comes to relevancy. The reason that they are top dog in the search market is because they seem to be able to consistently be able to deliver the most relevant results in the sea of crap on the web. They have top secret algorithms that determine what web site content is quality and what is crap. One of the most important factors for google (and the other search engines) is “reputation”.
What are Backlinks?
It’s just like when you ask your friends and family where to go to get the best deal on a car, or what restaurant has the best food. If half a dozen of your friends told you a certain bar and grill was spectacular – you would just have to go and check it out. But if your friends and your boss at work, your doctor, and your parents told you it was an awesome place to eat as well – you would most certainly be expecting top notch dining wouldn’t you? That’s because it was recommended not only by good references, but also by important and respected ones.
How Pagerank Works
That’s how google operates too. Using it’s “Page Ranking” system google ranks web sites on a scale from 0 to 10. That Page Rank or “PR”. Zero is assigned to web sites that are brand new or aren’t well known. Ten is reserved for sites like google.com or whitehouse.gov. CNN has a PR of 9. To put it in perspective, in the bar and grill example your parents would probably have a page rank of 8 and your friends a PR of 2, 3, or 4 depending on how well you knew them and respected their opinion(s).
<>Why Link Reputation Counts
In contrast to the end user wanting to have the most relevant results, you as a web site or blog owner want to come up as high as possible in those search results. The higher you come up in search results, the more traffic you’ll get to your web site. To come up highest in the search engine result pages you have to prove that you are a “trusted” source of information – an expert of sorts. The measure the search engines use for this is how many other web sites link to yours. The quantity of links surely counts, but even moreso is the quality. It would be much better to have 3 pagerank 6 sites linking to you than 20 page rank 2.
Building Backlinks for Your Web Site
Now we’re going to talk about how to build back links for your site. If you want to keep your site indexed with google the only way to do this is the honest way. DO NOT buy backlinks, do not use link exchange services, web sites, or software. Do not send out link exchange requests in bulk….and MOST importantly – MAKE SURE that all the sites you link are directly relevant (content wise) to yours. The better the quality of sites you link – the better off you are.

Scrutinize every web site offering you something to help build up your backlinks or link exchanges. Everybody has some kind of ulterior motive. Sometimes it’s exposure, sometimes it’s money. What you want to stay from are sites that will bring your reputation down. Your web site reputation that is. If you have a lot of unsavory web sites linking to your that can actually hurt your search engine rankings if you aren’t careful. For example, google doesn’t like sites that are link farms (more links than actual content, basically a spam site). Google also doesn’t like sites with pop-ups, sites that redirect users from one domain or one page to another, or sites with illegal content.
Examples of Link Exchange and Backlink building Web Sites
I’ll give you an example of a site I thought was good, but after I used it for awhile turned out to be not so good. Take a look at www.linkmetro.com. This is a link exchange web site. Membership and use of the site is free, but you’ll notice that the home page advertises an advanced membership. I exchanged links using this site and was penalized by google. Google tells you in their webmaster quality guidelines not to use services like this, so to stay in best standing for their search index – don’t!

*UPDATE* May 31, 2007 I’m going to leave this post up for posterity, but for those of you looking for tricks and shortcuts to ‘build backlinks’ to your web site or shortcuts to get you higher search engine rankings – this is NOT they way. You used to be able to beat the system – but no more. You can probably get away with it for a short time, and then google will impose a ‘penalty’ on your site and you will drop to the back pages of the index. Trust me – it happenned to me (for some of my other sites), and it can and will happen to you. Google now states in their quality guidelines and terms of service in their Google Webmasters Console that you shouldn’t use backlink building techniques and services like this.

How to Get Web Site Traffic

When you have a web site, the thing that everyone wants is all kinds of traffic. Usually (especially at first) the primary source of that traffic comes from the search engines – because no one knows who you are. Over time you get returning visitors, but still a large percentage of traffic always comes from SE’s.

There are TONS of things on the web that you can buy that either try and teach you how to get good search rankings (positioning to get that SE traffic), or try to guarantee to get you good google “pagerank” (PR). Let’s talk a moment about what things usually get good search engine positions (page one or two in the search engine result pages or SERP’s).

• well written content rich with naturally placed keywords
• good HTML title and description
• good page title in header (H1) tags
• some keywords and phrases in bold and / or italics
• linked breadcrumbs on the page
• search engine friendly URL / page name

Now – let’s say you did all of those things, but the topic you wrote about is one that thousands – or maybe even millions – of other pages on the Internet is competing against you in the search engine rankings for? Maybe some like “how to make a web page”. Most of the other search engines work similarly (except for directories), but I’ll use google for these examples. How does google determine what pages should be on the first page of results, and what pages go on the last? Who has the most information, what is most relevant, what’s most accurate, etc.? It would be impossible for google to know this information for everything people search for, so one of the biggest factors that is used in the google algorithm is who’s linking you! These are called “backlinks” or “reciprocal links“.
It all boils down to popularity. Google figures that the more sites that link to you, combined with the actual importance of those sites (page rank) equals where you will be found in the search engine results pages. Now let’s talk about Page Rank for a second….google pagerank is a number from 0 to 10. Ten is reserved for huge sites like apple.com and google.com. Zero is a pagerank given to brand new sites (or sites banned from google). If you haven’t experienced page rank before, download the google toolbar for your browser and enable the pagerank view. Then surf around the web, and check out the PageRank numbers of various sites (including your own). The higher the “pagerank”, the more respected authority google believes you are. Also, every individual URL can have it’s own pagerank. Meaning, www.site.com could have a pagerank of 5, but www.site.com/link.html could have a pagerank of 2.

So, if you and I had competing web pages on the topic “how to create a web page”, and I had pages linking to me with PageRank 5 and 6, and you had 100 pages linking to you that were PR 0, 1, and 2 – who’s going to come up higher in the SERP’s? Probably me. It’s quality of links, not quantity. In addition, if my page were a low page rank – the fact that half a dozen PR 5 and 6 sites were linking to me would probably raise up my PR to a higher number as well! If you had 100 sites linking you with a lower page rank, it shouldn’t bring you down, but it sure doesn’t raise your PR much either. There are of course many, many other factors that go into coming up in the SERP’s higher and that pesky google algorithm, but it’s still a widely known fact that if you have high quality sites with good PR linking to you – you should fare pretty good.

How to obtain lots of backlinks or ‘reciprocal links’ to your web site

So, how do you get quality sites to link to you legitimately? There are many ways to go about it. The oldest and easiest (and free) way to do it is to manually email sites and just flat out ask them to exchange links. This is a whole lot of work, and you might not even get a response. Also, you might find it hard to figure out who to email or contact. Another way (if you have the money) is to just buy them. There are many sites where you can do this. Just make certain to verify that the pages linking back to you actually have a good pagerank first. Do a google search for “buy backlinks” and you’ll find plenty of places that will take your money. Watch out for anything that sounds too good to be true.

You best (and least costly) bet is too find a free reciprocal or backlink service to use. Make sure that it shows you what PR the linking sites are, and browse through the listings to see if you feel they are “spammy” or not. For instance, I checked out www.linkshighway dot net and thought it was just terrible. There was no indication of pagerank for any of the sites listed in their directory, and the listings looked like some bad email spam (most of them). I’ve also used www.linkmetro for many months and I’m not happy with it either. The directory shows the PR of the sites, but it seems to be PR at the time of inclusion in the directory (not live). I had several sites listed in the directory at PR5 request links, only to find out they had dropped to zero (probably from bad linking practices). Also, the directory shows PR of sites, but when you go into the approval section for new links – it isn’t shown there. I found that 95% of the sites requesting links from had no page rank at all. And most of the pages requesting links from me were on link farm directory pages with bad (link-143[34]c.html) url’s. I hated that site – I took my pages out of the directory.

The site I still use and that works for me is www.backlinks.com. I am not trying to sell them, the service is free, and I don’t get anything at all by promoting them here. You just signup, and list your pages. Then add the code to your web page(s), and start choosing some link partners. The biggest reason I like this directory is because to list your pages – they must be at least PR3. If you have no pagerank (or low pagerank), you’ll need to start somewhere else. The interface is very full featured – and you get to all links before they go live on your page. Adding the code is just like adding the snippet of google code, and you get to change it’s appearance (if you need to) in the same way.

Do a little google work and you’ll find similar services to exchange links through. Weed out the bad ones, and post the post you find back here in comments! I’d love to hear of some of the ones I haven’t found yet!