Analyzing Link Partners

So you have a website. You’re also bright enough to realize that it isn’t going to do you any good if no one is visiting it. So you’ve set yourself a goal to find online partners to exchange links with, or you have a budget set aside to purchase links online.

Prioritize

Very quickly you’ll realize there are a thousand different opportunities out there and more people willing to take your money than you have money to give. You need to separate the great from the good and the good from the bad. Here’s a quick list of questions to get you started:

• How relevant is this site? There will be a few criteria, such as geography, products, approach, all compared to your own site.


• How respectable is this site? Sometimes this is tough to determine, but often amateurish or poorly designed sites stand out.


• What do the search engines think of this site? Visit an online tool such as iwebtool to see the PageRank of the site. Obviously the higher the better.


• How much traffic does the site get (and more specifically the page where your link will appear)? You’ll have to depend on the webmaster’s word, but it’s still a worthwhile question to ask before you spend any serious money.

In short, the money you spend on your online presence can and should be well spent. Not all sites are created equal, so be picky. Look for relevant sites that stand a good chance of bringing solid business leads to your website as well as boost your PageRank.

Follow Up

Finally, before you renew any packages from a site that sells links, check your website statistics and ensure that you have been getting enough traffic to justify the cost. Also of course, ask your new clients how they heard about you, the tricky part about marketing is that it's so hard to tell what expenditures are worthwhile. But it gets even harder to know if you don't ask.

How to Get Banned from Google

Search engine optimization and online website promotion is incredibly important to creating a successful website. There are however pitfalls to avoid as you build your online network. Google does watch for certain behaviours and, if caught, an offending website can see a dramatic drop in its PageRank or even worse, it could be banned from the index altogether. In this article we’ll go through some of the major ones you’ll want to avoid.

There are lots of fish in the sea

When picking link partners, be cautious. Avoid link farms: sites with thousands of unrelated links but no content. Google will assign a value to any link to your site based on the quality of the site it’s coming from. Link farms are often banned altogether. Online directories are a different story. They are often focused in the links they carry, for example: Saskatoon small business; web designers; freelance graphic artists; etc. Google acknowledges these directories as different from the link farms.

Black Hat SEO

Search engine optimization used to be a black art with every web designer guessing what every search engine was ranking site on. The rules change regularly, but search engines have been more open in what they like to see and what they don’t. I’ll talk about the don’ts here.

• Using invisible links, i.e. making the text colour the same as the background.


• Keyword stuffing: it’s expected that you’ll emphasize your keywords in your website, but many go overboard and repeat all 50 keywords in every alt tag of each image, in the meta tag of each page, and anywhere else they can put extra words without them appearing on the screen.


• Automated backlink generation: there are a lot of programs and services available that will search the internet for buttons that say “submit link”, “add a link”, etc., and then automatically fill in your website’s address and description. This can produce a huge number of backlinks in a short period of time. Google will notice, but not in the good way.


• Leaving your site to die. Websites are organic entities and if you don’t look after them, they’ll slowly get older, outdated, and less useful to the general public. While this won't get you banned, it might as well, since your pagerank will drop slowly but surely.

Search Engine Optimization

By Robert Blizzard

Your domain name: there is a reason speculators have bought up hundreds of thousands of .com names. Because the words that appear in your domain name are a head start in getting your website found by a search engine.

Tips:

• Incorporate your keywords
• Keep it as short as you can
• Make it memorable

Use every opportunity

At this point, search engines still can’t analyze images. This means that it is the words on your website that matter. Be sure to take every opportunity, whether it is in the name of your images, the meta tags for your html documents, or descriptions of your links, to reinforce your keywords.

Not everything is equal

Search engines will give more weight to some words than others. The title of your web pages, for example, is one of the most important as the engine will assume it is the best description of your site. The same applies to the header tags, or items appearing higher up on you page.

Tip:
Use CSS based layout so that the content is loaded before your navigation system. The style sheet will ensure that each appear where they should, but in the HTML document, the content comes first. You don’t want the first thing a search engine sees to be “Home”, “About Us”, and so on.

Outside your site

The biggest difference in your search engine results will come not from what’s on your site, but what’s on other people’s sites. Most search engines, and Google especially, care most about how many backlinks there are to your site, and the quality of them.

A backlink is a link to your website from someone else’s. High profile websites (universities, news organizations, etc.) are deemed more important than others (such as your MySpace page). To create backlinks, submit your site to web directories, offer to provide a link on your site, and write blogs or articles for other websites.

Search engine optimization is the easy part, just make sure you’re taking advantage of your opportunities. The work intensive part is to create a network of links that lead internet users to you. That takes time and effort.