Link Exchanging – Still an Effective Way of Promoting your Website?
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
As we have just launched our newest website, Qatar Visitor, we have been researching ways to promote it.
It’s been well worth the effort as Google has made changes this year to the way they rank websites – and through Matt Cutt’s Google blog these changes have been more transparent than before.
It has become clear is that one method of promoting websites is no longer as effective as before. That method is exchanging links.
Google’s aim is, of course, to maximise internet surfers’ ability to find quality sites. If sites can raise their page ranking just by exchanging links, then this will decrease the validity of the search.
In fact, Google is even penalising excessive link exchanging. However, just moderate link exchanging does not seem to be penalised – just not to carry as much weight as before. Of course, if you exchange links to sites with relevant content you should still boost traffic.
What Google – and therefore you – really want is for people to add (non-reciprocal) links to quality content. This raises the linked sites’ ranking for the right reason – because the sites are good, not because their owners have exchanged links with a thousand other sites.
Submitting your website to directories may also be less effective than before. However, it depends on the directory. The more a directory screens for quality, the more valuable its links will be.
This fits in with Google’s strategy of rewarding quality sites. If a directory only links to sites with good content, then it helps Google to identify quality sites for its users. DMOZ is the ultimate directory to be listed on – although unfortunately, it also seems very difficult to get into.
It’s also worth noting that Google assesses the quality of your own links. If you link to sites which just contain blocks of advertising (probably as a result of link exchanging) Google is likely to penalise your site. If your site is important and contains good quality Google may penalise it by reducing its ability to pass on page ranking.
It seems likely that the opposite is also true, and your website will be rewarded for linking to quality sites; in Qatar Visitor’s directory, we have introduced submission guidelines to help wean out poor quality sites.
To sum up then, websites now need to non-reciprocal links, not reciprocal links. Unfortunately, that’s just a little bit harder.
About the Author: Qatar Visitor provides extensive information on Qatar for tourists, residents and potential residents.
Labels: exchange, link, page, promote, promotion, ranking, Seo, web, Websites
Search Engine Optimiser Tip
Thursday, July 12, 2007
I used several criteria as benchmarks to gauge the quality of sites in this field.
Criteria selected were:
* Page Rank * Site Age * Yahoo Links * Yahoo .edu Links * Yahoo .gov Links * Pages Cached by Google * DMOZ Listings * Yahoo Dir Listings
I monitored the 28 top sites relating to this topic and placed them in a list and scored them for each. I call this 'Inner Circle Classification', meaning that these sites are the central sites to this particular search term. There will be this same 'Inner Circle' list in each and every subject matter on the net.
I recorded the average for each set of data to show the results needed if a site wanted to try to break in to the 'Inner Circle'.
The averages needed for this subject matter were as follows:
* Page Rank (6) * Site Age (2001) * Yahoo Links (72672) * Yahoo .edu Links (31) * Yahoo .gov Links (1) * Pages Cached by Google (1782) * DMOZ Listings (4) * Yahoo Dir Listings (3)
Of course, a site cannot change its age, which means that it must over-compensate in other areas to make up ground on the existing competition if it is newer than most. Each of the other criteria are things that can be adjusted by work from a site owner. This is a must if success is to be attained.
One striking note in all of this testing was the fact that .edu and .gov links seem to be the most important factors when selecting the most impressive list of criteria. I know that this may not be a surprise to some who are reading this, but to see it in black and white makes it very clear that any site wanting to break in most of the semi-to-ultra competitive 'inner circles' must try and target education and government websites for inbound links.
Each of the top sites in the list (when sorted by .edu links) show some similarities in criteria. A high DMOZ listings score, a high Yahoo links score, and generally, a high number of indexed pages. However, the .edu links seem to far outweigh any other scoring mechanism for success.
So what are you waiting for, wasting your time reading this sentence? Get to work!
Find more information about search engine optimisation here.
Article Source: ArticleRich.com
Labels: search engine optimisation, Seo
5 Amazing SEO Secrets That Will Make Your Articles Blast Your Website To The Top Of Search Engines
Monday, July 2, 2007
I see in forums of article websites that many are struggling to use articles for SEO purposes and failing at an alarming rate. The solution are simple to correct the problems that hinder your sites climb to the top 10. If you understand what the search engines are looking for.
The first thing we must clear up is a few misconceptions about articles and their use and value. The first in this category is that links from the article directories do help you climb the search engines. You will understand this more as we cover the 3 secrets. The second is that you only need to submit to a few of the top directories.
The more exposure the better, chances are if you get included in 200 directories that you may get over 200 links just from the directories and that does not count the re-publishers of your articles.Remember, you are playing a numbers game. And that can increase web site traffic also
Now the 3 secrets.
The first secret is to get at least one of your keywords in the title of your article. There is a reason for this. The title of a page is a major factor in the search engines determining the value of the links to other sites on the page. What ever your title of the article is will likely be the title of the page. Go to goarticles or ezinearticles and click any article and the title of the article is also the title of the page. This puts your keywords in the title of the page.
Secret 2 is keywords in the content of the article. Try to get at least a 3 percent density of your keywords or phrase in the content.
This is SEO at its best because you have absolute control of the content of the article and can help to control the value of the links.
Do not buy into all of the voodoo that articles on article sites will not help with SEO. Each page is valued by the same factors as any other page on any site.
So my point is that your link needs to come from a relevant page, not a relevant site, and if you control the relevance you control the power of the link to some extent.
Secret 3 is to make sure that you have the proper anchor text in your resources box. This is the place where you blow your own whistle. Make sure that the link is html and the clickable part is one of the phrases that you are targeting. If you want to rank for frog legs, then the clickable text needs to be frog legs.
Now also consider that if you get accepted into 200 directories the chances are that you will get re-published. This is nothing more than a numbers game. The more time you put yourself in front of people the more potential you have to gain Web Traffic to your site and also you get a diversity of different IP addresses linking to your site.
Now lets look a few more bonus secrets and the additional benefits of articles and SEO. Lets look at the power of links.
Links values are calculated by the page that the link is on (notice I did not say the site?) The reason I say this is because each page is its own entity in the search engines. This can be proven several ways.The first way is page rank, page rank is assigned to each page of a website, not one pr for the whole site. I have seen sites with pr ranging from pr 10 to pr0.
Each page has its own value. The second example is you can have a site with 400 pages and have just 1 or anywhere from 1 to 400 pages indexed, if they were all counted collectively the whole site would be indexed at once.
There are over 100 factors that determine the value of any given link. Some of the factors include pr of the page, if your keywords are in the title and content, position of the link on the page, how many outbound links the page has and on and on.
The reason articles are so powerful is because you are creating a related page by controlling the title and content of the article you are writing.
You should be able to get 1 or more of your keywords in the title, and I am sure you can get at least one entire phrase in the content. This makes the page where your article is published relevant to your site because it has your keywords all over it.
The next advantage is that most articles site on directories for over 18 months and your article starts as a pr0 page, this should increase over time and Google updates. People will link to it, or might even publish it on their pr 5 site, now your links get better with time.
The many advantages of articles for SEO great are many. I wish I could mention them all here.
Article marketing and SEO are a great tool for the website owner. Learn to use them and they will keep you up top.
About the Author:
Jim Corkern is the lead SEO for a Quality New York SEO Company and is offering a Free Article Submission Service to the general public to help them market and preform SEO more efficently
Labels: article marketing, Internet Marketing, Seo, Web Traffic
