SEO – Page 6

Increasing your link popularity

Why is increasing link popularity important when it comes to promoting your blog or website? Well, link popularity basically means that you have several people linking to your site. The more sites that link to your own, then the more popular your site is seen as being in the eyes of the search engines- particularly Google.

Understanding how Google works helps to some degree. Google has a very complex algorithm – and I don’t think anyone has managed to figure out exactly how it works, but people watching how Google works have come up with some pieces of the puzzle over time.

Of all the search engines Google tends to drive the most traffic to our websites. This is more than likely because it is one of the most popular search engines in use world wide.

Google looks at a websites on and off site factors in order to determine how the website should rank. Page Rank plays a part in how Google rates our sites, and page rank is basically how important Google thinks your page is on the internet as a whole. Page rank is not the be all and end all of Search engine optimization but some still consider it to be important even though it is much less important than it used to be.

What Google considers important these days is the links pointing to your site, what types of sources they come from and how many sites link to your own. Another part of Googles algorithm that we’re still trying to understand is the quality of the page that the link is on relative your your website or the page that it’s directed to. By this we mean- is the site or page that links to your own similar in topic or genre to your own? We believe that Google considers this very important. Also -is the page a list of links, or is the link to your site contained within the text of the site.

So how do you get sites that are similar or complimentary to your own to link to you?

Some methods that people have used are to distribute press releases, purchase links from link brokers or to trade links with other websites. It’s said that the press release is the most effective way of increasing your link popularity but it can be difficult because the content of your press release or article must be interesting enough for others to want to write about your press release and thus your site.

Purchasing links is quick and easy but the links are usually listed on a page on a website and not within the text of the site so they don’t work quite as well. Also, Google apparently automatically removes the value of links when they are placed at the bottom of websites with a whole list of outbound links.

Trading links with other sites used to be the best method of gaining link popularity, and it can still be a very good method but you need to get links from sites with similar context as your own. Also, if your reciprocal link is on a page that lists a number of links it still won’t be of that much value. You need to try to exchange links with other sites in a manner that gets them to mention your site or pages of your site within an article on that site for the best value.

As has been said hundreds or thousands of times before the very best way to gain link popularity is to work on your sites content. Create content that makes people want to come back to your site for more.

It is also important that when other sites link to you that they use descriptive text in their links. For example if you are linking to a site don’t write something like xyz company is fantastic click here to visit the site, with the link text being click here. It would be far better to write out a descriptive sentence that is appropriate for the site and link to the word in the phrase that describes the site best. For example if xyz company sells bikes you might write “xyz company sells bikes and you can read articles on biking, and purchase bike accessories directly on the site” with a link to the work bike or bikes.

DIY Search engine Optimization tips #2

by Tricia

Continued from DIY Search Engine Optimization Tips #1

6. When writing your articles or posts on your pages be sure to include important keywords and search phrases at the beginning, middle and end of the article.

If you are using good writing technique when composing your pages and articles you shouldn’t have a problem with this phase of SEO. As you might know, a well written article usually begins with a paragraph that describes what the body of the article will be about; the mid section of your article goes into more detail or greater depth regarding your initial statement in the first paragraph; the end of the article should come to a conclusion regarding the information you have discussed in the mid portion of the article.

Write naturally, but do remember to use terms within your post that might be used by people when they are searching for the type of information that your article contains.

7. Place your keywords and phrases in the link text of your web pages.

Keywords should be used in your links. When you are linking to another page or subpage on your site use a descriptive keyword or phrase to describe the clickable link. Don’t use terms like “click here” as that offers no description of what the link is for the search engines.

8. Make sure your site can be navigated easily by your visitors as well as search engines

When someone links to your site, or when you submit your site to a search engine it is often only the index page of the site that is given to the search engine. When the search engine visits your site it will index your main page. Your main page should contain some links that lead deeper into your site but if you have a javascript based navigation system the search engine spiders may not follow the links deep into your site as easily as if your links are text (html) based.

9. Build a site map page or use the Google sitemap option.

It’s important to get all of the pages on your site indexed by the search engines. Creating a page that contains links to all of the pages within your site, a sitemap, helps the search engine in this matter. As you probably know, visitors using your sitemap will be able to find items on your site easier as well.

You can create an xml version of your sitemap and submit it to Google Sitemaps. Google has links to third party XML sitemap creators in it’s Webmasters tools area. Once you’ve created your xml sitemap you can submit it to the sitemap area and google’s spiders will visit your site on a regular basis depending upon how often you update your site.

10. Off-site optimization

Now that you know how to optimize your site, and write articles and sub pages for search engine optimization you should concentrate on off site optimization. Google places a high measure of importance as to where you site is ranked on factors such as how many other sites link to your page, the page rank of the sites linking to your site, and the type of sites linking to your site.

The best way to get off site links of course is to create a website with valuable information that will make others want to link to you. If you exchange links with other sites try to exchange links with sites that are similar to your own. For example if you have a gardening site you should attempt to link up with other gardening sites – of all types.

You can also write informative articles and get them published on other websites which will result in a link back to your site. This may also help increase the amount of visitors coming to your site as well. Submit your links to all of the main directories- Google, Yahoo, MSN, the Open directory, and directories that are perhaps related to your sites genre as well. Participate in forums in order to promote your site and perhaps get more visitors to your site as well.

All of the tips that I have listed should help you promote your site and get better rankings on the main search engines.

DIY Search engine Optimization tips #1

by Tricia

Individual website owners and bloggers usually can’t afford to pay SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies to optimize their sites so that they reach the top of the search engines, however there are a lot of things that you can do yourself to improve your page rank and publicize their sites.

Here’s some tips

1. Plan your site for optimization from the beginning.

Start by choosing a domain name that includes words that could be considered important keywords for your site. For example, if you are creating a gardening site it would be great to have the word garden or gardening in your domain name. Use keywords when you create pages on your site too. A sub page of a gardening site might be called rosegardening.html .

Titles of posts in your blog – if your blog is for a specific niche should also contain keywords that pertain to the post and to the theme of the site itself.

2. keep search engines in mind as you design your site

Search engines use the text on a site to figure out what the site is about, and in part, where to place it on the search pages. If you use photos on your site always use the alt text tag to describe what the photo is about. This will make the search engines spiders and robots job easier.

Sites designed with flash format are difficult for search engines to navigate and index, as they don’t contain much text for the search engines to use to classify the site.

It’s also been said that long strips of java script might be better put in an external file that is called upon from the main page or CSS style files.

3. Each page of your site should have it’s own title tag

It’s very simple to make sure that each page has a title – simple use a Meta Title tag in the header for each page, and individually give each page it’s own title. Search Engines look at the title of each page as being one of the most important factors in telling it’s robots and spiders what the page is about. As per my earlier example if you created a gardening site and you talked about different types of plants on the various sub-pages you would want each page to have a title that contains information about the plant that is being discussed in the page. For example a sub page of the gardening site my have the title “Growing Daisies” if it discussed how to grow daisies.

Title tags should also contain important keywords that will help people find that specific page on your site when they are using a search engine. Think about what words you would choose to search for the type of information that your page is about and use some of those words in the title.

The main page of a gardening site might have a title tag – “Gardening- plants for the garden, gardening tips, and gardening FAQ’s”

4. Be sure to add a description tag to each of your pages:

A description tag is as important as the title tag. The first couple of sentences on your page should summarize what the page is about using important keywords and search phrases that you think people would use when searching for that page.

A gardening sites description tag might say “XYZ Gardening provides information to gardeners about growing plants in the garden, plant profiles, gardening tips and advice.”

5. Put your keywords into headers and headlines on your page.

Search engines give high value to the use of header tags on a page. Header tags are used to enclose the title of an article or as a sub heading in a page. I can’t write the full code here but the tags are H1 H2 H3 H4 and so on. The headline of your page should have a H1 header tag around the words.

Good blog themes often come with CSS style sheets that incorporate important items like header tags into the theme. You shouldn’t really have to think of this feature on a well made blog theme, but if you are writing and designing your own site or theme please remember that header tags are very important.

Please remember that article titles and sub-headings within an article or page should contain important keywords as well. Use words that best describe the content of the article or page when you make a header tag.

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