A website with quality links is likely to rank among the top ten results of the search engines. The link popularity for every search engine is different from the other. You can find out the link popularity by typing “Link: domain name of the website” in any of the search engine. The compete details of the sites linking to your website will be in front of you.

You can devise an effective link building strategy to raise the link popularity of your website. You can incorporate three types of links for this purpose internal, external and reciprocal links.

The best possible way to have a good linking plan for your website is to develop a site map. A site map is the plan of the whole website that contains entire links on a website. The links are specified according to the specific details of a topic. They are generally given in a hierarchical manner. The links must be text links containing the keywords related to your website. This makes the search of the search engine for links quite easy.

You can have a quality internal links and can get the pages of your website linked internally. The website is rated as a good quality website, if it has rightly placed internal links. The link building strategy also stresses up on the outgoing links. They make your website user-friendly.

Connecting to the right websites makes your website to access good content. If the content of the sites related to your site is not good or useless, the search engines will not consider such links as useful. The message is clear that you have to stress on the quality of the links rather than the quantity.

The inbound links are the most important for link building strategy. You can get other websites to link to your website by developing good content. According to the experts, content of a website is the primary decisive factor in link building. Others will be interested to link to your website, if and only if, you have a good content on it.

The expert link building strategy is also to build reciprocal links with your competitors. This is beneficial to both the parties of linking. Both of them will provide targeted traffic to each other. This link building strategy is the ultimate mantra for getting quality links and gain good link popularity as the information on both the links will be related to each other.

The accurate link building strategy pushes ahead your target of link popularity, resulting in high search engine ranks.

Discover advanced link building and link popularity tools and resources as a Member of: www.Link-Advantage.com

‘Accessibility!’. ‘Usability!’ Apparently that is what the professional SEO community is focusing on to get traffic numbers up for their clients. Evidence the popularity of these words themselves. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’ has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a word like ’shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product you might be selling, but then -luckily- there are not as many SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.

So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies? Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to describe your business, it’s time to integrate everything yet again and focus on your site’s usability and accessibility.

Usability

What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does your site still provide valuable information to your human visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is key, say the guys at doubleclick.com, who have got good insights on what’s going on in online marketing in a broad sense. “Personalization is the hot term for relevancy, with the goal being to intertwine search with a consumer’s daily activity. As clients become more sophisticated with increased demands, the marketplace will yield more efficient results. Technology will continue to be created to facilitate the massive amounts of data currently sorted by the engines”, they report. Perhaps it is totally obvious, but you would be surprised how many strategies fail simply on wording and text writing.

It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to your site are not going to be impressed by what they read. Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past and using common sense, neutral language will open up the content to a wider audience of search terms. It is best to get a copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through this tool (free trial of seven days) and consider contacting a freelance copywriter for a quote if it appears your content is hampered; http://www.ezapplications.com/samples.htm.

There are millions of similar tools out there that can give you quite a good insight into your content. If you think your content is a mess, consider hiring a freelance copywriter to match content and keywords.

Accessibility Accessibility of sites is way more of a technological issue. You will have what is generally considered an ‘accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers. Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching between your content and the search engines. The various limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text, JavaScript through the

There are two good ways you can check how accessible your website is. Simply download the Lynx browser to see if you can successfully access all your pages and download the Opera browser and follow their instructions to enhanced accessibility. Good SEOs focus on a few standard setting organisations’ guidelines, which are complex systems of rules on unifying coding. What SEOs make sure of is that users from other languages and cultures, and users of differing age groups are not excluded from your site because of some silly technical hiccups. Where an SEO says he’s making all the difference for his clients is that he has numerous checklists to make sure your business in whatever location or segment it is, is optimised. He likely will market his services saying that he will make your site more localised than your competition.

There is a lot of scepticism on the strategies in use here and it remains to be seen whether better accessible local business site optimisation will actually translate into tangible higher Return on Investment numbers. Local search appears to be performing well for national advertisers seeking to segment markets. The local dry cleaner however doesn’t have (or probably need) a Web site so the lead is not accurately tracked, and the value remains doubtful. Don’t buy into it until you see results from comparable segments to the one you are in!

All lists SEO’s use to make sure your site is technically kosher are likely variations in one form or another of the lengthy, prioritised in-depth checkpoints published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding of the web. It can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. It is not deemed 100% fool proof, but it’s said to be Google-proof. The checklist consists of general, common-sense priorities that designers and programmers must take heed of. The bulk of the checkpoints are likely issues you’ve comply with for years already, but it’s always good to see if there’s anything new. It could give you that edge over the competition you need!

Search engines increasingly take their lead from Google and use hyper linked text for relevancy so checking that your links make sense all the time is not a luxury but incremental for your business. Some SEOs will run software that check that if a hyperlink is removed from the text -something that easily happens in forms- and determine whether it still makes sense in the general context of your site. An SEO would replace a simple hyperlinked word like ‘more’, with a more descriptive term such as ‘more news and events’, or similar. You get the idea here.

Source code in general is also quite important. Again, w3 sets the standard and you can run your site through their validator tool (http://validator.w3.org/) to get it analysed to see if search engine spiders/robots have any problems splitting your content/page into sections before indexing it – e.g. header, metadata tags, headings, normal text, etc. If the spider has difficulty in calculating the structure of your code, some of the text could be misclassified or omitted. Find out and optimise!

It is estimated that up to 60% of new traffic to your Web site will come from search engines. This means that unless you are already so well known that people will be using your name to search for your site, you need a search engine strategy. Thousands of new Web sites are created daily, so the axiom “Build it, and they will come” does not apply.

Effective Web site promotion requires a serious and continuing investment of time and resources, whether you do it yourself, or hire a professional. It is not a one-shot deal, but an ongoing process, meaning you should evaluate the return on your investment. You can collect a vast amount of crucial information about your traffic, and make strategic business development decisions, in ways that are unprecedented in the real world.

Setting your goals

We’ve all met the person who boasts of “thousands of hits a day” on his Web site, and maybe we felt a little envious. But let’s debunk the hype . . . .

It’s important to distinguish between individual visitors, and “hits”. The latter refers to every piece of your site that is downloaded, and this includes all graphics files separately. Thus, one visitor viewing your home page, which contains text and four images, will generate five “hits”. If that visitor explores your site further, he or she will generate more hits, but it’s still the same user.

You want to ask yourself whether you want every visitor that you can get – which could be thousands of indiscriminate, unqualified people, or whether you would prefer 20 highly qualified decision makers per day, looking for exactly what you provide?

There are no right or wrong answers, but you should have goals for the volume and quality of traffic that you would like, so you can measure results (more on this later!)

Designing keywords

The next step is to identify some keywords and key phrases that will differentiate you. Imagine if we all used “professional speaker” as our main key phrase. How many of us would show up on top of the search engines?

Furthermore, there are too many results for the typical search. So, visitors will be combining “professional speaker” with something that narrows down what they are looking for – perhaps “customer service” and “banking”, or maybe a location, such as “teambuilding” and “Chicago”. You will discover the keywords that work best for you when you run a log analysis – for now, make your best guess.

Think about the topics you offer, which industries you specialize in, which locations you serve, and anything else that sets you apart. Make sure that your keywords are in the language that your clients use, and not industry jargon – I have never seen the phrase “keynote speaker” in actual searches.

Then, build these into a set of keywords and phrases. Because of the frequency of most single words, phrases often work better in narrowing a search. Include your name, common misspellings of your name, and any other key element of your site. Use both singular and plural forms, and mix capital with lower case letters, except for proper names (some search engines are case sensitive and will exclude lower case searches for words that you have capitalized).

As an example, here are the key words and phrases for my site:

Philippa Gamse, Phillipa, Games, CyberSpeaker, internet speaker, internet seminars, Internet marketing programs, internet marketing speakers, search engines, online marketing strategies, Web site promotion, traffic logs, internet consultant

Not an exhaustive list, but a good start

When you have the keywords and phrases, use those to build:

1. a page title containing your most significant keywords. It doesn’t matter if the title doesn’t read well – it’s the piece that appears in the colored bar of the browser at the top, and very few people see it. Contrary to popular belief, titles are for search engines, not people!

2. a brief “knock their sox off” description. This will be displayed in the search engine results, and will attract visitors to come to you. Most search engines display 2 lines or less, so wording such as

“Welcome to My Company – a full service provider of . . .” is probably most of what you’ll get – and you haven’t said anything yet! So keep it pithy, and include the keywords.

Now – do this for every significant page of your site!

Your site is (or should be) more than your home page. The spider search engines that index every word on a page allow you to submit multiple pages. So do it! This increases by many times your exposure, and the angles that you can use to promote yourself.

For example, I have an article on my site about choosing an Internet Service Provider (if you want to read it, check out my list of articles). Many people searching for this topic find this piece as their entry point to my site. If they want to find out more about me, they can follow the navigation aids back to get more information.

Reviewing and updating your pages

When you have your keywords, key phrases, titles and descriptions ready, it’s time to insert them into every significant page of your site. You may need help from your Web designer to do this.

First, you need to incorporate these elements into the header record for each page – in special places called “meta tags”. These tags, which aren’t visible to visitors, are used heavily by several of the major search engines.

As an example, the header record for my home page looks like this:

Also, make sure that the text of each page includes the main keywords again – but don’t spam – that is, repeat them incessantly. At best, the search engines will ignore more than about 7 occurrences of each word, at worst they may even exclude your site.

While you are reviewing your Web site pages, look for any hidden roadblocks for the search engines that your Web designer may have unwittingly introduced. These can include:

* Frames: the separation of the screen into different sections. Several search engines will not go inside these.

* Java: a programming language used to create “cool” animation effects, and other applications on your site – again, the search engines will not work with Java script.

* Images: pages that contain only graphics with no text, (even if words are part of the graphic) will be passed over by the search engines unless you include alternative text tags for the images.

Note: there are big differences between the various search engines as to what and how they will index. My suggestions here will help you well through the basics, but for much more detailed information, check out “The Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines”.

Submitting to the search engines

Now it’s time to submit to the search engines.

By the way, they all (currently) accept your listing free of charge – they raise revenue from the advertising banners at the top of their pages.

You may have already received some unsolicited e-mail (not from me!) offering to submit your site to 500+ search engines for a seemingly very low price. My advice would be to avoid these services, for several reasons:

1. Most of the 500 search engines will be obscure (such as “Fred’s Cool Links”), with few people ever visiting.

2. These services will submit your site to all the engines on their lists indiscriminately, whether or not it is applicable. Worse, some of them may be adult-oriented.

3. The services use software to submit your site automatically, which means that they do not take the time to ensure that you appear in the optimum category within each directory. Also, some of the search engines are now rejecting automated submissions.

If you decide to do your own submissions, these are the ones that I recommend using:

Alta Vista; AOL Netfind; Excite; Google; Hotbot; Infoseek; Lycos; Microsoft Network; Northern Light; Webcrawler;

Be aware that the search engines take vastly differing amounts of time to list you. Alta Vista and Infoseek are usually very fast, while Excite and Lycos can be delayed by several weeks.

You should also get yourself listed in the major directories – these are reviewed by human editors, so make sure that your site is ready for close scrutiny! These include:

Looksmart; Snap; Yahoo!

If, and only if, you are selling product directly from your Web site via a secure server, you can apply for Yahoo!’s Business Express Service. This costs a one-time fee of $199, but seems to virtually guarantee you a listing – and Yahoo! is still by far the highest trafficked directory.

And, if you are willing to pay per click (visitor to your Web site), check out Goto. This search engine is arranged on an auction system – you bid per keyword or phrase (bids start at $0.01), and the highest bidder’s site is displayed first. Your account is debited by the amount of your bid when someone clicks on your listing. Again, this site is controlled by human editors, so the results are pretty clean.

Traffic analysis – evaluating results

Once your site is promoted and starts appearing in the search engines, you can evaluate your traffic. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) should provide your site’s usage logs, which give you incredibly useful information. (And if they don’t, take your business elsewhere!)

You will need a good analysis tool to break down this data (some ISP’s and / or professional Web site marketers provide this service as well). I currently use Hitbox, which is excellent.

The report will show you how many individual visitors came to your site, as well as the hit count. You can see which pages of the site are the most popular, and which pages draw little traffic. Maybe this is because you haven’t made them enticing enough in your links.

Armed with this analysis, you can intelligently review your site structure and content. For the purposes of this discussion on search engine promotion, look at the sections on search engines and keywords (you can find these by using the navigation links in the left-hand frame of the report):

“Top Referring Sites” “Top Referring URL’s” “Top Search Engines” “Top Search Phrases” “Top Search Keywords”

These charts and tables show you which search engines (or other Web sites that link to you) are driving the most traffic to your site, and what keywords and phrases people are using to find you, broken down both by individual search engine and overall. Here’s where you start getting some great feedback. You may have been fairly sure that you knew the keywords that your markets would use to find your site, but you could be wrong! With this information, you can adjust the titles, keywords and descriptions in your pages, and then resubmit the site. This ongoing process helps to improve your position in the search engines where you may not be so well placed.

This also provides wonderful market research on your audience. Rita Risser’s company, Fair Measures, provides legal training for managers in the area of employment law. Her Web site is an extensive information resource, attracting over 6,000 visitors per month.

Rita told me that her logs showed that many visitors were searching for a specific topic that was a total surprise to her. But there was such demand for this subject that she decided to write a book on it.

If you view the Webtrends report while online, you can click on the most popular search strings and perform that actual search. This will show you how your site appears, and also what other pages are being returned. So if your competition is ahead of you, it may be possible to look at their promotional techniques and work out how they do it!

Conclusion

Take your Web marketing seriously. The Web affords you the opportunity to track the results of your marketing investment in ways that you never could with traditional advertising. You can learn something about literally every visitor to your site.

Get serious about your Web site marketing; set your goals, invest in an ongoing strategy, and then become even more successful!

Copyright, Philippa Gamse, 2000

If you get a link to your site from Yahoo, then your own site’s ranking in various search engines will be enhanced, as Yahoo is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Ranking of course is not a precise term, and varies from search engine to search engine. But if you want to be consistent, you can use the Google Toolbar, and the Google page ranking, shown in the toolbar, as way of judging how well you are doing. Google ranks a page from 0-10, and a site with a 0 ranking will not do well in searches, especially in very competitive categories. So when it comes to finding link partners one guideline is to find sites that have a Google ranking that is equal to or higher than yours.

A site with a 0 ranking will not help you. Also, sometimes a site has a relatively good page ranking but its links page is 0, and this is the page that links to you, thus it is very important. So the question is why is the links page 0 when the rest of the site is OK? Some sites use robotic tools to create what are known as “link farms. Link farms are huge collections of links, a giant directory that dwarfs the original web site. These were set up by people hoping to increase their link popularity very fast. However search engines got wise to this, and do not give any importance to such directories, hence you will see a 0 ranking for them.

So, if it is a link farm, don’t participate in a link exchange with that site. It will not help you, and some observers say that a link from a “link farm” will actually harm your standing. I am not sure if it will harm you, but it is definitely not going to help you.

Another important thing to consider is whether the links page or directory on the other site is visible to the public. This might seem elementary, but some people like to get reciprocal links but don’t really display them fairly, because they don’t want people leaving their site through the reciprocal links. The links page should be linked to at least one of the major pages of the site, if it is not, then don’t puruse the link. One time, I noticed this on another site and objected. The webmaster acknowledged my point and changed the site to properly display the links page.

Similarly, if your link on the other site will be in sea of hundreds of unsorted links, like on the free-for-all links pages, this is not valuable to you, because such a site has little chance of sending you any traffic.

What are the best sites to link to? A site that has good content, a site that your web visitors will think is a valuable resource. While you can’t take responsibility for everything that is on the other person’s website, you shouldn’t knowingly send your web visitors to a low-quality website. So be selective in pursuing reciprocal links, and in responding to requests for links. Visit the other site and see what it is all about before jumping to link with them.

The ideal link partner should be a site thematically related to yours, with the kind of visitors who will also be interested in your site. It should give your link the kind of prominence that will enable you to get some traffic, and finally, the site should have a decent page ranking. If you get all of these factors together, you can be sure that it is a quality link and worth your effort in making the contact and setting up the link exchange. Check your logs from time to time and see which links are performing well, and then try to find similar link partners.

Reciprocal linking takes time if you want to do it correctly, but the targeted traffic that it can generate coupled with the enhancement of your page ranking that it can provide, makes it an important part of overall website promotion.

Be sure to read these related articles:

Improving Your Site’s Link Popularity and Search Engine Ranking
How to Choose Your Link Partners
How to Get Non-Reciprocal Links, and Improve Your Page Rank

© Copyright 2003, Donald Nelson, all rights reserved.

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has been
working on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization,
http://www.a1-optimization.com, a firm providing search engine optimization,
copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. He
publishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at
http://www.a1-optimization.com/newsletter.html