Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the
difference between a small, barely profitable or visible website and a
traffic magnet website. There are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to
influence the search engines. Some search engines react to certain
strategies better than others. Some even have conflicting strategies
that they react to. To document all of these things would require a
significant number of pages and research that goes beyond the scope of
this article.
However, there are a number of things that can be
documented that will work for most if not all search engines. And let's
face it; there are really only 3 that make a difference between a
successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy. They are the big three:
Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines in any given month are
responsible for over 90% of all internet searches.
So, what is
this article about? It's about what you can do as a website owner that
will influence the search engines using commonly accepted practices of
linking to other websites (outbound) and getting website links (inbound)
back to you. There are basically 4 strategies that a website owner
usually will employ to increase their website value in the eyes of the
search engine. They are reciprocal linking, one-way linking, multi-site
linking and directory linking. A website owner should not think that
using just a single strategy is the right answer - sure it will help
your SEO but it won't be the Best answer. The Best answer is to employ
all 4 techniques and to do it naturally.
Each of the four linking strategies has specific descriptions that can be summed up as:
1. Reciprocal Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links back to Site A
2. One-Way Linking = Site B links to Site A
3.
Multi-Site Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C,
Site C links to Site D, and Site D links back to Site A. Could be 3..N
number of sites involved.
4. Directory Linking = Site Directory A links to Site A
That
seems simple enough but it takes time and effort to perform all 4
strategies and most website owners aren't willing to spend the time or
don't have the time to spend on it. As a website owner, SEO needs to be
one of the highest priority tasks that you need to address, just after
Order Processing and Fulfillment and Customer Service. Without free
traffic from the search engines, other traffic generation strategies
that usually require payment must be engaged.
Now doing the 4
strategies above is great, but it gets even harder because you have to
do it in a way that doesn't trigger the search engines to enforce a
penalty upon your website. No one except the search engine engineers
know all of the exact penalties but we have some good theories for some
of them.
The first is the rate at which links are created. There
is a certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's
possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to the age
of the website according to the engine. For example, a young
low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month
whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get
1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure
you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying
links.
The second is that having a link to every site that links
to you will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if
all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up the
SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach your sites
full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies will appear more
natural to the engines.
The third is having all inbound links to
your site on "linking" pages will make those links less valuable than
having a natural link on a contextually relative page for a percentage
of the inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage,
the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some
of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it
requires more time and effort for both website owners.
The
fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking sites. If all
you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites then you are likely
to be sending the message that you purchased your links and that is not
natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for
driving traffic is just fine and it is. However, you should not expect
the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when
calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for
you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a
decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0
- 10).
The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links
varied. It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have
the same text on the link description. The natural tendency would be to
have a certain percent be the sites name, but after that it should be a
wide variety of description. Your link text description is a key factor
for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in
mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your
website.
Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your
inbound links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural
for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all point back
to the home page of your website. It's most natural for a good high
quality link to appear in the text of a page and have it point
internally within your site.
So, when you begin or continue your
SEO activities keep all of these things in mind and don't be impatient.
Impatience could incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in
the "sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google
supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they
have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being
manipulated. Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes
to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from
being cluttered.
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