How popular is your site
Popularity makes or breaks celebrities and it will make or break your web site rankings. But how do you become popular
Well right now popular in the eyes of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) means links.
Each search engine views links differently and weights their influence on your ranking based on their own criteria. The only people who know these exact criteria are the search engines themselves. However by careful observation and experimentation over time we can see patterns that well ranked sites nearly always have.
Lets take a look at the fussiest of all and the one nearly every webmaster wants to rank well on - Google.
Google started the obsession with links. This was because a site that had a large number of links would nearly always rank well. You may not have heard of the term link bombing. Link bombing is simply gathering a large number of links to point at a site, using selected keywords in the link and the site then ranks well. A famous example of this was when you went to Google and types in miserable failure a biography of George Bush ranks number one (as at 27/11/05) this is still the case. This shows the power of links as the term miserable failure does not appear anywhere in the words on the page.
Now Google is continually getting smarter at spotting practices like this that are basically unnatural linking. Things that may be considered unnatural linking include:
- links to one site from every page of another site
- all the links pointing to a site using the same keywords in the link text
- links to a site all coming from a limited range of sites
- all links to a site going only to the home page
- all links to your site a reciprocal
Now how to avoid this is critical to your success. Links to your site, using your keywords in the link text are still the key to ranking well today. Here are 3 quick ideas. These ideas will be greatly expanded on in future articles.
1. Look at your high ranking competitors link structure. Who links to them and what do the links say. Can you get links from these sites as well
2. Write and distribute articles. Articles give you one-way links and these are considered more important than links traded between sites.
3. Get links to a range of pages within your site and vary what the text of the link says.
If you focus on quality linking strategies you will boost your rankings over time in Google and the other search engines will typically show similar results.
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As I was doing research for how to market my website once its completed, I ran into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. Their services ranged from one time fee to continuous payment monthly as long as the site was constantly optimized by the company. I didnt really look into SEO services because they were way too expensive for me to afford. I just thought they were similar to Yahoos Fast Track program, where they come up with keywords and descriptions, just that they charge so much more to keep my positions on the very top of every search page.
After meeting my potential business partner, I found out that there are two types of website optimization: one is to maximize website performance, and the other is for internet presence and visibility through natural listings on search engines, using meta tags of descriptions and keywords to give specific instructions for search engines spiders and robots. Spiders and robots crawl every webpage to match and position the sites on their search engines.
I wasnt very interested in maximizing my site performance because it loaded faster than other comparison shopping websites. However, I realized that website optimizationSEOwould help me a lot with visibility on all search engines. I can always pay to get high positioning on search pages, but having high positioning with natural listings; its like advertising the site for free. I felt like if I spent a little more and chose to go with SEO, I wouldve saved a lot more money in the long run.
Another $40,000 to invest to optimize my site was nearly impossible for me, unless the person I spoke to was willing to help out. I was ill prepared for this, and I blame this for me not being technologically savvy and just pushing my idea to work. This was when I realized my major setback Part VIII.
If you have experienced any major setbacks with your business and would like to share with the audience, please feel free to email me at writings@imbae.net
By Anthony Bae
Raising Money for Charity by Selling Links to Online Advertisers