Tampilkan postingan dengan label Improve Search Engine Placement. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Improve Search Engine Placement. Tampilkan semua postingan

Jumat, 31 Agustus 2012

Search Engine Optimisation: One Link is Better than Ten

That can’t be right! Shouldn’t ten links be better than one? It is usually the case where more is better. However, when it comes to gaining links, having more links isn’t necessarily better than having a few good links. In fact, having too many irrelevant links could possibly harm your website’s visibility within the search engines.

These days, search engines are placing more emphasis on incoming links to a website when evaluating rank. The reason being is because they are difficult to obtain from trusted sources (a "by the book" website such as the Dmoz directory) and it is a good way to partially eliminate the group of people who abuse the "on the page" factors of optimisation (page spamming). How is this so? Well, if you have someone who is abusing the "on the page" factors and they have no trusted links to their page (they will most likely not get any at all due to spam) then there is no chance of them getting a good listing. However, people have worked out ways in getting a large number of links, through link farms and other tactics, regardless of the quality of their website. As the search engines are aware of this, it brings us to the topic of how one link can be better than ten.

Obtaining one link from a trusted source can be very difficult in the sense that they do not issue links to just about anyone. If you have a good website with relevant information, then you will get them. It is for this reason one link from a trusted source can better a multiple of links from other websites. As a trusted source website is "trusted" by search engines, it will also trust the websites it links to. If you have ten links from your best friends, it will help you in some sense, but no where near as much as the one link from a source like Dmoz, unless one of your friends has a very reputable website amongst the search engines.

Having too many irrelevant links could harm your website’s visibility in the search engines. What is meant by this is having links from websites that have no relation to yours. An example of this would be a site about cars linking to another site about medicine (unless the sites are reputable and have a good reason for the link i.e. there is a relationship made between cars and medicine). Search engines will pick up on this sort of link and will give it no weight in boosting your visibility. Obtain many of these irrelevant links, then it could be seen as spam (like a link farm tactic) and that will lower the popularity of your website within search engines.

The key here is to focus on quality and not quantity. Gaining a few good / relevant links will take you much further than a lot of irrelevant links. To get these quality links, start off by placing your website in directories, but be sure to avoid any "on the page" spamming as this will not get you accepted. Once search engines have acknowledged a presence of relevant links, follow up on it and research some ways to obtain more. As time passes, you will notice that your website’s performance will increase, as the links age, provided you have carried out search engine optimisation. Avoid obtaining the irrelevant links even though it may be tempting to see fast results. It will only be a matter of time before a search engine realises the spam tactic, and as the saying goes "fast rise, fast fall".

Sabtu, 12 Mei 2012

The Three Basic Keys of Search Engine Optimisation

With search engine optimisation on the rise, there are many mind blowing theories that are circulating about what will get you high up in the search engines. From having your keywords in bold font, to having your text as close to the top of a page, along with the famous 3% - 7% keyword density rule, we can scrap them all since it comes down to three basic key points.

1. Keyword Selection

The most important point out of the three is keyword selection. If you end up selecting keywords that do not have any/few searches, then you are simply wasting time by optimising for them. There is no point in being ranked number one for a keyword when there are no searchers for that term. A good place to start is by using keyword research tools such as “Wordtracker”, “Overture Keyword Assistant” and “Keyword Discovery”, to find out what people are typing into search engines. Once you have found those terms, the next step is to work out the level of competition and effort it will take to get a reasonable rank for each term. The best way is to look at the number of competing pages in search engines for each keyword and how many incoming links the top ten websites have (“Marketleap link popularity checker” is a good tool for that). If you have the knowledge and time, you may want to go for the slightly more competitive keywords.

2. Good On-the-Page and Off-the-Page Structure

For on-the-page factors, making sure that there is a sufficient amount of text based content, title tags and a strong internal linking between all web pages, is a good start. Title tags and content should contain keywords provided that they are not “stuffed” into the text. For example, if your keyword is “dog supplies”, this sort of writing should be avoided:

“We base our business on dog supplies and have a great range of dog supplies. Check out our latest dog supplies today!”

A visitor will be immediately turned off from this sort of writing and will question the credibility of your site. Keywords should be written around the content, not the other way around.

Off-the-page factors relates to reducing code within your web pages (placing code into external files, such as JavaScript and Style Sheets) and having a website design where search engines can index all your content.

3. Incoming Links

Attaining incoming links to your website has become a more heavily relied upon factor in last couple of years. Each incoming link is seen by search engines as a vouch from another site. The more incoming relevant links you have, the more trusted your website becomes by search engines. This does not mean you can simply acquire a bunch of links from any site. Links need to relevant in the sense that the website linking to you has some sort of affiliation with your theme otherwise the links will not benefit you.

Provided you stick to the three basic key points of search engine optimisation, in time you will notice a stronger website presence in the search engines. Whist it can be done on your own if you have the knowledge and time, hiring an SEO agency is one avenue to success if you have the budget. Having said that, time should not be spared in taking advantage of the vast opportunities the internet can bring you and your business.