Linking To The Top in Google

A while back and without much experience, and too much time to kill, after a little work I achieved top ranking for six of my websites for their main keyword phrases. And you know what? Back then it was easy, the main things were your meta tags and getting some links, it really was that simple. Mostly reciprocal links and all I had to do to get in the top three of my category was put my main keyword phrase in the link text. That's all it took, it was so easy!

It had to happen eventually, the seceret got out and everyone else knew to put their best keywords in their links, and bam, page one SERP's. The reciprocal link exchange boom was on. Link exchange services and software poped up like mushrooms after the rain.

I needed another edge so I started buying links, mostly run of site links. I'd have my best keyword in the ancor text on every page of a large site. I'd do this wit a couple of websites, and bam, right back on top. This was fantastic! Think about it, $100 every 30 days to get thousands of visitors every single day. Things were going great, I had tons of traffic and most of my competitors spending a fortune with Adwords for a small percentage of the traffic I was bringing in.

Once again everyone eventually discovered the power of buying text links, the race was on once again. It doesn't take long to get the attention of the SE's when everyone is abusing something that powerful, and once the SE's put their sites on it. it's over. So I looked at top ranking site's for terms like shoes, clothes, gifts etc. Link exchange services and software poped up like mushrooms after the rain. O.K. now I'm pumped, I've just got to get one way links from relevant content pages and I'm back in the saddle again. But how am I going to get lots of people to give me a one-way link from a relevant content page?

Then it hit me, create a triangle of sites linking to each other, A would link to B, B would link to C and C would link to A, of course this will solve all my problems. How hard could it be?

I had no idea what I was getting into!

Talk about a nightmare!

After sending out hundreds of request and eventually getting two webmasters to agree the first issue I encountered was that they insisted on putting the links on spammy links pages that were almost impossible for a SE spider to find. Next big issue was webmasters that wanted two of their websites in the triangle, both of which had the same IP#, this was like putting putting up a flashing neon sign that read "Link Scheme". Then there was quite a few shady operators who were actively seeking triangle links who wanted a good link from you, but wanted to link back from a link farm. What a nightmare this was turning into, almost a month and not one decent link. Where did I go wrong? And how the heck did I end up on this path to nowhere?

Now besides the headaches involved in trying to trick the search engines with schemes and black hat seo, there is a very real risk of having your site banned. It took me several years to figure out, but sometimes its easier to go with the flow and give the search engines what they want, like real and valuable content. It may seem like the slow hard way, but in the end you’ll see it’s the only way to succeed long term.

Next week we’ll exam ways to get quality one way links to your site.

Optimizing for Rankings – Things to Do and Avoid

Search engine optimization is a much-debated topic and there is a lot of different on the net. Let’s cut through the muck and discuss things you should and shouldn’t pursue to get high rankings. Optimizing for Rankings – Things to Do and Avoid Before blasting into the subject, we need to define optimization. It simply refers to the manipulation of a site to gain top rankings on the three search engines that dominate the search traffic on the net – Yahoo, Google and MSN. If you do a search on Google, the optimized listings are found in the large section on the left hand side of the page. These are often referred to as organic rankings since you don’t pay for placement. Of course, you manipulated the page for optimization, but we will stick with organic as a name. The first optimization tip is the most basic and the one many people screw up. Pick the correct keywords for your site! The correct keywords are not what you personally think based on your knowledge of your service or product. They are not the phrases returned in the Overture inventory tool. The only place you will find the exact keyword phrases you should use are in Wordtracker. The site gives you an analytical tool that provides the exact keyword phrases being used by your prospects, how often they are being used and which are easiest to get high rankings on. It costs a whopping $8 for a single session, but you will want to get a year subscription so you can pick up different cycles of keywords. Your prospects will search for different things in summer compared to winter. The second thing to consider is the isolation keyword strategy. Many people will try to cram as many keywords into a page as possible. The accepted standard is 10 to 15 words. This is an old approach that works, but it will take much longer to get high rankings. Instead, you should develop a list of as many keyword phrases as possible. A single page should be made for each keyword phrase. You should never have to pick one keyword phrase instead of another for your site. Instead, you should make individual pages for each phrase. A major third optimization tip is interlinking. The links from one page of your site to another matter a lot. When you create a link, make sure the link is the anchor text for the page the prospect will be going to. Anchor text is simply the keyword phrase on that page. Turning to things you should avoid in optimization, well, there are a lot. Do not put your site name in your meta title, the search engines will list you high without it. Do not skimp on text, you need at least 250 words per page. Do not put database parameters in your urls because spiders have problems reading them. Stay away from flash as much as possible for the same reason. Stick to a single subject per page, to wit, do not wonder around like a drunken web designer! For the love of God, do not use frames. Finally, keep your html code streamlined so search engines can read it with ease. The list of things to do and avoid is nearly endless. Follow these simple steps, however, and you will see marked improvement in your rankings.

The Myth of Link Exchange

If you have a web site that is getting much traffic, you will sooner or later be approached by someone who will want to link to your website and have a link from yours to theirs. It has been widely reported that this will help you get better positioning in search engines. This is and is not true.

While having someone link to your site might drive traffic if they visit your site from a link on that site, having links that are not relevant to the content on the linked sites on your site may actually harm your ranking on the search engines.

Search engine positionint on sites like Google are based on a point system. This system adds or subtracts points from you for various reasons. For example it used to be that if you hid keywords on your page repeated over and over, you moved up in the search engines on a relevance basis. This practice over time became known as a form of "spamming the search engines". When you have hidden text on your page (hidden text is when you make the text the same color as the background so it is invisible to the user) you lose points in the rankings and move down the list.

Search engines have been made very intelligent by their creators. They do things like compare the keywords to content, look for content changes, and compare the content of site links contained on the site to the sites they link to. If the content is relevant to the site chances are it helps your site rating. If the links are not related, it can hurt your ranking.

It seems then that to have effective linking we should only link to sites that contain complimentary content. If I have a business site, my site should link to other sites with business content. To link my site to a beauty salon site would probably do very little good for me as far as traffic is concerned and would very likely be detrimental to my site ranking.

Now I do not want to deter you from having advertising on your site. Ads are a different animal. Links usually are all grouped together on a page of suggested links while ads are usually mixed in with the content and take the form of banners. These types of ads will not hurt ranking. Most profit driven web sites have some form of ads on their site and the search engines are made to take these ads into consideration.

To sum it all up, links are good only to sites that are relevant to your content. If someone asks you to do a link exchange that is not relevant to your site, thank them for the offer and decline politely. If their content is related to yours be sure to make it happen if you have a way to do it.

As a web master who enjoys a top 5 listing on most search engines on the internet I can say that when it comes to learning how the search engines work it is better to have linked and lost than to have never linked at all. ;-)

Managed Link Strategies - The Page/Brin Effect

Improving your websites rankings in search engines requires an effective link strategy.

In the development period of Google's existence, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were burning the midnight oil trying to discover a way to determine the importance of a web site.

The concept they arrived at is now known as link popularity.

The basic idea is simple: If web site "A" has a lot of other web sites linking to it, then all these llinking sites must think that web site "A" is important.

In other words, each incoming link to your web site can be considered as a vote. The more votes your web site achieves, the more importance Google, and other major search engines will give to it. This means that in the all seeing eyes of search engines your web site is more relevant if it has a lot of incoming links. So the more relevancy you can acquire for your web pages means higher search engine rankings (all major search engines appear to have adopted the Google model).

After your web site has been assessed for the number of incoming links (or backlinks), and the quality, see later, of those links, Google will assign a value, called Page Rank (PR), to the web pages on your web site. This is a numeric value between 0 and 10. Higher PR indicating more importance.

So, improving my web sites Google ranking is as simple as that?

Unfortunately the answer is NO! This is because the Google algorithm is a complex beast. There are over one hundred other things that Google check for, and there are different types of links. Each type carrying more or less relevancy.

So, the types of link are:

1) Outgoing: where your site links to another site. No use to you in terms of PR.

2) Reciprocal: where two sites exchange links, this now has less value than it used to have since a recent Google update, but is still effective on other search engines.

3) One way Incoming: A link to your site pure and simple, where your site does not link back. This is what you need to build PR. This is a vote for your site and is far more powerful than a reciprocal link.

What's in a name?

Now you know the type of link that's needed (how to get one-way incoming links will be discussed elsewhere) there is still more that will affect your PR. This concerns the link anchor text. Link anchor text is the visible part of a link, i.e., the text you click on.

Link anchor text in a link pointing to your home page should contain the main keyword that your home page is optimised for. However, if you have many links all with the same anchor text it looks, to Google, like spamming and may cause lesser significance being given to those links. Therefore, vary your anchor text.

As can be seen, generating a successful crop of links can be a time consuming process. And there are many pitfalls along the way.

Get the Most Out of Web Directories and Article Directories

There are ways around promoting your site. And it isn’t even going to cost you a cent (only a bit of your time). There are what we call web directories and article directories. Web directories, simply, are directories of various categories containing website listings. On the other hand, article directories are directories also containing various categories where you can publish your articles. Why mention the two? You’ll soon find out.

First off, are web directories. Did you know that there hundreds of web directories exist all across the net? What you do is you submit your site to these directories, and there you go – instant links to your site! Did you also know that most of those web directories are free? That’s right, they won’t charge you anything (maybe just some occasional link backs to their site – “reciprocal linking”). What matters is that a site is linking back to your site. If you do this with hundreds of other web directories (thousands, if you have the time and perseverance), you would have that many sites linking back to you. By doing so, your link popularity will increase. Link popularity is the number of links pointing back to your site (the more links, and the higher their PR, the better). It also the basis on how search engines would rank your site. If a search engine sees that you have high link popularity, they would see your site to be important, and rank you accordingly.

Next are article directories. I know what you’re thinking. How would articles help your site get traffic? First reason – by submitting to article directories, you will have the chance to promote your site through the resource box or author’s biography. Like web directories, several hundred article directories exist. And again, they are also free. What you want are directories that let you submit and use their other articles for free. Why use free articles? Second reason – if your site is lacking content and you want people to regularly visit you, use these free articles as your web content (always include the author and source). With your site having more content, more traffic will eventually come to you.

These are two ways of boosting your link popularity, page rank, and of course, traffic. Other than these, you can try getting inbound links through forum participation and link partnership with sites that are related to yours (but that’s another story). I hope you would find this useful, so enlist to web directories and write your articles now.

Google Patent Application – Linking

The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items the search engine uses to rank web pages. The specific application is summarized as:

“A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.”

The patent application sheds significant light for those pursuing search engine optimization with Google. Patent applications can be difficult to understand, so following are highlights for those that don't speak lawyer.

Google’s Link Evaluation

It is well known that Google uses links as a significant ranking element. Although the patent application doesn’t dispute the value of linking, it does highlight the best method for pursuing a linking strategy. Simply put, consistently adding links will have a much better effect than adding links in bunches.

Google notes in the patent application that it looks at links from a historical perspective. The search engine notes the discovery date of links, the life span of the link and the speed at which a new web site obtains links. This approach reveals that Google is discounting quick link exchange strategies such as buying bulk links for your site. Instead, Google appears to consider a natural linking evolution as a sign that a site is “legitimate.”

The specifics of a good linking strategy are a bit difficult to nail down. In the patent application, Google tries to hide the evaluation method by listing factors that “might” go into evaluating links to a site. Factors that “might” be considered include:

1. The anchor text of the link.

2. The discovery date of the link.

3. The growth rate of links to your site.

4. The rate at which links to a page appear and disappear.

5. The age of links with older links carrying more value.

6. Numerous links to a new site will be looked at as spam, unless some of the links are from highly valued sites.

7. Link growth that is constant is optimal.

8. Sudden bunches of new links will be devalued as spam.

A general theme becomes clear as one reads the Google patent application. Google values sites that are in it for the long term, update regularly and consistently grow in link popularity. Taking this theme into account, it is easy to understand why the Google sandbox exists.

A steady approach is the key if you intention is to gain top rankings in Google. While the delay can be aggravating, the results are certainly worth it.