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eMarketing Resources
Trafficonomy - Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
Link Popularity Tips:
So what are the advantages of increasing the number of links to
your Web site? There are three primary benefits:
1. The more sites that link to you, the more traffic you can expect
to receive to your site. People find nearly as many Web sites by
following links from one Web site to another as they do by using
the search engines. Some well-placed links to your Web site can
be great long-term traffic generators.
2. More and more major search engines will rank your pages higher
when you have many links to your Web site (i.e., your link popularity).
Higher search rankings, of course, translate into greater traffic.
3. The more links to your site, the more ways search engine spiders
have for finding you each week. Therefore, you tend to stay indexed
longer and are less frequently dropped from the index.
Link Popularity Tips:
1. The more links you have to your site, the better.
2. Some engines favour links from popular sites. Therefore, a few
links from Web sites with a high link popularity score may be given
greater importance than a larger number of links from less popular
sites.
3. Some engines boost rankings for a keyword when they find links
to a site that include the targeted keywords in the linking text.
Linking to other sites helps:
Once again, try developing relationships with other businesses and
exchange links. Then check the Web logs to see if it's made a difference.
Also, beware of "frames" on your pages, in which one page
is inside of another on your site. Spider search engines sometimes
overlook framed pages. If your site depends on frames, make sure
your meta tags are thorough and diverse.>
Complete Linking Strategy:
Complete Strategy #1:
Here is a list, in order of tactical importance:
• First, build a content rich site, narrow in scope [say half
a dozen high potential keywords, with a smattering of lessor important
but still related kw's].
• Then, contact other sites that have the same scope as yours
does, and ask for a reciprocal link [after you have already linked
to them, of course!]. If you build a site that is content rich,
informative, and above all else has unique content, then all your
peers will beat a path to your door, asking you for a link!
• Get your site listed at Yahoo [yes, it does force you to
yank out your wallet, but it IS one of the best links you can get].
Do the research necessary to find the most appropriate category
[which is where the Link Relevancy comes from], and get that title
and description optimized!
• Get into the ODP. Do the same research as you did at Yahoo
for the best category.
• Find out which of the thousands of specialty SE's and directories
that your site is a good fit for, and submit to them.
• After you are done with 1 - 5, build another content rich
site, and on this one, concentrate on your next batch of kw's. Cross
link the home pages. Repeat.
• Even though blogging is all the rage these days, I think
it will go the way of link farms in the not-too-distant future,
especially if/when the SE's determine that it is just another case
of spamming. We are staying away from it, and concentrating on the
6 tactics above.
• Of much less importance is cross linking within each of
your individual sites. I have gotten away from heavy cross linking,
relying instead on good site maps [which addresses spiderability,
not link pop]. (Rocky Rawstern with 7th Wave <http://www.seventhwave.com>)
Complete Strategy #2:
Like Links:
• Step 1: Identify useful linkages. If you're a Web developer,
break your clients (or willing contacts from the industry) into
relevant linked groups: e.g. realtors, travel and tourism, technology
companies.
• Step 2: category-page.html. Build a link list for each group
(one for realtors, one for travel and tourism, etc.), plain html,
listing a keyword-relevant title for each description which links
to the site for each client, with one or two paragraphs about the
site. Example:
"Travel accommodations and resorts in Australia"
Save this page as say, travel-sites.html, and perhaps to remember
where it lives easily, and make it easily updateable, save it in
a directory like www.yourclientsite.com/accommodations/travel-sites.html
• Step 3: Make each of the pages different within each site.
Now apply your site template for each site in the list, to that
raw html page, (in other words cut and paste the list into a blank
version of one of your existing pages for each site and save it
as /accommodations/travel-sites.html) so that you have different
look, feel and byte size, for each of the pages built, in line with
the look of each site. This will stop most SE's viewing pages as
duplicate content when in fact what you're validly doing is provided
useful related links to other resources on the Web.
• Step 4: Make a site-map.html. Build a site map within every
site in the above list, if you haven't already. In each site, have
the site map linking to every internal page, set out like the one
above, with at least a one paragraph description of what is on the
page, with relevant keywords, which is also useful to humans. Hyperlink
the main keyword/phrase to the pages within your site. Also include
a link to the above link page (/accommodations/travel-sites.html)
which lists all the other related sites. Save the site map as something
like site-map.html.
• Step 5: Make a link to the site map from each home page.
On your home (index/default) page include a link to the site-map.html
page.
• Step 6: Submit to search engines. Submit your home page
to major SE's if it hasn't been submitted in a while. So now you
have a link to a site map on your home page, with that site map
listing one paragraph descriptions and hyperlinks to all the pages
in your site, including your new accommodations/travel-sites.html
(which now looks just like the rest of your pages in the site).
This simple 6-step process is a popularity and relevancy boost for
ALL the sites you have on the travel-sites.html list. Firstly, from
the home page on each site, SE spiders and humans now have access
to relevant descriptive links to all pages in your site and other
related sites. They have the addition of some useful "related
resource" information within the site content using the travel-sites.html
page. And most importantly, they have "x" more relevant
sites as incoming links. If all the sites are full of valid and
unique topic-related content, you've built a nice little interlinked
network of sites for very little effort. And with a resubmission
to the major SE's of this new content, you should see some increased
results within 3 months when checking link relevancy. (Carl Watney
with Unearthed <http://www.unearthed.com.au>)
Complete Strategy #3:
Begin a Link Exchange Campaign to create high quality content, high
PageRank links to your site by utilizing the following steps, in
order:
1. Create a links or resources page on your site
2. Establish a list of at least 50 related but non-competing, high
quality content sites with a high Google PageRank that you would
like to exchange links with by doing the following:
• Download Google toolbar (<http://toolbar.google.com>)
to be able to establish PageRank grading for the sites that come
up in the following search results
• Do searches on Google for:
i. terms that will show search results displaying sites that relate
to your own site, but are not direct competitors
Check out these sites, one by one, beginning with the ones listed
first in the search results, for quality content, non-competitiveness,
and Web master’s e-mail address, and note down in a list the
sites that meet these criterion, recording as well the site’s
title and description from the homepage source code
- terms that will show search results displaying sites that directly
compete with your own site
- terms that will show search results displaying sites that directly
compete with your own site >