The great thing about internet users is that browsing/surfing behaviors evolve rapidly as they learn to do things the more efficient way. One of the things that users now depend heavily on is the search box. Search is no longer confined to Google and more and more websites now offer internal search to make it easier for users to find specific info found somewhere on the site. This is good practice especially from the user interface point of view. However, when it comes to SEO the search box can become a liability.
How is this so?
To be more accurate, the search box itself is not the problem. The presence of a search box on the site will NOT affect your SEO efforts negatively. However, relying too much on the search box to help your users navigate through the website and not paying attention to the link architecture of the site is […]
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Written by on October 7th, 2008 with no comments.
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.EDU and .GOV links are usually prizes in the SEO world because they pass on very good link juice. Here are a few ideas on how to get these types of links.
Advertise or be a sponsor - Look for university and government sites that accept sponsors. You will be doling out cash but then it will give you not only links but also ads. If they do not post ads see if they provide links to sponsors and give to the university. The good part here is that you might be able to file this as tax deductible depending on whether the university falls under charity and dependign on your government’s laws.
See if they have job/service postings - Many university sites as well as government sites have job listings. If you have any job openings submit to these sites and place your website as part of your company background or […]
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Written by on March 19th, 2008 with no comments.
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We all know that one of the main reasons why websites add blogs to their site is to be able to provide fresh content and thus hopefully get more traffic and links. If you do not have the time to update a blog regularly though or you find that adding a blog to your site is still not enough to get you the amount of links nor the traffic you want you might want to offer other forms of additional content that will hopefully get you more links. Here are some ideas:
offer free useful tools/services - The tool/service you offer need not be the most brilliant idea but it should be useful or at least catchy enough. Firefox and Wordpress plug-ins are very popular so you might want to make your own plug-in. You can also offer free email subscriptions. Just make sure your email subscription really has something […]
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Written by on March 12th, 2008 with no comments.
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I have already stated my position on buying/selling links but realised that I didn’t mention anything about exchanging links. In my opinion exchanging links with another website is a sound strategy but only if you follow the guidelines listed below.
Do not deal in excessive link exchanges - Google looks at this as another link scheme and though I believe that it isn’t as dangerous as getting caught buying/selling links if Google says it can negatively impact your site’s ranking then it can.
Exchange links only with sites that have the same topic/theme as yours - We know that relevance is important in SEO. Exchanging links with anyone just to get inbound links is a waste of time and will actually make it easier for search engines to deduce that you are merely exchanging links for the link juice. Exchanging links with similar websites (unless done in excess) will not be seen […]
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Written by on March 5th, 2008 with no comments.
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Link building is not as easy as some SEOs make it sound. The truth is that many SEOs that promise thousands of links in several days get these links by buying links. Buying links will get you a good amount of links way faster than organically building up the number of inbound links to your site but the truth is that it isn’t that good an idea because Google considers buying links in order to pass/get page rank to be a link scheme. According to Google “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”
Of course Google wouldn’t penalise your site if it does not find out that you have been buying links to get your page rank up. However, there is a good chance that they will find out. Eric Enge, who explained why […]
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Written by on February 26th, 2008 with no comments.
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Why should you ask about the difference between search engine algorithms? As I have mentioned in previous posts, though Google is the big daddy of search, it is important to know the difference between the algorithms used by different search engines. The truth though is that when it comes to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN there isn’t much difference, at least in terms of the basic principle. Ask uses a different approach though.
If you look at the Ask Algorithm (read the short answer if you want a less amusing but easier to understand answer) you will see that Ask places emphasis not only in the number of inbound links but also previous user click streams to help determine a site’s actual popularity. This is a good thing in the sense that the search engine actually gets to determine (with each click) which sites are really relevant to the search terms since […]
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Written by on February 18th, 2008 with no comments.
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If you are running out of ideas for your link building campaign and have done the usual methods of hunting for links you might be relieved to know that there is another simple method you might have missed - link building using search.
Link building using search is might be a little time consuming, depending on the amount of results you get, but it does work pretty well. So what exactly should you search for? You should search for:
your company name;
your website title;
your website’s URL; and
your name
The reason why you should search for these is to find the websites that mention any of the above but fail to link back to you. In most cases (unless you find scrapers) asking the webmaster of that site to link back to your site using the above fields as anchor text will end up in new inbound links for you. If you think about […]
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Written by on February 13th, 2008 with no comments.
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Chris of Rillz Magazine wrote an interesting post on a Wordpress quirk that isn’t doing anything for your SEO. The ever helpful Wordpress uses the phrase “Read more” or “Continue reading” automatically at the end of post excerpts. This is useful since you want your readers to know that they have something more to read and that the post hasn’t ended. However, as Chris pointed out, in terms of SEO this is actually not a good thing because you want search engines to only rank relevant links. Links with generic terms in the anchor text does you no good in terms of SEO, and in fact will somehow show that your Wordpress blog is very much about “read” and “reading” due to the number of internal links containing these words as anchor text.
To combat this problem Chris suggests that you simply use to nofollow link attribute. You can read more […]
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Written by on January 18th, 2008 with no comments.
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