If you spend a very large amount of time on your website and design an exceptional design which ends up looking prestigious. This will naturally attract hundreds and thousands of high quality PR links to your homepage over time and this will go on increasing!
It is a lot of hard work and worth spending months of work. Look at N Design Studio for example, he spent a very large amount of time but now his natural links go on increasing. Can you complain?
So go on and design yourself a ace website and then you can sit back and see the number of links for your site on the increase!
Link building is one of those activities which is usually frowned upon by Google, to varying degrees. Typically if you are paying for links, Google doesn’t like it much. If you are building links through active means but without payment, then usually that is OK. Google’s own guidelines follow the “if you build it, they will link it” rule – meaning that you should concentrate on making good content, a usable site and inevitably you will see more links coming your way.
All of this is easier than it sounds, though. Making a site linkworthy is an elusive art, but there are a few tips to help you on your way:
- Don’t fill your site with ads. You may want to make money, but users are no more receptive to being bombarded with ads on the internet than they are in the street. If you’re the kind of person who thinks that at least 50% of the visible portion of a page should be used for adverts, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
- Post content regularly, or at the least evenly. By this I mean don’t write 10 blog posts and have them all come out over 10 days in sequence. Spread them out for your more busy periods when you won’t be posting content. This will keep people coming back as they will come to expect this regularity from your site. This will help build links, too.
- Don’t just copy another article and shift a few words around. Write original content for your site even if it is about a topic being talked about across a huge variety of sites. Take the Apple iPad for instance – there will be thousands of blog posts about it by now but the ones which stand out are the original ones, and standing out will get you links.
I will be talking about this more in the future, but I think it is something important for website owners to pay attention to. The days of gaming the system are now starting to fade, meaning you will have to work hard to get your site to the top.
Linkscape, the SEOmoz link spider, has found a new lease of life it would seem. Already an invaluable tool to SEO specialists and link builders worldwide, the announcement of the Open Site Explorer shows their intent to take this vast data resource to the next level.
Essentially, the tool makes it incredibly simple to deal with the data Linkscape offers. Information relating to the key measures most website owners would be interested in is now even easier to access, along with an amazing set of tools to help you filter through the masses of links that Linkscape has spidered relating to your site.
SEOmoz are showing themselves to be very committed to this project, and with the possible lack of Yahoo’s Site Explorer soon due to the Bing deal, they could well end up at the forefront of the analytics market outside of Google (if they aren’t there already!)
So what are you waiting for? Check it out!
This is an important question you now need to ask yourself. Search engines are now pulling ever increasing amounts of information from websites, including contact information, event information and location data. So is your site a resource for everything you do?
The days of having a simple list of 10 web pages returned for whatever you searched for are long gone. Now you can expect to have richer results, with maps of local companies and service providers, review information for online stores and lists of events being packed in around the traditional results. This means less prominence for that elusive #1 ranking, but a more even playing field for those who can’t possibly compete with SEO behemoths such as Wikipedia and the big multi-nationals.
So, consider rich snippets. Consider Google Local listings, Google Base product feeds and just about everything else which makes it onto the SERPs offered by Google. You may end up reducing your spend on SEO as a whole.
You will see that your site will become a central resource for your company – not just a page on the web.
I think it is time to go over a simple concept which still seems to be one that a lot of site owners haven’t really got an understanding of – link quality.
Quality of links is a hard thing to measure. Generally you want links from a site which is in a similar area of relevance to your own. Links from a site about body building to your online pet store probably won’t help much, but links from a blog about pet ownership would be very useful. Search engines and users are discerning and will only be interested in a link if it is relevant.
In this way, you could say that 100 irrelevant links could be worth 1 relevant one from a good site. In the end the cost might be the same – weigh it up in your head!
However, nothing beats natural links. Paying will get you so far but the real benefit comes from the snowball effect of good content people want to share. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can be especially good for this kind of thing.
I haven’t gone into much detail as there is a hell of a lot of information out there about links and their usefulness, but I just wanted to get the concept of “quality beats quantity” into people’s heads once more.
Well it is it is Christmas Day again and while for most of us, it is predominantly a time of excess and gluttony, we must remember that it is also a religious time of year. That made me think. What SEO problems would Jesus’ website face?
- Keywords: Jesus, Religion, Christianity, Crucifixion, Carpentry, Fish.
- Set all pages to robots, follow.
- Change the parables because of hidden content.
- 301 redirect the Jesus-is-dead-page to the he-has-risen.htm
- Duplicate content: Father the Son and the Holly Ghost (only on the Catholic website.)
- Create a blog on a sub-domain called, “Loaves and Fishes” and direct it to the main site.
- Each page would be a PR-10 because it had a link from God.
Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New-Year.
One of the cool things that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools is the feature which allow you to see the website as Googlebot sees it. There are plugins which also you to do this in Firefox, namely, user agent switcher. This alters the user agent string when making a request to a website so that it will return the page as though it were being spidered by Googlebot.
The addition tof this Google Webmastertools adds this functionality. It is located in the labs section. Simply type a URL and press fetch. You can only fetch pages on sites which you have added to your webmaster tools account however.
When the request is processed, it will show the page code as Google sees it allowing you to identify if there are any problems. It is particularly good for identifying spam links that have been injected into your site which may only be visible to Googlebot.
You may have noticed that Google is added more features to keep it ahead in market share of search. To use the new search feature, select latest from the search menu options and results will appear as they occur. The results are taken from a variety of sources including Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca, but you find mostly they tend to come from Twitter. For example to find out the latest news on the snow in the UK search, snow UK for this and news will be relayed as it happens. It could be useful in certain situations but I think that it will be used for spam when it is realised that it will display in realtime for certain events.
I was looking on Google trends and I was thinking I wonder how Bing is doing? Would Google show me the information for its largest competitor? As it turns out it did and the results are much as you would expect. Almost nothing before the launch of the search engine then a large spike, settling down somewhat and now starting to increase slowly. (I would post a picture but the image upload facility is not working.)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=bing
On the image you can also see there also a small blip at the end of the year before Bing was even conceived. Thinking what could that be. The Christmasy answer was revealed when I thought of a White Christmas. It was Bing Crosby.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=bing+crosby&ctab=-1&geo=all&date=all
A partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4 and TalkTalk has been given a provisional thumbs up by the BBC Trust to develop an internet television standard. The project known as Canvas, would develop set-top boxes to access services such as BBC iPlayer and ITV player.
The boxes could be available by the end of next year and will sell for around £200. In addition to these services, users will be able to access internet services such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The news of this free service has not pleased everyone however. Pay TV providers such as Virgin and BSkyB are critical of the scheme.