Google is constantly checking your site’s performance and all indications point to this being a ranking factor in future. This was reported a late last year by WebProNews, after an interview with the venerable Matt Cutts from the Google team.

By their own admission Google is all about the ”user experience”, with their prime SEO mantra being; “make websites for users, not for the search engines”. And page load time is one if the most important user experience issues that you’ll encounter when browsing the web.  Google wants to serve it’s users with they what they want.  Do they want slow page websites at the top of their search results?  or do they want a page that loads instantly and gives them the information they’re seeking straight away.    Obviously, the latter.

It’s a well known “statistic” that if a web page does not load in less than 3 seconds a user will ”bounce” from the site, return to the search results and probably pick one of your competitors.  Which begs the question:  how can you speed up a slow site?

Examine your site’s performance

First off, you should analyze all information available about how your pages load using some readily available tools. As a good SEO or webmaster you’ve probably already signed up for Google’s Webmaster Tools.   A recently added feature is the “Site Performance” section, which is found under the “Labs” menu item.

This will give you a general indication of whether Google sees your site as being fast or slow, and provides a few tips on how your pages can be improved for speed.   You can also see over time how your work in improving web site speed is taking effect.

For a more immediate read-out of a webpage’s performance I also use the Yahoo YSlow plugin for Firebug (a Firefox plug-in). YSlow can be run on a live page that you are viewing and gives instant (depending on page load time of course), feedback on what areas you can address to improve load time on your website.   It will also give you an indication of the “emtpy cache” (first time visitor) and “primed cache” (repeat visitor) performance.

For an advanced metric of page load time, Google Analytics can be configured to record a page load time metric and gives a reasonable representation of the issue from the user perspective.   Analytics can be made to track the load time based on internet connection speed in so giving a broad indication of your site’s performance.

Enable GZip Compression

All modern browsers support webpage GZip compression and are able to decompress the data sent from your server.  The less data that is transferred for each page, the less time it takes for a page to load in a browser.  For those site owners who have a restriction on the amount of traffic with their host, GZip compression will reduce the amount of data that you have to serve.

You can use a GZip compression test to check if your pages are currently compressed and if not, this tool will estimate of the size of savings to expect.   If GZip compression is enabled, the actual % of data saved during compression is shown.  This tool can also test CSS and JS files.

Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers both support GZip, and quick and dirty instructions for enabling GZip compression is shown below:

Apache Server

The module that deals with GZip compression on an Apache server is “mod_deflate”. Create an “info.php” file and add the code <?php phpinfo() ?>, upload to your server and browse “/info.php” to get a readout of the Apache modules installed.  If mod_deflate is loaded on your webserver then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip for a lot of file types.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php application/rss+xml application/atom_xml
</IfModule>

If mod_deflate can’t be loaded by your host or server admin (it requires a core recompile for installation) then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip compression for php files only. The “gzhandler” is not as efficient at compressing data than “mod_deflate”, so will be marginally slower and the savings will me slightly less but for most sites will suffice.

php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

If your pages are .htm or .html (as opposed to .php) add the following lines at the top of your .htaccess to get Apache to parse those files as .php so that they will be compressed.

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

Microsoft IIS

If you’re running a Microsoft IIS server, the following document will explain how compression can be activated: http://g.www.ms.akadns.net/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/25d2170b-09c0-45fd-8da4-898cf9a7d568.mspx?mfr=true

Reduce Image Size

These days websites are very graphicy, with most sites having appealing header images, product images and so forth.  Unfortunately the more graphics on a site, the more data needs to be sent to the user’s browser leading to longer load times.  This is especially an issue for first time visitors who don’t have the images cached.

Most competent web designers keep this in mind and will try to maximize the Jpeg compression versus the image quality to speed up page loading.  But there are some cool tools out there that can further improve things like this.  Even using gif’s and png’s instead of jpegs will make a difference as they tend to use less k’s is size.

One of the most useful image tools that we use is SmushIt (found in the YSlow plugin that is mentioned earlier in this post). SmushIt is able to examine the images on a web page and compress them even further with no noticeable degradation in image quality. Smushing your header and background images is a must, and the data savings are often surprising.

One of the big no-no’s that we often come across is using the browsers image scaling to fit a large image into a small space.  We often find this is the case in product catalogs, when a large product image is used for the shingle thumbnail on the category listing pages.  In this case, use a small thumbnail in the shingle instead of scaling.

For all other cases browser image scaling should be avoided, as the web browser is slow at scaling, not to mention the extra time spent downloading the large image. Always  ensure images are scaled to the correct size before use on your pages, and you’ll notice an improvement in load time.

If your website template uses a lot of background images, header images and image buttons  then the number of HTTP requests for a webpage will be quite high. Each request takes time and can slow down a page. To reduce this delay combine these template images into a CSS sprite image. This is basically one “big” image that contains all of your template images and using CSS classes you can pick out the correct part of this image that you need for each of the graphic elements on the page.

CSS and JavaScript Code

There are a few strategies for improving CSS and JavaScript file load time.  At a minimum you should externalize all CSS and JS files so that they can be cached by the users browser.  In addition, if you have more that one CSS or JS include file, combine all the CSS includes into one file, do the same with the JS includes, and this will reduce http requests.  For the hardcore guys out there, try to Minify the CSS/JavaScript which will remove unnecessary white-space and line-breaks. Minify can be also found in the YSlow plugin for Firebug.  And no, I don’t sell Firebug or Yslow (based on how many times I’ve mentioned it) – it’s just a cool plug in.

Reduce the amount of database calls in your application

A lot of websites out there rely on an SQL database to store information that is shown to your users.  If your site runs a product catalog or a CMS systems then the odds are that a database is involved.  Every time a page is requested by a browser, the database is queried for the information that the user will see on the page.  This back and forth takes time and can be a bottleneck.

To speed things up, only run the minimum database queries that are required and only request the actual table fields from the database that you need. Avoid “SELECT * FROM” in your SQL queries.   Optimizing things in this way can get quite quite knarly, so be prepared for a lot of hard work. For large sites that get a lot of traffic this can help in page load time tremendously and is worth the effort.

Wordpress

Wordpress is the most popular blogging software out there, and due to it’s flexibility is increasingly being used as a CMS system. Wordpress uses an SQL database to store all your posts and pages.

Hundreds of “plug-ins” are available for Wordpress to help customize it in countless ways.  Unfortunately the more plugins that you install, the slower Wordpress becomes.  The less plugins that are activated the faster your Wordpress blog will be.  You should also go as far as removing all unactivated wordpress plugins from your “plugin” directory.

A useful addition to Wordpress are “Widgets”, which allow for “real time updated” areas within your template. There are Widgets available to show latest posts, most popular posts, dynamic menus and much more.  The problem is that each one of these widgets will poll the database to get the information required, thus increasing the load time of the page.  Try to reduce the number of widgets that you use and if a widget is showing content that doesn’t change too often, try to hardcode the HTML with what the widget would display.

Summary

There are many more things to look at to speed up a website and those listed above are the areas that I initially tend to look at for my search engine optimisation clients. Depending on the size of a site and the amount of traffic it gets, even the simplest change can have a significant effect.

If there are any other ways you have found to speed up a site, I’d love to know of your experiences.

Page ranks can be easily described numerically ranging from 1 to 10 where 10 works as the highest page rank in the whole chain. It has been noted that a very less amount of pages are featured with the page rank of 10 but any number above the ranking of 6 is taken to be a favorable one.

There are a wide variety of factors that helps in proper determining of the page ranks. However, the major variable appears to be actually based on the number of websites that link to your site’s page. Larger the number of popular sites visiting your site, better is the chances to get high position on the known search engines. So to say, take for example a case in which excellent ranking websites such as Yahoo.com or CNN.com links to your site. In this situation, your site will automatically get popular and this linking of the excellent ranking websites is much better than links from a large number of low page ranking sites.

Enhancing the page ranks of your site is not only described by the total number of back links you possess and use. Even article marketing with targeted titles, content and keywords, is an important factor that helps in taking the page ranks to higher heights. Equally essential is the site’s content. The actual content of the website requires to be the details that the users can read and use in the best possible manner. Having the right kind of content that suits the keywords is one of the other factors as well that contributes a lot in deciding the overall page ranks. There are various inquisitions in the minds of website owners about whether there are some ways that can actually help in generating good page ranking and that too without involving any expenses or costs. The exact answer to these inhibitions is actually “yes”. There are a few things, however, that needs to be considered wisely in order to generate great page ranks.

The first and foremost thing that needs to be kept in mind while looking for better page ranking at no cost is that of creating internal back links. It is necessary to make links to your website whenever applicable. Take for instance a condition where you mention the online payment system on the introductory page. In such a case, it is not only good to add the service provided of online payments, it is always a better option to hyperlink the specific payments page so that the customer can easily get to the payments system and enjoy the facilities. By doing this, not only your website is creating another back link for the spiders, it is making it easier for the visitors to get to the specific payments page right there and that too without wasting their precious time.

The second aspect that needs proper consideration is that of avoiding the usage of dead-end back links. In case you have worked day and night on creating around 7 relevant pages. Your page rankings have the ability to be a rank of 7. But if by chance some of those pages are basically not providing any relevant results, they you really need to consider and figure out the main problem. Whenever the search engine spiders crawl on a site, they wish to move from one web page to the other. You may be featured with a really fantastic and informative page but in case it is not equipped with other page pinks, the spiders will take that particular excellent page to be a dead-link one thereby reducing the chances of enjoying high page ranks. It is necessary to ensure that each web page is added with an external door apart from the back button. You can easily add an index link or maybe a site navigator on each page in order to add that extra convenience for your site visitors.

Read the top tips, then follow the explanations below for an understanding into the reasoning behind them.  Information like this isn’t everywhere on the web:

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year.

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year.

Stop using keywords in your URLs.

Stop using keywords in your titles.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page).

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week.  Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone.

Get a text editor like Notepad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less.

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site.  Put it into every forum profile you have created.

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts. Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – The Explanations

Change is the only constant you can count on in search engine optimization.  Although we often say that the fundamental principles of search engine optimization don’t change, pretty much everything else does.  If you want to be really, really good at this, you cannot be inflexible.  You cannot afford the luxury of becoming emotionally bonded to any particular idea.

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year. Why? Because you’ll find things you broke the last time around and you’ll be able to fix them.  Because you’ll finally be able to tweak the optimization for pages you have known could do better but for which you never found the time to do anything.  Because you’ll have an opportunity to improve your visitor experience and make your presentation more competitive (but avoid the “Web X.0 pitfall” — don’t marry your site to any particular concept).

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week. Why? Because it gives you opportunities to expand your search visibility. Because it gives you opportunities for more free links that actually help. Because it gives you opportunities to try out new ideas.  Because it increases the value of your Web site.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year. Why? Because obviously those titles weren’t helping your least successful pages.

Stop using keywords in your URLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page.

Stop using keywords in your titles. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a Web page without stuffing your title, then you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. Titles and URLs are options, not requirements, in search engine optimization. Learn to understand and fully appreciate the difference between being able to do something and needing to do something.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question. Why? Because looking at someone else’s mistakes and brilliant ideas with an unemotional, critical, helpful point of view will only help improve your own self-analysis.  Keep your ideas and opinions to yourself.  Just share your feedback on how other people’s sites look.  You’ll learn more faster by helping with your honest, gut-level reactions than by helping forum idiots attack people whose ideas they don’t agree with.  You’ll also look more professional, too.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month. Why?  So you have all your favorite advice in one easy-to-read-and-search compendium.  Don’t sell it.  Just use it.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step. Why? Because after a year of using all the advice you put in the previous one you’ll have a far better idea of just how much crap and bullshit you’re getting from SEO blogs and forums.  But that also means your next SEO book will be ten times better than the last.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page). Why?  You can’t do better than to nail the number 1 position for a query, so why not aim for a second query?  If you can optimize a page forwards and backwards, you should be able to handle just about anything.

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional. Why?  It teaches you just how hard it is to build a good community, and maybe you’ll appreciate what “good community” really means before you act like an ass in an SEO forum or blog and flame someone else for disagreeing with you.  But there is another reason.  Keep reading to see if you can find it in the explanations given below.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you can never write too many advertisements. Your audience is always changing. Your venues are always changing. And GOOD ad copy (not the cheap, shlocky crap you see most of the time) makes GREAT meta description tags.  BTW — you should write that ad copy for sites other than your own until you learn to stop using cheap, shlocky crap expressions like “Proudly announces”, “pleased to admit”, “best prices”, etc. Be informative. Be compelling. Be classy.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week. Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you should spend some time promoting your site while you learn how to become a better search optimizer. Besides, practice makes perfect.

Get a text editor like Wordpad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch. Why? Because when you’ve seen just how stupid your templated CSS code really is, you’ll begin to understand why ugly works better than pretty.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less. Why? Because you should never write a press release that starts out with, “John Shlock Smith the Shmuck proudly announces….”

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site. Why? Because it’s an opportunity for you to create an honest, sincere resource that no one else on the Web has the ability to create. Because people are actually more interested in your opinion of OTHER people’s Web sites than your opinion of your own Web sites.   Because if you haven’t found 20 sites you wish you had created that no one else has talked about in your regular Web communities, you need to spend less time with your buds and more time with the rest of the Web.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site. Put it into every forum profile you have created. Why? Because it makes you look confident, professional, and less like a shlocky self-promotional shmuck who doesn’t know what forums are for.  More importantly, it will teach you to write compelling content (think of those 25-word advertisements I mentioned above).

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site. Why? Because you’ll never compete with anyone harder to beat than yourself.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics. Why?  Because you need to know what it takes to become an influencer without cheating through social media Web site spam.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site. Why?  Because I’ve had to suffer through the frustration of not being able to take the computer away from someone who wants to do it their own way. Misery loves company.  Besides, it teaches us to be humble and appreciate the people who at least listen half the time.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts.  Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months. Why?  Because you need a competitive advantage that you cannot possibly get from using someone’s backlink checking tool.  Because you need to understand and appreciate that there is more to the Web than links. Because you need to be one step ahead of the other guy, who may very well have his own metrics in place before you even get started.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – What They Mean:

Let the idiots spend their days arguing in the SEO blogs and forums. They don’t need your help to look stupid.

You can learn from other people by watching them, helping them, promoting their sites, and putting the community ahead of yourself.  They won’t always appreciate what you do.  But you can knock a self-promotional shmuck out of the search results any day of the week if you know more about search engine optimization than he does.

You have to keep moving forward. When you stop learning about search engine optimization the idea of getting back into the game becomes overwhelming. Worse, if you become dependent upon any one tip or technique, you hobble yourself in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

Thanks to Michael Martinez for posting this on www.seo-theory.com

Upon closer inspection, Zeriouz seems to be a network for web owners to register on a scheme to promote other zeriouz partners plus adding a link for people to register their own site, through yours.  If successful, those that sign up for it (100% free), will have your link on their site as a referral to promote your site and obtain a backlink of that page.

There’s not much across the web as to whether it actually works, but the theory is there.  Much in the way Network Marketing works,  Zeriouz offers a hierarchial system not to be confused with ‘pyramids’, but more like a ‘downline’.  That is to say, that if someone uses your referral to get signed up, your link will appear in the 5 zeriouz partners on the bottom of their page.

In theory, this should work and is totally ‘White hat SEO’ as you are not spamming sites, nor are you joining some link farm – which most SEO’s know, is frowned on by Google and other Search Engines.  Each referral is subject to people checking your page to ensure you are correctly promoting your site and that you have the links (unmodified) on your homepage.

Here’s what the owner of Zeriouz claims on his website:

There are too many people not understanding zeriouz (mainly because they don’t read the website, which I spent a lot of time and effort writing explanations and making videos for). It’s not everyone, but it’s the majority. I just want to let you know how to make the most of zeriouz, and if you listen to me you WILL create a lot of links and traffic! I am broadcasting this message to everyone who has added their URL to zeriouz (and also everyone that has viewed zeriouz and entered their details), so that you can make the most of the FREE and POWERFUL zeriouz system.

Some people have literally thousands of links from other people’s websites, pointing to their own “through zeriouz”. The difference between these people and the ones who have no links at all is a “little bit of promotion”. Just a LITTLE BIT!

See, zeriouz doesn’t do anything all by itself.  In order to get links on other people’s websites to your own, you must have them become a zeriouz partner. Each and every person that becomes a zeriouz partner through a referral URL) will add a link to YOUR WEBSITE on “their homepage”. To refer more partners, you have three options:

1). You can simply promote your own website. This is something you should already be doing if you’re trying to increase traffic. People will naturally see the zeriouz partner link (if they can see it ie: It’s not somewhere on the page where no one will look), and they will click “Add Your Link”. When they join zeriouz, your URL will be on their homepage.

2). Providing that you have the zeriouz code on the homepage of your website, you can (and really should) just promote your zeriouz referral URL further on your own website. That’s the URL in the “Add Your Link” code. To get the URL simply right click on it and copy the link. Then you can put that link in your signature on forums, or even make a link close to the top of your website saying: “Free Traffic”. If you have a forum or email lists, SEND IT TO THEM. Encourage people to become a zeriouz partner. The whole idea is to get people to zeriouz through your own referral URL! That’s what results in links and traffic!

3). You can directly send people to zeriouz (through your referral URL) on safelists, forums, solo ads – what ever! This is HIGHLY recommended. Some of you have the ABILITY to mass promote your zeriouz referral URL, yet you do not. You could be attracting thousands of links to YOUR WEBSITE. This means traffic!

See, some people are adding zeriouz code to a website that has “zero traffic”, or very close to zero traffic. They are not promoting their own website OR their zeriouz referral URL, and then they’re contacting me a month later and saying: “So where’s all the links?” — “HUH? WHERE’S ALL THE LINKS?”. zeriouz does NOT give you free traffic without you promoting anything. That is not how it works. You MUST promote your website and your zeriouz URL.

Yahoo is displaying over 91,000 of them but my records show that there’s close to 200,000 links. These are websites linking to zeriouz partners! If you don’t have any links out of those 200,000 – you didn’t promote your zeriouz referral URL. It’s that simple!

Zeriouz is SO easy to build referrals for, because it’s absolutely free and requires no registration. zeriouz is extremely powerful, extremely viral and is growing extremely fast — even with a small portion of the people actually taking the time to understand how it works and going out to promote their website and referral URL. Even the people who are putting in a meager effort are attracting a lot of links.

If EVERYONE promoted their referral URL, there would be over 2 million links by now – not 200,000. There WILL be 2 million links soon though, because I am currently spending close to ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS each month promoting zeriouz! I want everyone to benefit from that advertising. zeriouz gets LOT of traffic. That is why it’s also very good to be on the moderation list which only costs $7.00 (This WILL be going up to the tune of close to $100) per link once zeriouz has links in the millions, so take advantage of that now. All advertising money goes directly (100%) back into the promotion of zeriouz anyway! So it’s a great advertising offer!

I am just trying to reiterate and emphasize that if you promote your referral URL (even just ONE new referral per day), your links WILL increase and you WILL see a lot more traffic to your website. Over time, you will have attracted thousands of links and will have THOUSANDS of websites linking to yours.

Please understand what I am saying here. I am not trying to hype zeriouz up.  Zeriouz REALLY WORKS – but you have to do at least SOMETHING to get referrals. You can’t just add the code to your website — sit back and say: “So where’s all the traffic?”.

If you have understood this message, PLEASE contact me back and say: “Yes I understand” (and I spent some time on the website to understand everything). It will help me to get some sleep tonight

If you do NOT understand how zeriouz works, please contact me also! I will explain it to you personally! But first, PLEASE take a look at the website. There’s a LOT of information there — all about how everything works. Each time I reply to someone, I am almost always repeating “verbatim” what is in the zeriouz information center.

There are videos too. There are explanations everywhere. I highly recommend that if you are NOT receiving traffic from zeriouz and if you are NOT promoting your referral URL, please go back to zeriouz and spend a bit of time on the site to truly learn how it works — because if you do not understand — YOU ARE MISSING OUT! This is UTTERLY free (and powerful) advertising!”

===============================================

Now I’ve only started this and have no base for any results yet – but I’ll keep you all updated as to how successful this is as time goes on.

———\\ UPDATE //———

6 months of displaying the zeriouz links on my site, and not 1 link.   May try it again in the future, but for the meantime, I’m going to stick to creating my own backlinks the good old fashioned way.   

]]> http://www.theonemanmission.com/marketing/is-zeriouz-serious/feed/ 3 http://www.theonemanmission.com/seo/google-robots-and-why-they-are-important/ http://www.theonemanmission.com/seo/google-robots-and-why-they-are-important/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:50:22 +0000 Phil http://theonemanmission.com/?p=436 Robots?  No this post isn’t about sci-fi.   From my own research, and the work that I do at my web design agency OwenDevelopment,  Google robots are very real and important in helping your website get indexed in search results.

Also known as ‘Spiders’, ‘Crawlers’ and the ‘Googlebot’, these programs scrawl the internet constantly, from page-to-page, site-to-site, reading the content on the page and reporting back to Google and other search engines about what your site is about and what keyword or phrases would be relevant to display your site in it’s results.

Every day hundreds of them go out and scour the web, whether it’s Google trying to index the entire web, or a spam bot collecting any email address it could find for less than honorable intentions.  As site owners, what little control we have over what robots are allowed to do when they visit our sites exist in a magical little file called “robots.txt.”

“Robots.txt” is a regular text file that through its name, has special meaning to the majority of “honorable” robots on the web. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it’s both meaningless to you and a waste of your site’s bandwidth. “Robots.txt” lets you tell Google just that.

For my readership (because I love each and every one of you), I have included below a generator to create a robot.txt file to upload and use on your own sites:

Robots.txt Generator Tool © SEO Chat™       Allowed User Agent Select user agent or use default for all agents All AgentsAlexa AgentAltaVista AgentAOL Netfind/Excite AgentGoogle AgentHotBot AgentInfoSeek AgentLycos AgentMSN Search CrawlerNorthern Lights AgentWebcrawler Agent Enable All Webpages Yes No – Exclude These URL’s: ¦lt;br /> Enter URLs you wish to exclude /cgi-bin/<br /> /images/ Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

Link Building… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for higher rankings.

Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke’s 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:

What happens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on “links=seo”. When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The pertinent questions:

1. Will link building still be very important for rankings in the medium term?
2. When will link popularity be devalued in favor of other algo elements (that are less tedious, from a webmaster’s point of view)?

The answers:

1. Sorry, but link building is still going to be the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future.
2. I wouldn’t hold your breath for search engine algorithms to place less importance on link popularity until the Semantic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new protocol. Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they’re going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn’t count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don’t fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that’s all (“Host your own Web Ring”?). Anyway, enjoy the update.

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a “101 list”. These get Dugg all the time, and often become “authority documents”. People can’t resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an “authority”.)

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It’s an accessibility thing.)

7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

16. Write about, and link to, companies with “in the news” pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Business Links

24. Join the Better Business Bureau.

25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

27. List your site at the local library’s Web site.

28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other’s business cards.

30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional “normal” links.

Easy Free Links

31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

36. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links… unfortunately, some will not).

38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

41. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

50. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

51. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

52. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

53. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned ‘PR’ (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

54. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. We recommend WeBuildPages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

56. In case you didn’t get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like Wordpress. Don’t forget the “Designed by example.com” bit in the footer!

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) “celebrities” in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem “real” in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Directories

72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post nothing but “me too” posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

Blog Spam

80. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

81. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

82. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

83. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

84. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

85. Don’t even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.

Garbage Link Exchanges

86. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

87. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

89. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.

Spam People in Person

90. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

91. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

Be Persistant

92. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

93. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

94. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.

Getting Links by Being a Jerk

96. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

97. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

98. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say “excuse you, jerk”.

100. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

101. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more “hilariously dumb” than it is a “bad linking practice”.

Sometimes called inbound links, backlinks are the lifeblood of Search Engine Positioning.  In order for a website to be on the top of search engines like Google (without the webmaster having to pay big money for advertising), the website has to have a large number of backlinks.  Backlinks are links on one website that lead back to another website.   The more established, high quality, and high Page Rank the website that contains the link has, the more power it has to help the linked website with its search engine position.  If the website that is getting backlinks gets many High Quality and High Page Rank backlinks, the better the chance it has of being in a high position on the Search Engines.

So how does a webmaster go about getting high quality backlinks to his or her website?  There are many ways this can be done – there are ‘right’ ways to achieve this, and likewise there are ‘wrong’ ways to do it.  Some people advocate writing and submitting articles, posting on forums, making comments on blogs with a link attached to the text, that points to your website.  Others talk about submitting their website to various Internet directories.  One directory that has an excellent reputation is called DMOZ, or the ‘Open Directory’.  This directory is probably the most respected directory online today and the largest compilation of succesful sites.  The websites it contains have all been placed there by human editors; there is no automation to this directory unlike others.   The only drawback that’s been discussed about this directory is that it takes so long to have a website included.  It can take weeks if not months, but once successful, your website will have a boost in ranking, making it easier for people to stumble upon your site.

Another way that many people build backlinks for their website is to use Social Bookmarking websites. A Social Bookmark  is a website that usually has a very popular ‘community’ aspect to it. Users sign up and create profiles on the sites that contain photos and information about themselves.  They then can save bookmarks of favorite websites which can be itemized by ‘tags’, which are one or two word descriptions of what the sites contain, and these bookmarks can be saved to a list that’s private or can be listed publicly, so that everybody can see it.

With the advent of what is known as Web 2.0, gaining backlinks is easier now than in any time in the history of the internet. Most sites now have an interactive quality to them nowadays.  Readers can often sign in and create profiles.  They then are often allowed to post comments on the stories or articles on the website or blog.  In many cases, the website or blog owner responds to these comments; thus making this section of the website or blog a conversation.

Backlinking strategies can be easy and fun and the website owner who is working on getting more backlinks for his website can learn new things, meet new people, and have a tremendous amount of fun doing something that was once a chore: building backlinks.

To all my readership, I have taken the opportunity to use a tool to check how many backlinks are currently pointing to your website.  This tool is great, and I use it with every one of my web design clients:

Powered by iWEBTOOL

1  Search status   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321 .  This tool is actually a Firefox extension, whatever browser you may use is up to you.  But the browser of choice for web developers, designers and internet marketing professionals should be Firefox for its wide array of plugins.  This handy little tool will tell you the pagerank/alexa/compete ranking for the current site you are on.   Which is helpful information, but it also allows you to right click and bring up a menu which will let you search for backlinks (on yahoo, google, msn), indexed (on yahoo, google, msn) pages and keyword density. 

2.   SEO for Firefox:  http://seobook.com .   This one is also a Firefox extension, it allows you to see information within search results about the various pages that are being displayed.  This one is mostly handy-to-do research on competitors and reasons why they may be ranking better then a site you are optimizing.   Some of the information is less important than stuff like backlinks or edu and gov links.   But all-in-all you can get a pretty good idea about a site by just looking at that information.

3.   Webmaster Central  http://www.google.com/webmasters/ .   This is a Google-provided service that will allow you to see some really great statistics about a site.   You have to sign up for a Google account and verify that you have access to the domain, but once that is done there is a treasure chest of information available.   You can see the most popular search results your site showed up for, you can see what the most popular search results you received a click for and all kinds of other helpful information.  This can assist you in trying different methods of getting that user to click on your link in the search results.

4.   Seomoz   http://seomoz.com .   By itself, this isn’t really a ‘tool’ in the typical sense of the word, but the amount of tools that they offer for free is overwhelming.  Not to mention the fantastic content that is available so you can better understand all of their tools and others to best rank better and create more conversions for your clients.   One of the tools is a backlink anchor analysis, which can help you to discover what sites are linking in to your site in the anchor text.   It also has a Page Strength tool that will give you some information about how your site is doing in various aspects and assign a calculated Page Strength.    They also have a premium membership that offers some more advanced tools for about $49/month.

5.   SEO Chat   http://www.seochat.com .   This is another web site that isn’t by itself a tool but does provide a ton of fantastic tools that can add to your arsenal of optimization.  There are a lot of Keyword-related tools that can help in your keyword research tasks for your client.   One of my favorites is using Site Link Analyzer that will give you a ton of fantastic information about the links in your web site.   The site also offers some great articles and a forum to help you even more with your search marketing needs.  

I know not all of these are what you were expecting, but I’m sure you wanted to see this link or that link for helping you to build up your site in search engines.   Honestly, this is what I use to help me with every client I work with.   It is important that you optimize yourself with these five resources and not get distracted by some of the other junk that may be offered in other sites.   Believe me, there is a lot (eg, get as many backlinks as physically possible).   Nearly everything you need will be found in these five search marketing resources.  You don’t need to spend a ton of time elsewhere that could be spent adding great content to your site.

1) Create a website business plan that integrates nicely with your overall marketing objectives; the content should be consistent with any offline materials (leaflets, posters, business cards), the graphics/images should be web friendly and consistent with your overall branding; same colours, fonts, basically, everything that makes your website ‘recognisable’ as a brand.

2) When creating a website, try not to get “geek crazy” – meaning you become so in love with the latest design technology, your web site gets bogged down with heavy graphics, add-on software and components, GIF animated image/tacky crap, etc. But, conversely, check your ego at the door when you work at your design. There are too many sites cramped with meaningless junk they literally turn visitors away.  A decent, clean design is what you typically need.  Keep it ‘fresh’.

3) Pay attention to your website’s “load times,” i,e. how long it takes a web site to load on the worst-case scenario: a 56 kbps modem (this is an industry average and some users will still be using this – even in today’s broadband world).  If its more than 12-18 seconds, you may experience the “click of death” – the site doesn’t load quickly and the surfer is gone… forever.   Of course if you are targeting broadband customers who are reaching your site via ISDN, DSL or Cable modem then you can build a website that incorporates multimedia-ready content that may include streaming audio or video, Shockwave or Flash capabilities.

4) Keep it simple – make a website easy to navigate, build an efficient menu structure that is consistent with industry standards.

5) Your visitors should be able to get to their desired area of your site within one or two mouse clicks; they will quickly get frustrated if they have to click around multiple menus to get to the page that they are seeking.

6) Develop content that is web-friendly.  People don’t read text on websites like they do in any other offline media. Keep paragraphs short ( no more than three or four sentences) and put in white space between your content, include links in your pages as well to other areas of your site as well.  this not only steers people across your site, but also helps with seo.

7) Make your site User-friendly.   Don’t use white backgrounds with yellow text, don’t have tiny, tiny writing.  This page is about the limit (I personally love this size, but the majority of people don’t).  Also bear in mind people who are colour-blind or visually impaired – can they still use your site efficiently?   Will they be able to actually see anything on your site?

8. Optimise your website for Search Engines by researching about 8-12 keywords that people will use to find your site from Google etc, then incorporate these keywords actually within your site content (to drive relevancy with search engine spiders/bots) and then get lots of links to your site (also known as ‘backlinks’.  It is estimated as much as 70% of all traffic to most web site comes through a search engine of some sort – mainly Google, Yahoo and Aol.

9) Check  into your log server files regularly to uncover “tracking” made through your website – your log files are raw data that show how and from, where people located  your website, where they went within your web site, how long they stayed there for, etc.  There are many products on the market that can achieve such purpose, such as Google Analytics.   With Google, you would simply sign up with Google for free, they then give you some god to add into the pages and it does all the reportig for you.

10) Think global, not local - in your overall site design.  Always think that the greatest Internet growth is occurring outside where you live, so it is essential to build a site that can be accessed easily by people anywhere around the world – assuming that the content can be useful for anyone.   You may also want to make your web site content readily available in diverse languages as well (especially if e-commerce), so your website can be utilized by all.

Hope you find this as useful as I did.   It may seem common sense, but it’s easy to forget one or more of the important factors.

Search Engines (including Google amongst others) are internet portals where quite literally BILLIONS of people congregate to search for information.  Cheapest places to buy shoes, directions on how to get to their mother-in-laws, all the way to reading about how to remove that big clump of hair growing on their back.  Literally ANYTHING.  The most prominent search engine in the field are search giants Google and Yahoo. The level of traffic these .com organisations receive per hour is well, phenomenal.

So naturally, companies obviously move towards placing their links and sites on search engines as high as possible in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites from these search engines in question.

In order to maximize their ranking on the search engine results and more importantly the placement on the results page,  companies have used tools such as SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation.  Search engine optimization is the method and process of vastly improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing page.   As it suggests, the higher the result in the search, the more traffic you are likely to make, which means the more revenue or return on investment youare likely to enjoy.  Highly competitive markets try even harder as their gains are likely to be far greater than a smaller niche avenue.

Legitimate search engine optimization, practices the focus and goal on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving the actual site’s content, it’s usability and by using legitimate methods of promotion through various web phenomena such as Viral Marketing.  This is covered seperately in my blog, but in essence, it’s a form of advertising that spreads across the internet from person to person and can be extemely effective in the effect is has as well as the cost-efficiency side of it too.

Search engines nowadays, all use the most complex ‘algorithms’ in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering and manipulating their system.  However, what’s known as “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the cheating garbage out.  A cheating example includes hiding keywords within the website page by having the keywords the same colour as the background, so users can’t see it, but the search engines still read the code.  This is naughty, but the site if targeted by Google, can then be banned.  Large reputable brands (believe it or not) have been caught using this method as well, such as BMW and Disney, but they get banned too.   Google obviously takes this very seriously.   

Search engines now actually display different kinds of ‘listings’ on a result page, not just normal ‘results’.  The more common ones are pay-per-click (PPC) adverts, paid inclusion in the listings, and organic listings.  Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself mainly with organic listings for a variety of keywords.  This can increase the quality and quantity of visitors to a desired web site.  This is something I have always been aware of and offer to all my web design clients at OwenDevelopment. 

So which are the most effective?  Well from my research into this for my own project ‘Project X’, organic searches  are the way to go.   A study from Jupiter Mediarevealed that approximately 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases by users,  came from organic searches compared to paid online ads.  Are people becoming ‘blind’ to PPC adverts on sites?  I must admit that I have.  I for some reason, tend to not click on these ads and have even typed into the address bar the link to the PPC ad, rather than actually just clicking on it.  Why?  I don’t know, but it’s a habit I have just developed from somewhere unknown.  I have a few sites with these ads on, but still I just do it.  Yes, I’m a freak.

Anyway, this overall result from Jupiter Media has made traditional SEO far more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad method, but a method of intrinsically improving the sites content.

From everywhere I have scanned on the internet, here are a few tips I think are useful on improving content on your site for an  improved result in traditional organic searches:

• Expertise - Develop your strengths.  Sites you get involved with or own, must be on subject that you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away (they smell like a crusty sock left in the back of a cupboard).  But if you are knowledgable, people will stay and view the other content and are also more likely to come back to your site regularly.

• Plan -  A good layout that is easy to navigate and view (in web-friendly colours!) can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser and make it easier to accomodate any user on any browser.

• Research - Check out your competition and see what they have set up. My advice is find the biggets player in the market and see any improvements that you can make that let their site down.  See what works and implement the same, and likewise, what doesn’t and improve it.  If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get useful feedback on what should or can be improved further.  I also found it useful to find complaints in review sites on your market.  Find out what people hate about the main players and shout out on your site how you guarantee to make that aspect easier and more effective. 

• Keywords - Decide which are the most important keywords to use for your sight.  Include these keywords in the metatags in the header of your site, use in the content of the page, within the page title, and also in file names if you use them.

• Remember that the Search Engine is your best friend - Get best mates with your search engine, send him a birthday card and don’t give it a hard time.  Definately don’t cheat on them. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.  It will make you more money period.

• Keep Focussed – Concentrate on the topic in question and nothing else. The rule is one topic per page.  Confusing content by swapping from one thing to another won’t help your site.  It’s hard to follow a physical conversation when this happens, let alone on a website.

• Get added on directories - Directories are pools of knowledge made by a human, while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods.  The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may cause huge increases in rankings if they are the right directory for your market.   Avoid joining loads of less-known directories, as a only few directory listings on the big main ones will help more.  

• Links - An effective Optimisation method used as SEO 101.  Ask your networks, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances business parnerships to place your site’s website link on their sites.  With a short description this can draw huge amounts of traffic from other sites and increase your sites’ exposure on the web.  For example, Google ranks the importance of its sites by the sheer number of sites that are linked to it, and the better tand more reputable the site that links to you, the higher you will rise in the listings automatically.

• Repeat all the above - Keep repeating all the above tips over and over again, maintaining the optimisation and marketing of your site will keep you at the top of listings and the ££ coming in.  Doing a simple one-off campaign may see you hit the top, but not for long.  You will notice that by not treating this as a constant routine, you will gradually slip down the ranks because I GUARANTEE your competitors will be consistently applying the above. 

Meta Tags are the most basic of information every single website needs: without it, your site will never be read or found by search engines.  Meta tags have two possible attributes:

• <META HTTP-EQUIV=”name” CONTENT=”content“>
• <META NAME=”name” CONTENT=”content“>

META tags should be placed in the header section of the HTML document, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

Robots

Controls Search Engine Web robots on a per-page basis. E.g.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,FOLLOW”>

Robots may traverse this page but not index it.

• INDEX allows the page to be indexed by the spider
• NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
• FOLLOW allows all links on the page to be spidered as well
• NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages.
• ALL is the same as INDEX,FOLLOW
• NONE is the same as NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW
• NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed.
• NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page.

Keywords

Keywords used by search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title and document body. E.g.

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”fresh oranges, cool autumn scent, living room furniture, IT solutions”>

• Think Key Phrases instead of keywords. Key Phrases will provide you with a much greater volume of internet response.
• The primary words that appear in your title and description should also appear in your keywords, plus the primary words and phrases used on the page. Also, the primary words in your title and description should also appear somewhere else on your page.
• Insert your pages keywords into at least 1 of your images ALT tags. This helps for those search engines that read these tags, but don’t overdo it.
• It is best if you keep the number of keywords, commas and spaces below 800 characters.
• Many search engines only index the first 10 to 20 keywords, so be sure to have the most relevant keywords and phrases listed first.
• Using the same word more than three times, even if used differently within a phrase, might be considered Spamdexing by the search engine and your page might not be included.

Description

A short, plain language description of the document. Used by search engines to describe your document. Particularly important if your document has very little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top. E.g.

<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Citrus fruit wholesaler in North Wales. 40 varieties of mixed fruit drinks and wines available 24/7, from as little as £2.50″>

Keep your description below 250 characters.  This is SEO 101 and should always be included on every page of the site as a minimum.  Why spend on building a nice looking and informative website, when no-one will ever find it?

Summary

Remember, in the multi-coloured world of SEO, content is king.   Applying appropriate content on your site with effective keywords will do more than anything.  Keep it clear and concise, and you will have all the high rankings you will ever need.