Measuring Link Popularity

The best way to discover how people are finding your web site is to examine your site’s activity logs, a topic which is covered in depth on the Keywords Used to Find Your Web Site page obtainable to Search Engine Watch members.

Those not capable to analyze their logs can use search engines to path down referral links. In exacting, this method gives you an idea of how “popular” a search engine believes your site to be. That’s important because all main search engines consider a site’s link popularity in their ranking algorithm.

The information below describes how link popularity is deliberate at popular crawler-based search engines.

Be conscious that “popularity” is only one part of the link analysis systems that search engines such as Google use to rank web pages. The excellence and context of links is also taken into account, quite than sheer numbers.

Google Traffic Report Card

This is part 1 of a 7 part series that examines the 7 factors of incoming links that Google considers when choosing a spot for your website in it’s SERP’s.

Why incoming links? First because these are what Google places the highest value on. But, all incoming links are NOT created equal. This 7 part course looks at the kinds of links Google values when “rating” your website in the SERP’s. Each type of link discussed is important to your overall link strategy and consequently your free traffic levels.

The first factor is of course the anchor text used in your incoming links. The importance of the keywords used to link to your website are more important to Google than the content that is actually on your page. You can generally use anchor link text with your keywords and not even have the keywords on the page and still get a good ranking in Google for that term if enough incoming links have that keyword pharse in them.

If you’ve heard of the phrase “Google Bombing” then you know what I’m talking about. Basically it’s when a set of webmasters or blog owners decide to get a page ranked for a certain term and all leave links back to the selected site with the keyword phrase that they want that page to rank for.

The most notorious example of this is the “bombing” done by several blog owners to the George W Bush biograpby page. Several bloggers left links to the page containing the keyword text “miserable failure” and consequently this page turns up as the number 1 result in Google for the term, even though the words don’t appear anywhere on the page.

The “Google Bombing” was done by at most a few hundred links with this link text pointing to the page. Though more links would probably be necissary for a more competative term. Still, it goes to show how important link text is to the rankings of a page.

Google Bombing is nothing new. But what many people don’t realize is that Google places more relevance on the anchor link text that it finds when it first discovers a link to your website. Each consequent link either adds value to that first impression or subtracts from it.

Many times you can control which link google finds first just by knowing where google goes regularly (like on a daily basis) and effectively placing your link in it’s path. This is called “baiting” the google bot to visit your website through this link.

Each link you place after this initial link should further show google that their first impression (or the first keywords it discovered that linked to your website) was and still is correct. Each subsiquent link is a “vote” so to speak to validate Google’s original impression of what your website is about.

Placing that first link to be found by Google is only the first step, but a very important one. Choose your anchor text keywords carefully. Each incoming link you place after this one should serve to validate this first impression. Part 2 will discuss the appearance and disappearance of links over time and how they effect your traffic and search engine placement.

Importance of Inbound links

Inbound links play an important role in search engine marketing. Inbound links can improve page rank and search engine rankings. It also improves traffic in your site. Inbound links tells the search engine that your site is reliable and trustworthy. This depends on the page rank that every search maintains. The more inbound links that you get in your page the more the page rank will improve to your page. But these inbound links must come from those sites which have some good page rank. The inbound links should improve slowly in your page. If you start building links rapidly in your site the search engine may think that your page is spam and put your page in sand box. To improve your inbound link then buying links from other sites can improve your page rank. If your site has good content then other sites may offer exchange links with you. Both inbound links and outbound links influence each other. Certain factors that you need to consider in inbound links are – number of links, authority of site, anchor text of link, age of links, link velocity, age of site, links in content and one way links.

Other ways to "Build inks" for your website

Link building is a time consuming and original endeavor. In the long run, some links pass value more than others, which is why diversity is the key to creating a stable and dependable link profile for your website.

First, a brief synopsis of the additional common types of links and link building that one classically pursues, then, a few non traditional unique alternatives will be obtainable.

Editorial links – take weight but have more value for flash in the pan promotions or to draw attention to an interesting event.

Social media links – such as Mixx or Stumbleupon have a first spike and the end result is classically site-wide links across numerous categories if the story goes hot and gets assign of notice.

Directories and article marketing – motionless work, however their technique is best used as a increasing tactic coupled with other link building methods to understand their effects, as articles are archived after 30 days and directories take time to improve a link profile.

Contextual Link building – uses blogs and other websites and uses the basis of content and then provides a link to the aspire site with a relevant wikipedia style link to the site with the perfect keyword, to the ideal page. Excellent technique, but very time consuming and link and IP diversity are vital for maximum impact. It is better to not build links extremely from one site or same block of IP addresses. In other words, the more site that link to you with faith, the more trust and significance your sites reputation becomes (diversity is essential).

Everything You Wanted To Know About Google

Can you remember a day when you have not Googled?

But Google’s reach doesn’t stop with the mouse or the cursor. It has moved beyond the computer screen, snapping up resources, sites, and people at a frighteningly steady pace. Perhaps, the first indication Google wasn’t just satisfied with staying within the wired confines of the world wide web was when it partnered with universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and others, to scan and index the contents of their libraries — then making this material accessible through Google Print.

Then it casted its aspirations heavenward with the introduction of Google Maps and Google Earth. Mapping services that bring the world’s geographic information into view, it is as if Google had literally ascended, watching us from far and near, tracking our every move as well as our every keystroke. Even using satellite imagery to provide it with eyes in the sky; leading one to wonder, from those lofty heights can divinity be far behind?

All kidding aside, Google, whether it wants to or not, is developing a god-like reverence in the eyes of many. But is this such a leap of faith? Is the idea of Google as a god-like force in our lives so preposterous? so ludicrous? so sacrilegious?

In prehistoric times, pagans used to worship the sun gods. Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all had their gods who satisfied the basic human need we have to believe in a superior being or force. They even raised ordinary humans who displayed unusual courage or bravery up to a god-like status. Are we now entering into a new post-modern pagan era — will we be worshipping at the feet of Google?

Not really, we treat all our knowledge givers with respect, some even reach a god-like status. We raise them up above the crowd, give them special meaning or reverence in our lives. Humans have been doing this since we stood upright and walked on the plains of Africa. The shaman or high priest of ancient times — holders of the secret rites, holders of a group’s history or knowledge; we show these people respect and we elevate them to a higher status.

Google falls into this category.

And Google does deserve some respect, as far as the search engine market goes, whether it’s wearing a halo or a cursor — Google is still the only game in town. According to Alexa, a company that tracks web traffic, the top three sites on the Web are 1. Yahoo, 2. MSN, and 3. Google. However, when you compare where people go on these sites — search.yahoo.com accounts for only 9% of Yahoo’s traffic and search.msn.com only 7% of MSN’s total traffic; whereas most of Google’s traffic is search traffic. This is a big distinction.

And what about the purchasing power of these search engines; latest data presented by Score Networks, Inc. shows MSN searchers at 48%, Google searchers at 42% and Yahoo at 31%. That is Google searchers were 42% more likely to purchase online than the regular Internet user.

Another aspect of Google’s commercial might is its online advertising system. Through its Adsense and Adword programs, Google has commercialize and monetized most of the web’s free content. Depending on your opinions or stand, this may be good or bad. Regardless of viewpoints, Google has been more than generous with sharing this ad

revenue with all concerned parties — content providers, web writers and journalists, professional bloggers, ordinary webmasters and marketers — all have reaped the benefits of these programs.

If you feed it with fresh high quality content — Google will take good care of you! In many cases, it can be argued that Google is subsidizing or facilitating the creation of quality content on the Net through its Adsense program.

Google’s dominance of all aspects of the Internet is also taking on a god-like force. It is acquiring and building at an almost god-like speed. Google Acquisitions include: Outride, Blogger, Neotonic Software, Applied Semantics, Ignite Logic, Genius Labs, Picasa, Keyhole, Urchin software… how did all this madness start?

Initially called BackRub, referring to the way it back linked to web sites, Google was founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google, the name itself is a play on the word googol, and refers to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros… opened its doors on Sept. 7, 1998, in Menlo Park, California. It had a corporate staff of three. In 2004 Google offered its IPO with a price per share at $85. By June 7, 2005, Google was worth $80 billion, making it one of the world’s biggest media companies.

Perhaps, one of Google’s most brilliant (some believe absurd) moves, happened just recently. It has applied (via Nelson Minar, a Google Engineer), for patent rights to transmit ads through RSS feeds. Few people know, even more won’t believe, but the Internet has undergone a fundamental shift in how information is exchanged on the web. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and was first popularized by blogs because blogs use XML and RSS feeds to syndicate their content.

Don’t come to us, we will deliver. People can view a site’s contents through RSS readers or an RSS equipped browser without actually going to the sites.

RSS will revolutionize the Internet. Microsoft in its Longhorn Statement has announced the next version of Windows will have RSS integrated into its Operating System. RSS applications, under the Creative Commons license, will change the way we use our computers and the Internet.

Google, if it is successful with this patent application will build on its already god-like status. The stakes are enormous and Google knows it. This patent could put Google directly into the mix, but the rewards are beyond belief! And that’s not all, there are rumors Google may be developing its own RSS powered operating system and browser. Why not, it has the resources and financial clout to easily carry out such an undertaking. Google is already the owner of the domain name “gbrowser.com”!

One can only wonder, is Google positioning itself to not only be the brains of the Internet but also placing itself into the very core of the nasty beast? Does it desire not only to be a mega hub, but also to be an innate part of the whole structure? Positioning itself, in essence, to becoming the web’s nervous system.

Any movement of data, information, or commerce on the Internet will have to pass through and be affected by the Google Factor. More or less, cementing Google’s influence on the whole scheme of things. And in the process, further weaving Google into the very fabric of our lives.

Importance of outbound link

Outbound link is a key element in search engine marketing. Outbound links are composed in HTML code. An outbound link is defined as a link that directs users to another site. E.g. when site A links to site B, site A has an outbound link and site B has an inbound link. Outbound link send visitors away from your website. Some site owners still link freely. Some refuse to link at all, and some provide links that open in a new browser window. Outbound links can add value to your site by providing useful information to users without you having to create the content. The number and quality of the outbound links is of great importance. What is more important when creating outbound links is the quality of the site that is linked? Fewer high quality links are much more valuable than numerous low quality links. There are several items to consider when determining the quality of a link. First, links that have been for a longer time and have a good standing with search engines are looked upon with more favor. Another important thing that determines the credibility is the domain name extension. Links with extensions like .gov, .edu, and .org have more credibility because of their content. Links like .info and .biz has less credibility. Links are the skeletal system of the web, without them, it cannot stand.

Stuck In the Google Sandbox?

Heres a rough set of criteria for you.

• Your site is indexed and appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked) type site:www.yoursite.com into Google to check this.
• Your site has PageRank (use the google toolbar, or nichebot.com to find this)
• It is regularly crawled, and the cache dates are newer than 10 days
• On your keyword, you rank in the top 20 for allinanchor, allintext, and allintitle. To check this, type, e.g. allinanchor: and see if you’re in the top 20.
• You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for

Does the Sandbox Really Exist, or is it Just the Google Algorithm?

This is a big controversy. Everyone has a different opinions.

Don’t listen to guys who handle bluechip companies – they optimize older, high PR sites. It’s your everyday mainly-new-sites webmaster who knows this problem intimately. In fact, all the big sites need to do is place the keyword in the title and they’re on the first page. This gives them an unfair advantage not unlike what the media elite has enjoyed for decades.

Regardless of whether the sandbox is a separate phenomenon from the algorithm, the degree of prejudice against new sites has hurt quality of Google’s search results. This is especially true with products and topics both new and urgent. The bigger sites may not be covering it, but searchers end up there without high quality answers.

The common wisdom now is that if you’re looking for new websites, go to MSN or Yahoo instead. Neither of these sites is using this kind of filter. Many websites rank in the top 10 (for their targeted keywords) on these two search engines, yet are nowhere to be found in Google.

Why Would Google Do This?

Google frowns upon SEOs who try to overly influence ranking, so they needed to find a way around SEO factors to deliver quality results. So they’d look for signs of SEO in websites, e.g. how consistent the addition of backlinks is, and how repetitive (vs. natural) the anchor text of backlinks is, and they consider the age of the site and its backlinks.

Redesign Penalties

Similarly, websites that have made the mistake of too comprehensively redesigning their look, content, or navigation have been shocked to find that they get penalized for this updating. Google seems to prefer a frozen in time or moving like molasses kind of internet. But to be fair, this is something that had to be included to beat spammers who were buying old websites and refueling them with keyword spam.

Why Do You Get Sandboxed?

Some sites have gotten out of the sandbox in a week, while others can take up to a year or more. No one knows if any one contributing factor gets you out sooner rather than later. Some point to the age of inbound links, or the frequency with which your site acquires them. Some say that getting too many inbound links too quickly appears artificial, and is flagged as spam. But others argue that Google can’t know how fast a site should acquire links. A website that received national news coverage, for example, could acquire hundreds or thousands of links in a day.

It’s likely that no one outside of Google fully understands how the sandbox works. The problem has been noticed and discussed for nearly 2 years, and no one has given a satisfactory answer. What’s crystal clear is that Google has made it so complex that it cannot be reverse engineered.

How Long Will You Be Making Sand Castles?

The delay seems to vary anywhere from four to 11 months. Since we don’t know exactly upon what and to what degree the filter depends, it’s likely a different magic combination for every site- and this fits with webmasters experience. So keep your head down, develop content, get inbound links, and eventually you’ll get out.

Some suggest that when you come out of the sandbox, you are not fully free. They notice a rationing or gradual increase in traffic from Google. In the meantime, older sites may rank better than you, regardless of the quality of their look, feel, and content. Deal with it. Keep your head down and keep working.

Another wrinkle: some webmasters suggest that sandboxing can occur at the page level, not simply at the site level, and that it is the bigger money/traffic keywords that get sandboxed. Again, this could simply be due to the level of competition on that keyword, as the entire site is not sandboxed if you’re getting rankings and traffic from other keywords.

Is There a Way to Trick the Sandbox Filter?

Some webmasters have talked about finding cracks in the algorithm¦ and they mainly involve backlinks. For a while, there was a lot of linkspam on blogs, but everyone Google, bloggers, and blog providers have cracked down on that exploit.

The real sandbox solution is not a trick – unless you define everything done by the SEO-aware as tricky. The answer is to grow your content and backlinks naturally over time. Don’t look for the quick buck, the quick ranking, or the easy way out. Go back to basics and build websites that people can use and enjoy. Exchange links with quality websites.

To avoid frustration, I’d suggest, if web building is what you do full time, that you begin a new site every month or two eventually, if you’ve worked consistently on all of them, you’ll have one after another emerging from purgatory and flourishing in the rankings.

Link building solutions Backbone of SEO operations.

Website Optimization Tips for Link Building and SEO

Trust, timing and power are three metrics that crash the aim site for building links. Sites that rank at the helm of search engines do so because of fundamental characteristics communal across multiple industries, websites and topics.

Sites ranking in the top 10 are there because they (1) either started previous to others realized the potential for those keywords and contain an advantage of time to market / indexing diffusion (2) because they appreciate link popularity and contain built a plethora of links from a diversity of sites or (3) because they understand the value of a good domain, site structural design and on page optimization.

Not to say that this is the simply way, but we are only focusing on three metrics for the sake of argument. I have mentioned before that chronology begets power, in layman’s terms, if you in progress years ago optimizing, cleansing and grooming your site for senior search engine visibility, you understand the layers concerned in producing high ranking search engine consequence pages.

5 Simple Steps to Great Search Engine Rankings

Having your website rank well in the major search engines is crucial to a successful Internet business. However, the information on doing so, which abounds on the Internet, can be perceived as complex and contradictive. Many website owners end up overwhelmed by all the data and simply quit and move on to other areas of promotion. By following the handful of steps presented in this article you will be well on your way to solid rankings.

Primer

Each webpage is its own unit, which has its own title and theme. A theme is most commonly referred to as keywords or a keyword phrase. The theme should be based on the most dominant data for that webpage. Therefore, if you have a webpage that lists ten types of coffee cups, “coffee cups would be the likely choice for the theme. However, if the theme is too general then you should work to compact it as there will be far too many results in the search engine to contend with. Perhaps your webpage lists ten types of coffee cups which all have American symbols on them. Two of the various possible themes would then be American coffee cups and patriotic coffee cups.

To determine if a theme might be too broad, search for the theme at a popular search engine and see how many results come up. It is typical to see up to a few million results for any theme. However, one hundred million results would be extremely high and a different theme should be chosen.

Step One:

The title of your webpage means a lot. A website should never have a loose and thoughtless title. The title should be clear, compact, and related directly to the main theme of the webpage. Let us look at three title examples for a webpage that sells different types of red coffee cups.

• Bad Title: Welcome to Joes!
• Better Title: Joes red coffee cups.
• Best Title: Red coffee cups.

Notice how we trimmed the title down to simply the main theme. In the bad example, the title does nothing to describe the products offered on the webpage and therefore will end up hurting the search engine rankings for this webpage.

Step Two: Use the H1 tag.

On the top of your webpage put the main theme in a H1 tag. This will help establish what the webpage is about and Google will take the data enclosed in the H1 tag more seriously which helps boost the overall theme in its ranking algorithm. This should be at the very top of the webpage if possible and include only the main theme. Using our title example above, you would insert the following on top of the webpage:

Red coffee cups

Step Three: Utilize the written word properly.

The main keyword phrase (theme) must be printed on your webpage multiple times. It must appear natural in the flow of writing and not just thrown on the webpage somewhere a few times. After massaging your keyword phrase into the copy, bold one instance, underline one instance, and italicize one instance.

Again, basing this example from the one above:

• Bold One Instance: My name is Joe and I sell red coffee cups.
• Italicize One Instance: Our red coffee cups ship directly to your front door.
• Underline One Instance: Order today and receive free shipping on all red coffee cups!

By doing this you will help enforce the theme of the webpage and achieve better search rankings.

Step Four: Establish incoming links.

Before going any further, I recommend you visit google.com and install the Google toolbar. This will allow you to see what is called PR (page rank). Knowing a websites PR is extremely helpful, and basically mandatory, for this step. It is more important to have links today than ever. To rank high in the search engines, you must have people linking to you. Failure to acquire incoming links results in low or non-existing rankings. Here are some techniques to build up incoming links:

• Submit your website to directories. Once listed, directories, such as the ODP (dmoz.org) and business.com, will increase your incoming links. When viewing a directory, check to see if they have PR. The higher the number the better.
• Purchase text links. Many websites today sell text links at varied rates. Purchasing a text link can help you gain traffic and will increase your incoming links. Text links must be purchased or placed only on websites that have either the same or related theme as yours. If your website is all about coffee a link from a website about oil changes is not going to help you much and could actually harm your website rankings in the future.
• Link Research. Find out who is linking to top ranked websites under your keyword phrase (theme) and try to get listed on them. The idea here is to not reinvent the wheel, rather do what already works. To find out who is linking to top websites, visit Google and type the following text in the search box: link:site.com where site.com is the website URL.

Step Five: Work to ensure anchor text from incoming links contains your main theme.

When other websites link to you, try to get them to use the keyword phrase for the webpage they are linking to as the anchor text. This is not always possible and that is ok. You simply want to try and get as many links on target as possible. Not all links need to go to your homepage because having incoming links to a webpage within the website is beneficial also.