Building links to your website is a vital element in any search engine optimisation strategy, but it can be time consuming and difficult to keep coming up with new ideas to build links to your website.

In a previous post, I discussed Yahoo Answers as a means to drive traffic and links to your website, in this article I will dig a little deeper into the process of gaining some back links.

Link Building Tips - Tip 1: Submit to Web Directories

There are hundreds of website directories on the internet, I won’t list them here because there is a website that has a list of free directories to submit to, and it is updated on a regular basis: addurl.nu

Submitting to the list of free directories alone won’t have much of an impact, I have compiled a list of a few directories (free and paid) below which I think you should submit to:

• DMOZ
• Yahoo Web Directory
• Joe Ant
• Web World Index
• Gimpsy

You can also visit “Best Web Directories” for an up to date list of quality directories.

As of late, Google has been cracking down on some web directories by penalising the site and devaluing their page rank. When considering if you should submit your website to a directory, follow a few simple rules:

• Search for the name of the directory on Google, if the domain name is nowhere to be found in the results then the directory has possibly been penalised.
• If the directory is mentioning terms like “SEO Friendly Directory” or “High Page Rank Directory” then I wouldn’t recommend adding your site.
• Check the page rank of the directory homepage, if it has no page rank then it’s either a new directory or Google has devalued the site, either way it’s not worth submitting your site.

Link Building Tips - Tip 2: Setup a Company Blog

Setting up a company blog that provides your users with the latest news within your company AND in depth information about your products/services is a brilliant way to build links. By doing this, you will build up a reputation as an expert within your industry subject.

You can write about your industry news, how to guides and reviews for your products. Writing content will add value to your website and give potential customers information they need. If you are struggling with ideas about what to write, look at your competitors on Google and find out what they are writing about.

You can submit your blog posts and articles to social networking sites, this will attract more traffic to your website and it has the potential to attract links. You can view a list of social networking sites at ebizmba.com

As discussed in a previous post “Generate Traffic and Links with Yahoo Answers”, you can use Yahoo Answers as a platform to market your content and articles and build up your reputation as an expert at the same time.

Setting up a blog is very easy these days, but what you want is a blog within your current website (the same domain). Attracting links to a blog within your current website will have a positive effect for the entire site. If you have a web developer working for your company, you can have them set up a Wordpress blog or you can call us and we can offer our advice (Contact us).

Link Building Tips - Tip 3: Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking is an important link building strategy as it can generate a lot of relevant and quality links. Reciprocal linking is the process of exchanging links with another website.

You don’t want to exchange links with any website on the internet, you need to find websites that are similar to yours in terms of the services they provide and the information on their website.

A quick and easy solution for finding other relevant websites is to get a list of your keywords you are targeting and carry out searches on Google for them. Then make a list of the top 10 results for each of your keyword searches and save them in a document.

With the list of websites you have, you can find the email address of the website administrator and send them a personalised email asking for an exchange of links. Try and avoid mass emailing multiple email addresses as most of those emails will just be deleted.

When you receive feedback from those emails, you can negotiate where you want your link to appear on their website and the anchor text.

If reciprocal linking sounds like hard work and time consuming, have your website administrator manage the work load, they probably don’t have enough work to do anyway :). An alternative is to use reciprocal link management software, this type of software will find other relevant websites on the internet, and once a link exchange has been accomplished, the software will check to see if the link on their website to your site is still active.

You can find reciprocal link management software by carrying out a search on Google for “reciprocal link manager”. I recommend using Internet Business Promoter, as it has a lot of other useful tools bundled into the software.

Yahoo Answers provide a community of knowledge with questions and answers for just about any subject and with a growing network of users, it is becoming a popular resource worldwide.

Anybody who can provide useful information about a certain subject can join today and start reaping the benefits that Yahoo Answers can offer. If you have a lot of knowledge regarding a certain subject, you can position yourself as an expert in your respective industry.

Site owners worldwide can use their knowledge and content on their website to actively answer questions on Yahoo Answers. By answering questions and linking to useful resources (on your website) you can be identified as an expert within your industry subject. By doing this you will build up respect within the Yahoo community which will attract traffic and links to your website.

Taking advantage of Yahoo Answers

When you answer a question on Yahoo Answers, the form you need to complete comes with a section to list websites as references for your answer. Although these links will have the NoFollow attribute in them, it will still attract users to follow the link through to your website. This could also generate new links from other websites which found your information useful.

You can look around the categories on Yahoo Answers to find questions you have the knowledge to answer. If your website has no useful reference to a question, you can write an article about the subject, upload it to your website and then answer the question with your website as reference. By doing this you will be providing your website with more useful and unique content as well as getting the word out about your new article.

Becoming an expert on Yahoo Answers

To get started with Yahoo Answers, you will need to open an account with them, write some information about yourself on your profile and then upload an avatar.

Then choose a subject category that you have knowledge about or a category that is similar to the subject of your website. You can then check this category for new questions as often as you like and select which questions you would like to answer.

Always keep in mind; you need to provide useful information to the Yahoo community. You want to build up your reputation as an expert in your industry and not provide junk information with spam links

If you find other people are answering questions with a lot of useful information, go one step further and spend more time answering the question as best you can and with more information.

With every question you answer, add the user that is asking the question to your friends list. Build up as many friends as you can within the category you have chosen, if you have answered questions with useful information your friends will keep checking your activity on your account for any new questions that you may answered. This will keep users coming to your website for information and could even generate new links.

With Yahoo Answers growing on a daily basis, this is the time to get involved and start to become a reputable expert with the community.

Code to text ratio is used to calculate how much coding is on your webpage compared to your content. If you open up the source code of your webpage you will be able to see which parts are HTML coding and which parts are actual content.

For example, if your source code only has 5 lines of information, and 3 of those lines were HTML coding and 2 lines were content, your code text ratio would be 40%, which is a very good score.

You can use an online code to text ratio tool to calculate your score, the score you receive will give you a guideline, please visit collinsinternet.com

Is code to text ratio important for SEO?

Code to text ratio in my opinion is an important aspect for your website and SEO. If your websites coding structure is full of unnecessary junk then it only makes it harder for the search engines to read the important stuff on your webpage, your content. If your web page contains too much HTML coding, it could even prevent search engine spiders from crawling the page in its entirety.

Search engine crawlers can compare the amount of coding there is on a webpage compared to the amount of content in its algorithm, if the page is cluttered and has a large file size, the search engine spiders might only be allowed to read certain elements of the page. This could have a negative impact on your SEO efforts as these search engine spiders might be missing vital elements of your content.

How to improve your code to text ratio

There are many ways to reduce your code to text ratio, but it can take time and effort to make the changes, please find a few points below for improving your code to text ratio:

• Use external CSS style sheets for your website. Instead of having your design elements in your webpage, put all those elements into a separate CSS file. This is usually the main problem with code to text ratios.
• If you are using JavaScript, again you should try and move as much as you can into an external JavaScript file.
• If you have very little content on a page, try bulking it up a little to improve your text ratio.

With most websites, you can always improve your code to text ratio, but you don’t want to be spending massive amounts of time working on this when there are more important aspects to consider with SEO. You should try and improve your code to text ratio when you can and not worry too much about it.

Keyword rich domain names apparently give you a boost in the search engine rankings for that particular key phrase, for example if your keyword is “wooden clocks” and your domain name is “wooden-clocks.com” Google would favor your sites rankings for the search “wooden clocks”.

Having witnessed keyword rich domain names shoot up through the rankings on Google and especially Yahoo for the desired keywords, I believe there is some truth in it.

Surprisingly, Google and other search engines have not addressed this issue as this technique can easily manipulate the search engine results with little effort.

How much of an effect do keyword rich domain names have on the search engines?

Well I have witnessed keyword rich domain names with decent onsite optimisation (title tags, decent content) reach the top 10 for competitive key phrases with a small amount of back links. This was achieved within a few weeks of the domain being indexed (the back links were not picked up at this point).

In my mind, this does prove that keyword rich domain names do have an effect, but for how long?

After a short period of time of a top 10 position on the search engines, Google did seem to allocate the appropriate rankings and reduce the position for some reason or another for most keyword rich domain names.

Yahoo’s search results are a different story though, as soon as the ranking boost is achieved, you don’t seem to loose them, even when you don’t update your content often you will still maintain your position give or take a few jumps and drops.

Why are ranking positions dropped on Google?

This is a good question, if we can find out the reason why Google does eventually get smart and devalue the keyword rich domains, maybe we can discover something new about their algorithm, here is my theory:

Google’s algorithm might consider certain aspects of a site before others when determining search engine rankings. For example, Google might consider factors such as keywords in the domain name, keywords in the title and unique page content. Next time Google comes through the site it might then consider other factors which are lacking such as back links, new pages with unique content and of course, the age of the domain name.

This would explain why there is an immediate jump in search engine rankings and then a sudden drop, but this doesn’t explain why Yahoo doesn’t devalue rankings after a certain period of time.

Maintaining rankings on Google

If my theory above is correct, then it would be a good idea to add unique content to your site on a daily basis (this should be done anyway), and try and build a few back links to the site. This will certainly help towards maintaining the sudden boost in rankings and maybe if Google sees your site as active, those rankings will be more stable.

Conclusion

Keyword rich domain names obviously have an effect on the search engines.

It would be a good experiment to compare a keyword rich domain name properly optimised compared to a domain name with a company name, also properly optimised, launched at the same time with the same amount of back links, and then see the difference in the rankings. My money would be on the keyword rich domain name.

Are there any disadvantages with having keywords in my domain name? YES.

You are sacrificing the marketing and exposure of your company brand by not using your company name in the domain, but you are gaining a boost in the search engines by using keywords, you have to choose which technique will benefit you the most in the future.

Any future experiments I carry out on this theory will be published on this page.

What is the Meta Description Tag?

The Meta description tag can be found or inserted into the head section in any HTML page, below is an example of a Meta description tag.

<meta name=”description” content=”Describe Your Page Here” />

This description will appear in the search engine results page (SERPs) under your title tag link. Although the Meta description tag is not used by the major search engines for ranking purposes, having the option to write a sales pitch which users will see in the search engine results page gives you a great opportunity to attract visitors.

Meta Description Length

It is generally accepted that your Meta description length should be between 180 to 252 characters, but this does vary on different search engines.

When I write page descriptions, I tend to keep Google in mind, as should you. Google only seems to index around 150 to 155 characters of your page description. If you exceed that length Google will chop off any excess characters and replace them with a space and three dots.

With that in mind I like to keep my page description within the 150 character length, then I can write a description that won’t be interrupted by Google and I believe this makes for a better sales pitch.

How should I write my Meta Description?

It is hard writing a page description with limited space, but when your page description is done properly you will see the difference. When writing your page descriptions you should always keep in mind what the user is thinking, and what will make them click on the link to your website.

You should mention two of your main keywords within the description as these will be bolded on some search engines such as Google, giving your description some emphasis.

You should try and mention what services, products or information your webpage can offer to the user. I will try and give you an example of good page description below:

Target Keywords: SEO Services, Search Engine Optimization
Description: Generate new customers from the internet with our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Package. We provide SEO services at very competitive prices.

Positive points about the description:

• The length of the description above is 143 characters long, which means there will be no cut off point on the Google results page.
• I am telling the user a benefit for using our search engine optimization package by mentioning that it will generate new customers to their business.
• I have also mentioned that our prices are very competitive so the user will know they will get a fair deal.

The above example is just an example, but you get the idea. You need to promote your services and say what the benefits are for using them, but also mention one or two of your keywords or as many as you can fit into a 150 character description without just listing your keywords.

If you follow these simple guidelines you will find more users will click on your listing as opposed to your competitors.

Remember, keep it short and sweet!

What is URL Rewriting?

URL rewriting is a term used for the process of changing the appearance of a URL.

There are two types of pages you have for your website, either a static HTM/HTML page or a dynamic page URL.

A static page may look like:
www.example.com/descriptive_page_name.htm

But a dynamic page could look like:
www.example.com/products.cgi?gm=catlist&pid=121

The reason that dynamic pages look so ugly is either because data is being pulled from a database or there is some kind of programming language involved throwing values around to different pages.

So, why shouldn’t we use dynamic URL’s?

• Google and other search engines do seem to take longer indexing dynamic URL’s.
• Dynamic URL’s are hard for users to remember and it’s not very user friendly.
• By using dynamic URL’s, you have lost the opportunity to provide a descriptive page name which would help your search engine rankings and help your website users.

Dynamic pages are often found in online shops or sites that use a CMS (Content Management System) software, but as more and more people become aware of the negative aspects involved with dynamic URL’s, they are starting to address the issue and make changes.

So, back to the original question, what is URL rewriting?

URL rewriting takes a dynamic page name such as www.example.com/products.cgi?gm=catlist&pid=121 and changes it into something like www.example.com/products-gm-catlist-pid-121.htm. This simple URL rewrite has turned that ugly dynamic URL into a static HTM page.

How to do URL Rewriting

To change a URL from:
www.example.com/products.cgi?gm=catlist&pid=121
To:
www.example.com/products-gm-catlist-pid-121.htm

You will need to write some instructions to your web server, this might sound complicated but it’s actually rather easy. You will need to login to your websites FTP area and go to the root directory. There you should find a file called .htaccess, if there isn’t a file there by that name, just open up notepad, save as .htaccess, then upload to your root directory.

We will need to put some instructions into this htaccess file. Don’t worry, you wont have to learn any complicated programming languages; there is a URL rewrite tool that does all the work for you at linkvendor.com.

If you go to that website, input your dynamic URL and then give a page extension you would prefer such as .htm, it will generate the code needed to be put into your .htaccess file. This tool also gives you three different options for your static URL; I would just choose the option which use .htm.

Once you have copied and pasted the code into your htaccess file, save it and upload to your root directory then go back to the URL rewrite tool and copy and paste the generated URL example to test in your browser. If the page loads, you have just completed a URL rewrite!

All that is left for you to do is change the links on your website to point to the new URL’s and you’re done!

Page titles are found in the html source of a page, the title tag starts with < title > and ends with < /title >. In between these two tags you can enter a page title that best describes your content.

Page titles are one of the most important on page factors you need to do right to achieve high search engines rankings. In truth, changing your title tag on your pages can dramatically increase your search engine rankings, and due to the fact that your title tag appears as a link from the search engine results page, it gives you a great opportunity to try and attract clickthroughs.

What should my title look like?

First you must carry out some keyword research so that you know what keywords will bring you the most traffic. Once you know what keywords you targeting then you can judge what pages are targeting which keywords.

Say your website is about mobile phones, and you are optimising a page for the keyword “Mobile Phones”, your title tag should just have the keyword mobile phones, right?

Well yes and no, by just using the keyword mobile phones, you are limiting yourself to just that one keyword. If you carry out some more keyword research for the phrase “mobile phones” and try and find key phrases with 3 or even 4 words in them which contain the phrase “mobile phones” then you will be targeting 2 or 3 keywords in one page title.

For example, you found out that the keywords “cheap mobile phones” and “mobile phones sale” were being searched for, your title tag could be “cheap mobile phones sale”. By using this 4 word title you will be targeting the keywords mobile phones, cheap mobile phones, mobile phones sale and cheap mobile phones sale. By targeting multiple keywords within a title tag you are broadening the amount of traffic you will receive from the search engines from multiple keywords.

Should my title tag contain my company name?

This question keeps popping up from time to time, some people say your title should contain your company name, some people disagree.

In my opinion, if your company is well known and people know your brand you should always use your company name within your title so people know who you are.

For the smaller companies out there, I would recommend using your company name on your homepage title only. I’ll give you an example, say your company name was Mr.Mobile and the keyword you were targeting for your homepage was “cheap mobile phones sale” your title tag should look something like this “Cheap Mobile Phones Sale – Mr.Mobile”, for the rest of your pages I would just include your keywords without your company name.

The reason I say only put your company name on your homepage is so you rank for your company name, but the rest of your pages you leave exclusively to rank for your keywords.

There is no right or wrong way about putting your company name in your title tag, you can experiment and see what works best for you.

Welcome to the new website for Streamline Marketing Services, it has been in the development process for quite some time but now it’s finally here. We felt it was time to launch a new design for our site to show off our design and development skills to any potential clients.

There are still a few tweaks needed to be made in the design and the infrastructure of the site but these will be completed within the next few weeks.

The new site incorporates a blog which we will use to give you the latest news within the company and provide valuable information related to the search engine marketing industry. You will also be able to leave your opinions with a user comments function on individual blog posts.

Our main goal with the launch of this new site and blog is to provide our clients with information and advice ranging from search engine optimisation to Pay Per Click.

Feel free to look around and leave your opinions!