Super Search Engine Marketing

Links are what takes a person from one page to another. When you clicked to view this page you clicked a link.  The internet is built on links, one page linking to another, one site linking to another, this is why its called the World Wide Web.

Without links there would be no web. Links are what make the web the web.  They are what take you from one site to another searching for what ever it is your finding.  Links are one of the most important parts of the internet and your site.

There are a number of types of links you can get. Some are good, some are not.  Good links are links that are coming into your site.  You only have limited control over who links to you.  There are no laws on the internet that forbid people from linking to you. While some incoming links are better than others and certainly better than none, the right kind of link will bring you a better result.

The Best links: The best kind of link you can get is one from a website that ends in .EDU or .GOV these are, it is believed, to be links that are the best to have.  Part of the reason is that they are next to impossible to obtain due to the nature of the sites.  EDU sites are educational, and usually only have links to sites or pages that they know are of value.  The same is true for a GOV or government sites.  If your able to get a link from any of these kinds of domains take it, it is worth gold to the search engines.

Great Links: If your able to get a link from a news organization you can expect that you will not only see traffic increase but also a boost to your sites ranking.  News sites are generally ever changing and checked very often by the SE’s the more times you show up in links in News sites, especially the big ones, the better your going to rank and the more traffic your going to get.

The Next Best links: The next level of links are links that are one way to your site. The more people linking to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The SE’s keep track of how many links come into your site, the more links coming in the more important they believe your site to be. To a certain degree you can not control what sites link to your site so there is no real disadvantage to having an incoming link from any site.

Links in Directories: I will explain further in another article the value of registering your site with as many directories as you can find out there.  Suffice to to say that it falls into the category above where the more links coming in the better.

Link Exchange: This is where you seek out sites that will trade a link on your site for a link on their site.  This is also a subject I will discuss in another article in greater detail as it is an art form all to itself.

Sparky

One of the best things that can happen to your site is incoming links to your site. I have previously discussed the value of links, well there are incoming links and outgoing links.

Outgoing links take people away from your site. Which is not a bad thing but you do want people and the SE’s to come to your site.

Incoming links are links that are coming into your site from another site. These serve several purposes.  The first is that it brings in customers to your site.  Second is it brings the SE’s to your site.

SE’s have what are called spiders. You know World Wide Web, has World Wide Spiders.  These are programs that follow links around the internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… are always looking for new content on the net.  One way they find it is when you submit your site to them.  The other is they find your site through a link on another site.  The more they come to your site the better as each time they come they look for changes from the last time they indexed your site and may add your information to their data center.

There are a number of ways to get incoming links to your site. One is to use the directories that are out there.  Known to lots of people there are other places to find directories of websites that are used like the major SE’s.  Lots of people use these directories to look for things of interest.  They are usually smaller than the Big Three out there, but have a loyal fan base that is growing.  Many of these directories will allow you to suggest your site for free.  This is a perfect way to get more incoming links to your site.

The other method to get inbound links is to do article submission. If you happen to be good at writing and have some information that will be valuable to others you can submit articles to websites in hopes that they publish them and along with the article you have a link to your site.  These are not as easy to obtain as other types of links as you have to be able to write good content for it to be included in a website and you have to submit it to websites that may or may not include it.  I will discuss article writing in another part of this section as it deserves more attention than I can give it here.

There are a number of reasons to get incoming links to your site. First of course is the potential for new customers finding you.  Second is that as the SE’s spider the net they come across these directories and index them and follow their links, which means you have the SE’s coming and spidering your site more often.  It is also counted by the SE’s as another link to your site.  If your up against another site and all things being equal, the one with more inbound links vs outbound links is going to be one that is more likely to be listed above the other.

You will notice a link on the right that says Free Dirctories. That is a listing of nearly 1000 directories that will take your site.  Here again like link trading you want to have a variety of Title’s, and descriptions so that your site is indexed in different ways by the SE spiders.  This can be a long and tedious process, and again a service that I offer is to submit your site to as many of the directories as I can.  I use a piece of software that allows me to put in your information and then use it to submit a variety of worded links to your site from these directories.  The sooner you get yourself listed in these directories the better.  Many of them have a long waiting list so get yourself included as soon as you can.

Sparky

PR is page rank.  Page Rank is how important search engines determine your site to be. The higher the page rank the more important your site is to that search engine.

There are a number of ways to determine what your page rank is. One is a plugin offered for many webbrowsers.  The others are software like Traffic Travis which allows you to track PR for a search terms and other things your using to market your site, and products.

Page Rank is generally not given to new sites, and it usually takes time to achive a page rank for the various search engines.  Getting a high Page Rank is a never ending quest and if you follow the advice given in this blog you will find good advice on how to get the best Page Rank you can.

A high Page Rank across all search engines for the terms people use to find your site is the desire of every webmaster and site owner out there.  Welcome to the battle field.

The most interesting thing is how each of the various search engines determine your page rank.  Each has it’s own mathamatical calculation that it uses to determine search results based on what people are searching for.  To achieve the highest rank you need to get the best numbers you can into the calculation.

Of course with website design you need to keep your customer in mind.  Attractive sites bring people back.  Eye candy is important. If you look at my coffee site you will see that it is attractive to the eye.  It is also attractive to the search engines.

Offering lots of content is important.  Did I mention CONTENT IS KING?  Yea I think I did but you will hear me harp on it again and again as it is one of the MOST important things to search engine marketing. The more content in the form of text, alt tags and other html coding, the more important your page will rank (PR).  For information about PR I like to use other software that is available to track PR, not only across Google, but other SE’s as well.  We will get into this later.

So your design elements must incorporate not only Eye Candy for your customers but also a means for the SE’s to read your site.  Many sites use a data base program to make the pages from information they put into the data base.  A sample of this would be Harmony Cedar , their site runs on software on a computer server that offers up ever changing information.  This site also runs on a Data base where my text and what I have highlighted or made a link to is stored and when your looking at a page it is what the data base is offering.  Data base run sites can be cheap like this one, or very expensive like Harmony Cedar.

Most sites that I manage or create are made up of what we call static pages.  These are pages of HTML code that once placed on the internet shows what you see when you click to a site and view it in your web browser.  They are inexpensive to create, and maintain or make changes too.

Most people do not need to learn HTML code in order to open up a site.  Depending on your site, your host etc.. you may get software that will help you create your site.  You can use some Word Processing software to creat HTML pages from what you create in a word document.  However the best form is to create the pages from scratch or using some sort of template which content the very basic elements needed.

The Basic elements of a webpage needed in a site is: CONTENT, A Menu, A Header, and a Footer.  Almost every website page you look at contain thise 4 elements.  Obviously the Header is at the top, the Footer is at the bottom, where the content is viewable and the menu’s are located is entirely up to you and your particular tastes, or better yet the tastes of your customers.  Essentially you have 3 places where you can put your Menu, at the top of the page, along the left or along the right.  No one puts their menu at the bottom, though in the footer we do put links to other pages that are important to have on every page.

There are other types of files which we will get into later that are also very helpful to a website, like a sitemap, robots file, and other things.

So now you know the basic design elements that are needed.