Web Design Discussion

Getting links from high traffic web sites is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your web site. Some of the most trafficked sites on the Net include .edu and .gov sites because they contain lots of content focused on a particular subject or issue and they often rank at the top of the search engine results.

The problem is that it’s not easy to get links from these sites.

How to get links from .edu web sites?

1. Fill a void

Read the content contained within the .edu site and see if you can add to it or offer something new..perhaps from another viewpoint.

For example I once wrote an article on web design that was picked up by several educational sites looking for a concise tutorial.

2. Create quality content

Create a series of articles that have been carefully written and researched and offer them to the owner of the .edu web site. If the content is good they might link to the articles on your web site or have them added to their own site with your link at the end of the article.

3. Analyze competing web sites

Analyze the .edu links of competing web sites to see what they are linking to. This may be an indication that you could contact these particular .edu sites and offer them good content they can link to. This will save you a lot of time looking through 100s of other .edu sites.

4. Contact student web sites or blogs linked to an .edu web site

There may be students that have active blogs which link to the main .edu site. If you are an authority in your field they may be interested in having you write a post or article for their blog.

Conclusion

By getting incoming links from .edu sites you can boost your search engine rankings because they often have 1000s of incoming links from numerous resources.

*****************************************
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Development, SEO, Hosting

Receive fresh, in-depth articles articles on how to design, optimize and promote your web site by subscribing to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter at: http://www.isitebuild.com/

Web designers often focus on the aesthetics of a web site without creating a link structure that will increase link popularity and get more visitors. When the site owner contacts an SEO specialist to market his site to the search engines, the specialist may have to optimize the link structure-a task the designer should have included in the original design.

How does the link structure of your website effect your rankings?

The internal link structure of your site allows you to spread the link power of your home page to the individual pages of your site.

For example, if 1000 other websites link to your home page, then your home page has a certain link power that can be spread to the other pages of your site. If you link to 50 pages on your home page then each page will get 1/50 of the link power. If you link to only 10 pages, then each page will get much more link power passed to it (1/10).

The more link power a page receives, the more likely it is that the page will get high rankings on search engines. Your internal link structure allows you to direct search engines to your most important pages.

How to improve the internal link structure of your website

There are several things that you can do to improve the rankings of special pages on your website:

1) Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines.

2) Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page. The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.

3) Use your targeted keywords in the links to these pages. Make sure that you use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted.

Show search engines for which keywords your web pages are relevant.

4) Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you’ll get backlinks from these sites.

5) Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn’t be listed in search engines.

The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site. If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages.

6) Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. This is very similar to tip 5. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages they can take a close look at the pages for which you want to be ranked.

7) Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages. You might want to use the link checker that you can access in the new IBP 10 beta.

By optimizing the structure of how your web pages pass their link power, you can influence how search engines treat the content of your website.

Once you have optimized the link structure of your website, you should try to get more links from other websites.

It’s hard to beat a website with a great internal and external link structure.

*****************************************
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Development, SEO, Hosting

Receive fresh, in-depth articles articles on how to design, optimize and promote your web site by subscribing to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter at: http://www.isitebuild.com/

Blogging is a great way to rapidly build links to your web site. If you don’t have a website you can easily create a blog in a few minutes by installed the WordPress software that comes with your web host or add a blog to a subdirectory of your current site.

According to blog tracking firm Technorati, there are currently 14 million blogs with 80,000 more being added every day. And 30 percent of all 50 million internet users are blog readers. In short, a lot of people are reading and writing blogs.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably read those emails that guarantee your web site will be in the top 10 sites of Google, Yahoo or MSN or will submit your site to 250 directories.

My suggestion is to stay away from those offerings. You will be throwing your money away.

Why you should not use automatic website directory submission tools?

1. No control

You have no control what directories your web site will be submitted to. It may get submitted to a web site that is not related to the subject matter of your web pages.

2. Incorrect categories

If your web site is submitted to the wrong category it may not qualify for entry. If this happens with hundreds of directories you will lose money and be disappointed.

3. Incorrect titles and descriptions

Most website directories use different criteria for the titles, descriptions and anchor text to be submitted. ie Your website could be rejected if you enter 220 characters for the description but it only allows 120. Manually submitting your web site will prevent this from occurring.

4. Access to more directories

Many directories require a user name and password to prevent automated submissions or you use captcha forms where you need to enter specific letters or numbers. This is to filter out submissions from automated software. Manual website directory submissions will guarantee you get listed in these directories.

Benefits of Manual Website Directory Submissions

1. Get One way links
Submit to those directories that only require one way links. Avoid directories that require a reciprocal link unless it is directly related to the content of your site.

2. Boost link popularity

Obtaining high search engine rankings depends on the quality and quantity of links pointing to your website. Concentrate on high quality directories to get backlinks. If you can afford the cost, submit to some of the paid directories such as business.com, yahoo.com because these are viewed as trusted sites.

3. More web traffic

Select the directories that have the highest amount of traffic first. You achieve this by checking their page rank, alexa status, search engine rankings and number of backlinks. Continue submitting to directories that are less popular depending on the amount of time you have.

Tips

Manual website directory submissions is a time consuming task. Make a plan how many directories you want to submit to, then set some time aside each day to work through them all. You may not see a significant increase in your web traffic immediately because it takes time for your site to be reviewed and included in each directory.

Check the website statistics from your web host every few weeks so you can monitor the increase in traffic and where it is coming from.

Submitting your web site to the top directories in your
field is a strategy that will gain you a lot of links and
improve your search engine rankings. The best directories
to submit to are the paid directories because they contain
the most inbound links (except for Open Directory which is
free), are a trusted resource and keep their links up to
date.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most link building strategies are attained online, however offline techniques will enable you to acquire visitors that don’t normally spend all their time online.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the past few years site owners tried to get as many links as possible (link schemes) to their web sites. It didn’t matter where they came from. Search engines willl now penalize you for this practise because they want searches to be relevant and targeted.

Read the rest of this entry »

The key to building link popularity for your web site is to find related web sites and directories based on the keywords used within your content and meta tags.

Here is a great tool that will quickly find web sites, blogs, forums and directories that have the potential to provide a link to your own web site thus boosting your link popularity and increase traffic.

Link Search Tool
http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html?keyword

How it works

If you enter a keyword into the search box it will provide hundreds of links for any of these search engines Google, Yahoo!, MSN, ASK

Here is an outline of the results page after entering a keyword and selecting one of the search engines.

Add/Submit

keyword “submit url”
keyword “add a site”
keyword “suggest a site’
etc

Advanced

allintitle:keyword
allinanchor:keyword
etc

Directories

keyword directory
intitle:directory “keyword”
etc

Blogs & Forums

intitle:keyword forum
inurl:keyword forum
intitle:keyword blog
etc

The beauty of this link search tool is that it can save you a great deal of time when building links to your web site.

A great free method for building links to your web site is participating in forums. Be careful not use this method as a way of blatantly advertising your product or service.

Read the rest of this entry »

I often get asked to add a link from my site to the links page of a site owner. He says that his web site has a page rank of 8 (PR8). I check out the links page and find that it is actually a directory of links most of which are unrelated to my site. The page is buried deep within his site and has a page rank of 2 (PR2). This has happened so many times that I no longer do reciprocal link exchanges. I simply delete any requests.

Read the rest of this entry »