 posted in search engine optimization
on 25 Mar 08
|
6 proactive ways to get better search engine rankings
The ideal: You create a website with fantastic content, it gets discovered by a few people who tell other people about your site, and they tell other people - and so it snowballs. Before you know it, your site is well known and ranking well in the search engines, and all you did was create interesting, unique and useful content. You sit back, ponder on your success, and marvel at the meritocracy that is the internet.
The reality: You create a website with fantastic content, and you sit back and wait.....and wait.....and wait.....and......either give up, hire an SEO consultant to give you decent presence in the search engines, or spend a fortune on Pay Per Click advertising.
The ideal rarely happens. Yes it does happen, but it's rare enough to not expect this to happen.
The description of "reality" is actually a bit harsh, because most people don't just sit back and wait for success. However, it illustrates that the most painful path to take is to sit back and do nothing once your site has launched. This article will show you that you don't need to spend money to drive traffic to your site - you just need to put a bit of time aside each week, and develop good link building habits - and you will learn how to improve your search engine rankings.
Get proactive - find sites to link to youOnce your site has launched, find related sites and swap links with them. Yes, reciprocal links aren't as valuable as one way links, but in the early days, beggars can't be choosers. Links to your site (whether reciprocal or not) help your site get indexed by search engines more regularly. Reciprocal links help you to target keywords you want to rank better on since you get to choose the anchor text for the link to your site.
Here are 6 ways to find sites to link to you - reciprocal and one way links:-
1. DigitalPoint Link Exchange ForumThe DigitalPoint link exchange forum is a great place to meet other website owners who want to trade links. Trading links doesn't always means reciprocating from Site A to Site B / Site B to Site A - it can be 3 way exchange to create one way links for both parties. We strongly recommend this forum since it's very very active and you can find genuine people on here who have pages of various value (so you can get your foot on the ladder easily there).
2. linkmarket.netlinkmarket.net is a directory of websites who want to trade links, and you can find partner sites to trade links with here. Though a word of warning: you have to take great care on here, and on other link partner directories. What to take care of? Frankly speaking, and NOT for want of a better word, rubbish websites. Around 95% of sites who register to such directories aren't worth the consideration to trade links with - they are low quality, poorly written, poorly executed, poorly structured sites, many with dubious reasons to exist in the first place (often used soley as advertising boards). However, the 5% that are of decent quality do make it worth investigating. That may seem like a very low percentage and not worth the hassle, but good link building is about giving something of value, and getting something of value back in return - it's about quality, not quantity. If that means you select 1 site out of 20 to trade links with, so be it.
So how to determine low and high quality? You can look at a website and realise fairly quickly if it's someone's pride and joy, or just some Made For Adsense website that was created in 10 minutes for the sole purpose of making money from Google Ads. Quality websites are updated regularly, have obviously well-honed content, and nice, clean navigation. Quality websites link to related websites only, and have well organized link pages. Low quality sites have one links page with 500 links on it, linking out to diverse markets. They have messy, ad-strewn home pages. They were last updated 6 months ago. They have spelling/punctuation mistakes. They have dead links. The navigation of the site (link architecture) is chaotic and over-elaborate. You find yourself scrolling horizontally on their pages. They have thumbnail images that are 2MB in size. They have affiliate advertising all over the place.
The more you evaluate sites, the quicker you'll realise whether a site is worth trading with or not. You will want to trade with related websites. Also look out for unfair link exchanges - such as a website wanting to put your link on a page with 300 links already on it that's 4 clicks away from the home page - not worth the bother or worse, they place your link on an orphaned page (i.e. not linked to from the home page, or any other page on the internet for that matter!).
In our experience, linkmarket.net is worth the bother if you can put up with the spam sites wanting to trade with you and ignore the low quality sites.
3. link2me.comlink2me.com is another link partner directory - and again, it is full of low quality sites - but ignore those and you will find the good sites to trade with. The same guidelines apply when looking for decent link partners. Again, you will want to trade with related websites.
4. Search EnginesJust enter something like - "add URL" + web design (obviously change "web design" to your particular field) - in the search field of a search engine and you'll get back a list of results showing you pages you can add your website to. These are usually quid pro quo, so they'll want you to link to them first. Example search here
5. puresilva Links Search EngineThe archive is big enough (500+ links pages) to promote this as a viable way to find good link pages. This is an archive of approved pages that are of sufficient value that it's worth placing a link to your website on the pages in this archive that are related to your website's market. Link to puresilva links search engine here
6. Add your link to a trusted directory99.99% of directories are a waste of time adding your links too (just a year ago, that would not have been the case), but there are still some quality directories you can have your link placed on, and you will get some benefit from it. The top 40 directories can be found here. Some cost money to have your link placed, some are free. The list shows the directories with the highest inbound link value which should be passed onto your site if it's listed in one of these directories.
ConclusionThis is not an exhaustive list by ANY means. It just shows 6 proactive ways to increase inbound links to your site. There are many other sites out there that can help you increase your inbound links. The long term strategy for any site should be to provide content that is worth linking to, so you will gain link popularity naturally over time. In the short-term, that's unlikely to happen without some action on your part though. Hopefully this article will introduce you to proactive link building so you can at least get the ball rolling for your site's online success.
Footnote: all links out to external websites in this article are using "nofollow" - this is not a promotion or favour for any of the recommended sites
Share this article:
 Digg it |  del.icio.us |  Stumble it! |  Reddit |  Furl
any quoted text is from source mentioned above - all other text is authored and copyrighted by puresilva.com
|
|
| |
|
| |
The puresilva e-commerce website solution has a feedback facility built in, so buyers can give feedback on quality of product, service, speed of delivery and value for money - as well as leave comments.
There's no such thing as 'perfect feedback' - even if you delivered the perfect product with perfect customer service at an an unbelievably low price, you will still get some unsatisfied customers - because it's all about perception - and perception is subjective.
If you receive 100 feedbacks, and 97 were generally happy/very happy with 3 dis-satisfied - in our opinion it's better to show all 100 feedback comments. This adds integrity to ALL of the comments by not editing out any of the negative ones.
Having said that, the puresilva feedback facility allows you to play editor to customer feedback in terms of what comments to show. You cannot control the feedback on quality of product, value for money, speed of delivery and value for money.
View demo | More puresilva features |
|
