SEO Advice

Google announced yesterday that they have enhanced the Webmaster tools and now allow you to examine internal and external links on your site much more thoroughly than you can with the link: command.

After playing around with the new enhancements, so far I have to give it a thumbs up. The new features allow you to examine every single link to and from your site, not just the links that sometimes show up with the link:command. In addition, you can look at internal and external links to and from specific pages and export any of this data to CSV format.

It was announced earlier this week that Wikipedia has put in place the nofollow tag for all external links in the Wikipedia web site. We did a quick check and yes, the announcement appears to be implemented. Apparantly it was done to combat black hat SEOs who were spamming the directory in order to boost link popularity by placing a link to their web site in related articles on Wikipedia. Bottom line, Wikipedia articles will no longer affect the number of backlinks to your web site and thus will not help you in the ongoing struggle of web site search engine rankings.

This might not be a startling revelation of any kind, but just revalidates how critical being part of trusted neighborhoods and having strong linking from established, related sites. You can tell how well Google trusts the content of your web site by how deep Google will spider and index your web site.

Check your web logs and see what Googlebot is doing. Is it spidering deep within your site? Does a site:www.yourdomain.com query on Google display only your home page? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that there is a low trustiness factor from Google and it just doesn’t think your site is very important.

If your site is new, then you probably know why this is happening. Go and get some backlinks to your site. If your site is established, then you probably have a problem some where. Maybe you are involved in some bad neighborhoods that Google has little respect for. Dump your reciprocal link programs, get some good content and start getting legitimate links to your web site. Easier said than done, but this is the foolproof solution.

Here is another neato web tool brought to you by Text Link Ads. This serves two purposes, first of all its an interesting tool that shows how your blog ranks to top blogs in your blog category (or a blog you specify). Secondly, its a great example of link baiting in getting other sites to link to you.

During my normal Monday morning surf-a-round I found a great post at TLA that discusses the dreaded Google sandbox and how to climb / crawl / punch your way out of it. As you may have guessed, the article focuses on building trust with backlinks from authority sites, blogs or other sites that you can beg, steal, or cheat your way to getting a link. There is also some good discussion on link baiting; overall a good read.

Most webmasters know that it’s important to have a text based footer with links to main sections. This is a good idea for a couple reasons: it provides actual text that the search engine spiders such as googlebot can read and associate with the page it links to and also provides a link to your main pages from every single page. Along these lines, its also key to have a site map that includes a link to every page in your site. This is where most sites stop in terms of internal linking but this is just the beginning.

Your site should be well linked internally before you bother spending time on link popularity and backlinks from external web sites. Its a lot easier to make your site well linked internally than it is to get other sites to link to you; start with easy stuff that you have full control over.

If you use blog software, it can be very easy to increase internal linking with a little effort:

• Have a list of popular search keywords or phrases, put these on each page and link to the search results (assuming your blog has a search function)
• Setup tags and/or categories and classify your blog entries - make sure the tag list and categories show up on every page (for an example of tags, look at this site on the right hand navigation)
• Create a “related articles” blurb for each article - most blogs will either support this feature or have a plugin to support it

Not only will these improve your internal linking within your blog but they will also make navigation easier for your readers.

All the ideas suggested here are very simple examples. How you increase your internal site linking depends on your web site and the content. The point is merely to suggest basic ideas that many sites could employ and get you thinking about more complex ways to optimize your site.

I recently read an interesting article that explains, in lamen terms, SEO and SEM in the Australian. What I found interesting was that one SEO firm actually had a client pay 100,000 dollars, even aussie dollars are valuable, to have a certain press release show lower down in the SERPs when you typed in this fella’s name.

“We have had a couple of individuals who were wealthy who wanted negative references to themselves disappeared, which was an expensive exercise,” he said. “You’ve got to optimise the 20 sites below them so the (negative reference) is moved down. We had one individual pay $100,000 plus because there was a (press release) about him on the Australian Securities and Investments Commission website that ranked No.2 when you searched for his name.'’

A good way to promote your web site, although time consuming, is to post to relevant blogs and forums that are applicable to your web site topic. Most will allow you to put a link to your web site in your forum signature or comment. I never recommend using an automated comment spam application to do this either, I am referrering to the old fashioned way that provides an opinion or information relevant to the forum topic or blog post. Remember good search engine marketing is time consuming (and sometimes hard) work!

I no longer recommend webmasters to run link exchange programs as the benefit doesn’t outweigh the time and effort to find quality link partners, the effort required to maintain the links, and the potential negative effects of linking to web sites for the wrong reasons. The best way to get quality links to your web site is the old fashion, tried and true methods. Unfortunately, this makes them the most difficult. But like the older generations always say, hard work pays off.

- Have quality content on your web site. If there is something there worth linking, web sites will link to it.

- Give and you will receive. Link to other web sites related to your web site’s topic that you think would be beneficial to your users. Not only do quality outbound links related to your web sites topic have a positive, upwards effect on your serp, but assuming your web site meets the first qualification, webmasters may even link back.