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One thing has become abundantly clear in today's Internet: you need to place well in the search engines if you want to succeed with your online business. Every search engine ranks pages based on slightly different criteria, but one that is consistently critical is the number of incoming links lead to your page.
Google especially focused its original algorithms on these links. Their idea was that if your page has lots of incoming links from pages in or related to your keyword topic, and if those links originated from good or prestigious pages, this was an indicator that your page was likely to hold the information that their search engine customers were seeking. Rankings were based on the number of incoming links a given page had.
Today, Google works on the same concept, but they've grown increasingly sophisticated to serve their customers better. For instance, when affiliate marketers figured out that Google was using linking to drive search engine placement, they started building automated link-generating sites that cross-referenced one another through complex linking arrays. This quickly became known as search engine spam.
How Can You Use Links?
First, never spam Google. They may blackball all your sites and your name if they think you've done something contrary to their terms of use. Instead, focus on how you can get good quality links from other pages to your website.
Great Content: Great content, once the word gets out, will always draw links from other sites to you. If you have a fantastic tool or resource to share, putting it online can draw links and ultimately traffic.
Links From Directories: Yahoo! and Dmoz are well-known directory sites; instead of cataloging pages via web spiders, these directories have you or an editor place your site into an appropriate category, from which your link will emerge. Always register your site with directories yourself so you can select a category appropriate to your keywords. Don't overlook niche directories, either; whether your website is focused on pets or datachips, there are small specialized directories out there you can register with. Note: register with free directories first, and when you see where your site's going to fall in the search engine you can start looking at the paid ones.
Links from Related Forums: If you post in a forum related to your website topic, always include a link back to your website; the spiders pick up these links and, when they're from related forums, it will boost your website's ranking.
Reciprocal Links: Historically, these have been great, a sort of tit-for-tat web marketing scheme. Lately, after the latest update on Google , they've been reduce in importance, though they are still valuable.
Article Sites: There are numerous websites that distribute free donated articles written by experts. If you write good articles, you can contribute articles to these sites. The benefit? Each article is printed on content-rich sites with a resource box that has your name and a link to your website in it. This provides you with an automatic one-way link from a quality site.
Blogs: Blogs are a little different, in that they don't necessarily give you one-way links. What they do is provide your site with continually fresh content – an online commodity that the search engines love. With good one-way links and fresh content, you can raise your search engine rankings quickly.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's) are the pages you see after you type in a search on Google or other search engines and click on the Search button. Because 90% of people use search engines to find what they are looking for these SERP's are the most important pages on the internet.
The Search Engines Result Pages (SERP's) can be broadly divided into two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and Paid Advertisements usually bought on a "Pay Per Click" (PPC) basis.
Roughly 80% of clicks at Google occur within the organic listings not the PPC listings. This is why is it important to get your site to rank naturally in the search engine result pages. Getting your site to rank high is not tricky; it's just a matter of optimising your website to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with little text your site will not rank high. You need to target each keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search terms “business plans” you need to have one page with the title “business plans” and lots of text about “business plans”.
To me this is just common sense but then I have been working in the SEO field for a number of years. However it never ceases to amaze me why people still call their home pages “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. The owners probably search for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google. This is only good for the customers that know your company which is fine for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you're trying to get customers from for internet users you need to optimise your text for the search engines.
The other aspect of getting high SERPs is trust and authority. It is kind of no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a good reputation. Forgetting the cyber world for a moment, in the real world established businesses have much more clout that new start up businesses. Like your favourite restaurant. If a new restaurant opened up just down the street you might not want to chance eating there and stick with your favourite restaurant. Now if you hear that its gaining a good reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust you get is via an algorithm. The more links you get from already established trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or not relevant website.
Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and using keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a naturally progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and their warning lights flash which means they might look into your site and possibly penalise it.
So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to do everything the search engines like. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily) ,have lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you shouldn't go far wrong.