Manager Buzz

May 25th, 2008

How to Develop Back Links

Posted in Life Of Traffic

There are no hidden secrets on how to rank high with the major search engines. All that is needed is a basic understanding of how search engines work and a bit of know hown Perhaps the biggest contributing factor to a successful web site is incoming links. Without links, your website will more than likely go unnoticed. So how should you accumulate these links? Below are a few basic methods to accumulate quality back links

Before you get started

You MUST understand how search engines work. Over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to optimize your site for search engines. You could have the greatest deals in the entire world, but if no one knows about them then your efforts are wasted. Do a search on google for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You will find tons of great information on how to create a website that is both user friendly and search engine friendly. There are also countless numbers of companies and freelancers out there who offer SEO services. Just be cautious of their offers and do your research first. Remember, NO ONE can guarantee top placement in major search engines, no matter what they say.

Where should back links come from?

1. Articles are a fantastic source of links and additional traffic to your site. There are countless sites online that want your articles. It’s a win win situation for everyone. When you write articles and submit them online, you are able to leave a link to your own site and sometimes even anchor text. I know what you’re saying, “I can’t write about anything.” I use to feel the same way. But the truth of the matter is, anyone can write. You just have to find a topic that interests you. You can write about anything from dogs, to computers, to personal training, to web hosting, heck you can even write about writing. The bottom line is, articles are a valuable source of “relevant” back links to your site.

2. Submit to directories. There are literally hundreds of “free” and “paid” directories online. With 3 hours of painless work, you can have your site submitted to hundreds of great directories. There are many quality lists of directories that are regularly updated. One of my favorites is http://www.best-web-directories.com/ which is always updated and maintained.

3. Develop link exchanges with relevant sites. The major search engines such as google see incoming links from relevant sites, and give them more rank compared a link from an unrelated site. For example, if you have a website about pet care products, your link strategy should target pet related sites. Again with a bit of hard work and determination, you can develop a great deal of “relevant” back links.

4. Forums are a great source for additional traffic and links. Many forums allow their users to display signatures in their posts. These signatures can consist of both text and links. When you post a new message on that forum, your websites link will be displayed for everyone to see. This not only helps build valuable back links, but will bring additional traffic to your website.

5. Join a link co-op. Co-ops such as the one found at http://www.digitalpoint.com/ are an amazing source of valuable back links and free advertisement. What is a co op network? A Co op network is a network of site owners/webmasters that offer ad space to the network. In return, the ads they define are displayed across the entire network. The best part of ad networks such as the one found at digital point, is, they are free. Having your site in a co-op can literally mean thousands of back links for your site.

If you want to have a successful site, whether-it-be a hobby or for business, you have to understand how search engines work. Part of that understanding is knowing about link development. Maybe in the early 90’s the idea of “if you build it they will come” might have been true. But in the year 2005 the internet is a far more competitive and complex place. To be successful today, you have to work at it. Without a quality source of back links the search engines will all buy ignore your site.

Ron is the CTO for Dice Ventures Inc an internet holdings and development company. Some current projects include a hosting forum and a Linux forum

April 5th, 2008

When optimising your site to reach customers more effectively, why not improve on what professional

Posted in Life Of Traffic

Last year was the year of search engine marketing and the
experts predict the saga is going to continue full swing until
at least in 2010. When you set out to work on your site’s
visibility, it is useful to know what the professionals that you
cannot afford to outsource the whole headache to are up to and
beat them at the game. Scanning SEO news, it’s pretty obvious
that high search engine rankings still are the
be-all-and-end-all of online marketing, but things are beginning
to move on from here. The new buzzwords that stand out are
accessibility and usability and renewed energy is poured in what
are believed to be new opportunities in areas like local
marketing. But how much bang for your buck will you get this
time?

‘Accessibility!’. ‘Usability!’ Apparently that is what the
professional SEO community is focusing on to get traffic numbers
up for their clients. Evidence the popularity of these words
themselves. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this
in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’
has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double
that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a
word like ’shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product
you might be selling, but then -luckily- there are not as many
SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.

So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies?
Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital
elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising
strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way
and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to
describe your business, it’s time to integrate everything yet
again and focus on your site’s usability and accessibility.

Usability

What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be
navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising
efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does
your site still provide valuable information to your human
visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is
key, say the guys at doubleclick.com, who have got good insights
on what’s going on in online marketing in a broad sense.
“Personalization is the hot term for relevancy, with the goal
being to intertwine search with a consumer’s daily activity. As
clients become more sophisticated with increased demands, the
marketplace will yield more efficient results. Technology will
continue to be created to facilitate the massive amounts of data
currently sorted by the engines”, they report. Perhaps it is
totally obvious, but you would be surprised how many strategies
fail simply on wording and text writing.

It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to
your site are not going to be impressed by what they read.
Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past
and using common sense, neutral language will open up the
content to a wider audience of search terms. It is best to get a
copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your
site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools
you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make
sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through this tool
(free trial of seven days) and consider contacting a freelance
copywriter for a quote if it appears your content is hampered;
http://www.ezapplications.com/samples.htm.

There are millions of similar tools out there that can give you
quite a good insight into your content. If you think your
content is a mess, consider hiring a freelance copywriter to
match content and keywords.

Accessibility Accessibility of sites is way more of a
technological issue. You will have what is generally considered
an ‘accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers.
Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible
perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware
of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching
between your content and the search engines. The various
limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and
Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during
this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx
browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS,
images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are
various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text,
JavaScript through the

There are two good ways you can check how accessible your
website is. Simply download the Lynx browser to see if you can
successfully access all your pages and download the Opera
browser and follow their instructions to enhanced accessibility.
Good SEOs focus on a few standard setting organisations’
guidelines, which are complex systems of rules on unifying
coding. What SEOs make sure of is that users from other
languages and cultures, and users of differing age groups are
not excluded from your site because of some silly technical
hiccups. Where an SEO says he’s making all the difference for
his clients is that he has numerous checklists to make sure your
business in whatever location or segment it is, is optimised. He
likely will market his services saying that he will make your
site more localised than your competition.

There is a lot of scepticism on the strategies in use here and
it remains to be seen whether better accessible local business
site optimisation will actually translate into tangible higher
Return on Investment numbers. Local search appears to be
performing well for national advertisers seeking to segment
markets. The local dry cleaner however doesn’t have (or probably
need) a Web site so the lead is not accurately tracked, and the
value remains doubtful. Don’t buy into it until you see results
from comparable segments to the one you are in!

All lists SEO’s use to make sure your site is technically kosher
are likely variations in one form or another of the lengthy,
prioritised in-depth checkpoints published by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), a forum for information, commerce,
communication, and collective understanding of the web. It can
be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. It is not deemed
100% fool proof, but it’s said to be Google-proof. The checklist
consists of general, common-sense priorities that designers and
programmers must take heed of. The bulk of the checkpoints are
likely issues you’ve comply with for years already, but it’s
always good to see if there’s anything new. It could give you
that edge over the competition you need!

Search engines increasingly take their lead from Google and use
hyper linked text for relevancy so checking that your links make
sense all the time is not a luxury but incremental for your
business. Some SEOs will run software that check that if a
hyperlink is removed from the text -something that easily
happens in forms- and determine whether it still makes sense in
the general context of your site. An SEO would replace a simple
hyperlinked word like ‘more’, with a more descriptive term such
as ‘more news and events’, or similar. You get the idea here.

Source code in general is also quite important. Again, w3 sets
the standard and you can run your site through their validator
tool (http://validator.w3.org/) to get it analysed to see if
search engine spiders/robots have any problems splitting your
content/page into sections before indexing it - e.g. header,
metadata tags, headings, normal text, etc. If the spider has
difficulty in calculating the structure of your code, some of
the text could be misclassified or omitted. Find out and
optimise!