Inbound Links Link Building and Search Engines

November 29th, 2009

Search engines do not rank website randomly, websites are not a stack of leaves that search engines throw in the air and rank who lands first at the top. There is a very complicated formula that search engines use to rank website “ranking algorithm” this algorithm uses hundreds of metrics to decide the order of sites that it will be returned for each query.

In this post I will focus on a metric that is heavily used to rank sites in all major search engines algorithms which is inbound links

“Think of links as a de facto endorsement. When you link to a site, you are endorsing that site. A site that links to your site is endorsing you. These links implicitly state that, “I, webmaster of my site, believe the value of the content at the site I am linking to will be useful to my customers.” That’s optimally why sites link out to one another, which is a good thing”. Quote from Bing


Here is what search engines say about inbound links:

- Bing

Bing has published recently a well crafted document explains the benefit of inbound links, I will quote some interesting paragraphs from this document:

Lord Alfred Douglas once said, “All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.” He could have just as easily been talking about high-ranking websites (had he known about them — his quote pre-dates the 1920s!). The way to search engine optimization (SEO) success is neither fast nor simple (not that it has to be hard, though). But the accumulation of valuable, relevant, inbound links from authority sites to your site is a sure-fire way to improve your site’s ranking with search engines.

There is another one where Bing stress again the importance of quality content, however when two websites have equally good content links will be used to make the ranking decision:

“The rank of two sites on the same topic offering equally good, original content will be differentiated in the SERPs by the inbound links they get externally,”

- Goolge:

“webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site’s visibility in the Google search results”    read the whole post.

- Yahoo:

Yahoo is still busy to figure out how to make more money from ads (not sure if they even have enough traffic to funnel to the advertisers sites) in result they did not have enough time to publish any document to explain more for business owners or webmasters how does their algorithm work. The good news for us is that Bing will be empowering Yahoo search next year so consider what Bing said applied to Yahoo.

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Online Internet Marketing Channels Toronto

November 28th, 2009

As a business owner in Toronto looking to leverage the power of the web to grew your business you need to learn more about the available channels, in this post I will list the most popular channels and then expand on each of them separately:

  1. Organic search engines results
  2. Paid search engine results  (Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter, Yahoo search marketing)
  3. Local web channels  (Google Local, Local business directories such as Yellowpages or Canpages)
  4. Social media sites
  5. Banner ads
  6. Email Marketing

Before continuing with this I am including a photo to demonstrate some of the online marketing channels in one screen:

internet-marketing-channels

1- Organic Search engine results:

When you search in major search engines, Google for instance, the results in the left area beneath the sponsored ads which shown in blue in the picture above or organic, you do not need to pay Google to show up here, however ranking well in this area for meaningful keyword requires to have search engine friendly site and quality inbound links, the process of improving your ranking in this area called “Search Engine Optimization”

2- Paid Search Engine Results:

All major search engines have paid inclusion program (shown in red in our photo), you will pay only when your ad is clicked. All major search engines have a user friendly backend to manage your ads or you can hire PPC (Pay Per Click) management company to do that for you

3- Local Web Channel

All search major search engines have now local search, they even started to show the local results (shown in blue) at the top of the organic results. Old media such as YellowPages has now web products where you can promote your business, there are other important channels like review sites; Yelp.ca is an example where people can review businesses.

Local search is becoming a very important that you need to make sure your business is represented well at.

4- Social Media Sites:

FaceBook, Twitter, Linkedin and many other social media sites are becoming day by day important marketing channel, it is all about coverage, the web spectrum is quite wide you need to make sure that you are represented in most popular mediums. The process of marketing your website on social media channels called “Social Media Marketing”.

5- Banner Ads:

This is one of the oldest online marketing channels that is still working fine, find a high traffic website that is related to your business check if they are offering ads or of they are a part of an ad network.

6- Email Marketing:

Email marketing is still an effective channel however the old days where you could send an email to millions of people without opting them in is gone, you still can do email marketing through a third party that has an opt in list, either ways make sure that you have a forum mail subscription on your site, so by the time you can have your own opt in mail list.

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SEO Lessons For Beginners #1

November 21st, 2009
If you are a business owner that owns a site and do not have time to learn more about SEO, you also currently do not have enough budget so spend with SEO company then this series of  SEO posts for beginners is a good fit for you.
Every post of this series will require very limited amount of time and web design knowledge to implement, however the return of your time investment will be super high, you may end up getting a decent boost in your ranking a week or two after following this series. Let us start.
What is title tag:
Title tag is an HTM element that defines a document title <title>…</title>
Web browsers usually display it in a window’s title bar
Search engines’ web crawlers may pay particular attention to the words used in the title, they use the title
In all major browsers if you hit your mouse right button inside the web page a small window will pop out with tab says “VIEW SOURCE” if you click this tab you will see the source code of your page, title tag regularly comes at the top of the page.
How to optimize your title tag to satisfy both users and search engines:
If you do not know what the keywords that people may use to find your service, check Google Keyword Tool , you can either type your service and get some keyword ideas, or you can submit your ULR and Google will find the keywords for you.
Now you know your keywords how to write the title tag:
Search engine shows only 65 characters of a site’s title tag, so you have may be 6-7 words to include in your title tag tell both search engines and users about the content of your site. Assuming your business is plumbing and you are serving Toronto area the title tag of your home page will look like this
<title>Toronto Plumber – Drain Leaks – Your Business Name</title>
How to changes yout title tag of your home page:
That depends on how your site was built, if it is a content management system with a backed where you can login and change your content then you need to login to your back and find the home page, you will mostly find a feidld labled as title, change the content to the optimized one then save.
If your website is based on static files then you need to establish a FTP connection using a FTP client, find your home page (most likely will be some thing like main.html or index.html) download it to your machine, use text editor like Wordpad to edit the page, you need to find where is the title tag
<title>non optimized content</title> and replace it with this <title>Toronto Plumber – Drain Leaks – Your Business Name</title>
(change the keywords to match your business), save and upload again to your site using FTP client.
Wait a week or two, check the keywords that you have included in your title tab, if they are not competitive and your site has enough authority then you have a good chance to see significant improvement in ranking.

If you are a business owner that owns a site and do not have time to learn more about SEO, you also currently do not have enough budget so spend with SEO company then this series of  SEO posts for beginners is a good fit for you.

Every post of this series will require very limited amount of time and web design knowledge to implement, however the return of your time investment will be super high, you may end up getting a decent boost in your ranking a week or two after following this series. Let us start.

What is title tag?

Title tag is an HTM element that defines a document title <title>…</title>

Web browsers usually display it in a window’s title bar

title

Search engines’ web crawlers may pay particular attention to the words used in the title, they use the title

In all major browsers if you hit your mouse right button inside the web page a small window will pop out with tab says “VIEW SOURCE” if you click this tab you will see the source code of your page, title tag regularly comes at the top of the page.

toronto-title

How to optimize your title tag to satisfy both users and search engines?

If you do not know what the keywords that people may use to find your service, check Google Keyword Tool , you can either type your service and get some keyword ideas, or you can submit your ULR and Google will find the keywords for you.

Now you know your keywords how to write the title tag:

Search engine shows only 65 characters of a site’s title tag, so you have may be 6-7 words to include in your title tag tell both search engines and users about the content of your site. Assuming your business is plumbing and you are serving Toronto area the title tag of your home page will look like this

<title>Toronto Plumber – Drain Leaks – Your Business Name</title>

How to changes your title tag of your home page?

That depends on how your site was built, if it is a content management system with a backed where you can login and change your content then you need to login to your back and find the home page, you will mostly find a feidld labled as title, change the content to the optimized one then save.

If your website is based on static files then you need to establish a FTP connection using a FTP client, find your home page (most likely will be some thing like main.html or index.html) download it to your machine, use text editor like Wordpad to edit the page, you need to find where is the title tag

<title>non optimized content</title> and replace it with this <title>Toronto Plumber – Drain Leaks – Your Business Name</title>

(change the keywords to match your business), save and upload again to your site using a FTP client.

Wait a week or two, check the keywords that you have included in your title tab, if they are not competitive and your site has enough authority then you have a good chance to see significant improvement in ranking.

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Posted in SEO Lessons For Beginners | No Comments »