Having your anchor text in the backlink set as your target key phrase, should make your site rank better for that key phrase, basically increasing its relevancy for that phrase. There is a theory that even a blank page can rank high on search engines if there is enough backlinks with the same anchor text linking to it.

An extreme version of this technique has been called a ‘Google Bomb’, ‘Link Bomb’, or ‘Google Washing’, which is basically when thousands of websites all link to one site, all using the same anchor text, so as to manipulate the search engine results. These days Google has changed a few things so that extreme versions are not as easy to create as they were back in the day. Google needs to deliver Relevant results to its customers, and if the results are incorrect, due to a Google bomb, it would have unhappy users, hence the change. For some information on famous Google Bombs, visit Wikipedia

Another important part of your link building efforts is getting websites with a high Google Pagerank to link to your website. Many of the link exchange pages on websites specify that they only exchange links with websites that have a high PR, or a Pagerank of at least 3 or 4, with the purpose of getting good quality inbound links to the website.

At the end of the day, if you are trying to get good rankings for your website, you will be wanting to get loads of backlinks, especially those with a high pagerank.

Now for the cool stuff!

When you are trying to get your website ranked above your competitors in the search engine results, its a great idea to see where their backlinks are coming from, what anchor text was used, and the pagerank of the site the backink is on.

I like to use a tool called Link Diagnosis, which allows you to put in a url, and get a list of all the backlinks pointing to that domain.

Creating a report showing the links to a website shows the Pagerank of the inbound links, the anchor text used, if each link is No-follow, how many outbound links are on that page, and the strength of that link! Awesome!

With this information you will be able to visit all the same high PR and quality sites linking to a competitor website, and see if its possible to add your own link there too, or even better, if you can get your link listed instead of the competitor website.

Using this method is a really easy way to find a great list of websites that you could possibly exchange links with, or event better, to build a one-way link to your site with.

I suggest you start with the websites that have a PR over 2 for best results. What I like about Link Diagnosis, is that you can arrange all the links displayed in order of Pagerank and link strength, as well as the fact that you can register as a member, and save your reports online, not to mention export them to a spreadsheet.

Another great website that I like to use is called Check Backlink (http://www.check-backlink.com), which offers a similar service. I like both these websites and use them both quite often. I find that although Check Backlink is not as comprehensive as Link Diagnosis, it is a fast way to do a quick check when doing research, while Link Diagnosis is a tad slow sometimes.

Need to build quality one-way backlinks FAST?

If you are looking to build quality backlinks fast, I can suggest http://www.textlinks.com, if you sign up for free, you can place 25 permanent links. Obviously it would be better to pay the $99 a month and be able to place 100 links per month, but I like the fact that you can sign up and test the system before buying. Even if you don’t purchase, your 25 links are permanent and will remain.

Most of our clients are SMME, we deal directly with the owners of the company, and get to know them on a personal level. Unfortunately, every time I talk to clients about website maketing, they all ask about getting listed on so called ‘thousands’ of search engines. It seems that almost all of them have at some point in time received some spam email promising their site on thousands of search engines within 24 hours or a similar type offer. Worse still are the ones who have been ‘educated’ by friends and / or family, who think they know what they are talking about. Most of these guys have all been brainwashed by people and companies wanting to make a quick buck.

The reality is that people do use search engines to find things on the web, that much is true. What they DON’T do, is use all these thousands of search engines as much as people would have you believe. The fact is that almost all good search engine traffic woldwide comes from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the most popular search engines on the web. These engines being the most popular engines, leads you to believe that the others are NOT all that popular, and therefore dont get as much traffic, let alone traffic that uses their services. Of the web traffic these engines do get, you have to ask yourself, what is the percentage of their visitors that will be trying to find YOUR website or services / products? Why would a visitor to these other engines websites use them to search and NOT use Google, Yahoo, or MSN?

Dont get me wrong, there are some other engines that do have satisfied and loyal customers, and most of the time they keep their place in the market by being language, region, theme or subject specific, in order to hold onto their loyal users, but not many.

Some of these engines supliment some or all of their search results, by re-branding the results from the big 3 under their own name. Many times you will find that you can get identical results when searching for something in Google, and other search engine X. One such website that gets results from multiple locations, and has a great following of loyal users, is the site www.Dogpile.com, which lists the top results of each of the engines in its results.

So definately the big 3, Google, Yahoo and MSN are the most important engines to be listed. The next place your website MUST be listed in, is the DMOZ directory. Thousands of other websites get directory results from DMOZ, the most important web directory on the web. Get your website listed in those four locations, and the chances are that your site will be ‘findable’ in most of these thousands of other search engines already anyway.

If you get listed in all these thousands of small independant engines, your link is not listed for any given length of time on a specific page, and is only able to be found via a search. So the only traffic you will receive from that engine, is as with any engine, from visitors using the search facililty. So you once again need to ask yourself, what sort of visitor traffic is the engine getting? Of that traffic, how many people will be looking for my site/products/services? I am not saying it wont hurt to submit your site there, but would you get a good return on investment (ROI) from paying some company to list your site in all of these ‘thousands of engines’, when the big 3 are clearly dominating in traffic and searches? Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am concerned, the short answer, is a huge NO!

So what happens if you dont care, and are willing to spend the money with one of these companies to get listed on ‘thousands of engines’?

Are you sitting pretty, making so much money through your website that you dont know what to do with all of it? Well, not necissarily! You might have just paid to be listed on tons of these ‘engines’, but that doesnt mean you are going to get any more traffic than you are already getting. Just because your site is indexed, does NOT mean you will be listed on the first page of results on that engine. There are NO guarantees to where your site will be placed in the regular search results on any given search engine, by any web marketing company on the web.

The fact is that your website still needs to be optimized for search phrases that you would like to be ranked high for, before you see the results of being indexed in any search engine, and that goes for the big 3 too. With each real search engine having its own unique formula that it uses to judge where your site should be listed in search results for a key word or phrase, its going to be hard to optimize a website to be number one for all of the big 3 engines at the same time.

So you have ask yourself again, why pay to have your site submitted to thousands of search engines, with no guarantee of placement, and no guarantee of traffic? I don’t get it, maybe I am missing something?

till next time – F

DIY Website optimization

Meta Tags

For some people, this is the beginning and the end of SEO. As far as they are concerned, as long as they have a META keywords and description, they are set, and the page is ‘optimised’ – Wrong! Firstly, META tags are not as important as some people think, google for instance doesnt really do much with them other than acknowledge their existence. Engines like Yahoo on the other hand, as well as some META search engines will put much more importance on them.

Personally I still use them so that I cover all the bases, but there is a correct and an incorrect way to use them. Firstly, always have keywords and a description that is applicable to the content on that specific page. Each page on your site must have its own set of different keywords as well as description and dont forget the title tag either.

Now there is something that you have to remember, search engines are extrememly clever animals, and if you want to rank high, you need to make sure your site is relevant for the search term. Think about it, how long do you think people would use google if all the top results were websites that had nothing to do with the search term? Google and other search engine’s bread and butter, relies on being able to deliver relevant results to the customer. With this in mind, DONT think you can trick your way into the top ten. Rather do it right first time, and target a couple of specific phrases you would like to rank high for. Why only a couple, well, you want your page to have relevant content, if you target more phrases, its cant really be very relevant for all of them at the same time. Why phrases you ask, because then you are targetting a specific search term. Chances are, if someone is searching for exactly that specific term, you want them for a customer. Single keywords could help, but think how broad they are. Potentially you are now trying to fight for position with thousands more websites around the web. Essentially its like niche marketing for your business, you are targetting a niche group of web surfers out there, who want sites about that specific term. Thats targeted traffic, thats what you want coming to your site. The conversion from visitor to customer is way higher if the traffic is more targetted in the first place.

I have used my hosting website as an example below. I was targeting the keyphrases “linux website hosting” as the main key phrase I wanted to use to bring in traffic. This phrase has worked very well for me here on Google.co.za. Please note that I cant put the tag names in properly on this blog because I get errors, so I have substituted the < and > tags for { and }

{head}
{title}Linux website hosting – fast, reliable, affordable linux web hosting{/title}
{meta name=”keywords” content=”linux website hosting, linux web host, hosting, web hosting, website hosting, affordable, cheap, fast, reliable, web, host, website, website host, linux hosting, linux, reliable website host, free domain, business, email” /}
{meta name=”description” content=”Linux website hosting specialisits providing affordable, reliable, fast and feature rich linux website hosting. ” /}
{meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ /}
{META name=”verify-v1″ content=”03v8mbl1JZd7vD+fttVw5MrT3oj+UZqYZDYI/HlGZpU=” /}
{meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, all” /}
{meta name=”language” content=”en” /}
{meta name=”rating” content=”GENERAL” /}
{meta name=”distribution” content=”GLOBAL” /}
{meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 Days” /}
{meta name=”author” content=”Francois Harris – francois@sa-nethost.com”
{meta http-equiv=”reply-to” content=”info@sa-nethost.com” /}

The title tag of your website is extremely important and hold quite a bit of clout with the search engines, so dont waste this prime space for your domain name or business name, rather use it to target the keyphrase you want to be found for. In the title tag for your website, try to put your primary keyphrase in the beginning, followed by a few relevant words to make the whole thing make sense. Notice how I put the primary keyphrase in the beginning and the end of the title tag.

{title}Linux website hosting – fast, reliable, affordable linux web hosting{/title}

Take your primary and seconday key phrases, and use them first and second in your keywords meta tag, separated by a comma. Following them, a few extra relevant keywords to the site, and again your area or city name if you are targeting that traffic. Dont go mental on the keywords!!! There is a theory that the more keywords you have, then the less importance there is for all of them, as the relevance is spread between all of them, using less apparently gives the ones you do use more ‘power’, not sure on this but hey,its not gonna hurt. You also dont want the search engines to think you are spamming them with loads of keywords either. Keep it to about 15 or 20 keywords in total to be safe, and dont repeat keywords. One other thing, is that every one of the keywords I have used, IS actually in the text on that page, giving each one of the keywords more relevance.

{meta name=”keywords” content=”linux website hosting, linux web host, hosting, web hosting, website hosting, affordable, cheap, fast, reliable, web, host, website, website host, linux hosting, linux, reliable website host, free domain, business, email” /}

Try to put your primary and secondary key phrases right in the beginning of your description, while still making sure it makes sense to read. Try if possible to strategically place some of your other keywords into the description too, but dont make it too long either. Keep it short and sweet, while using your main key phrases, and you should be fine. In the example below, I again used my primary phrase twice, once in the beginning, and once in the end of the description.

{meta name=”description” content=”Linux website hosting specialisits providing affordable, reliable, fast and feature rich linux website hosting. ” /}

There are a couple of other meta tags that can be put into the code now, and they are as follows:

{meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ /} A good website editor like dreamweaver will do this one for you
{META name=”verify-v1″ content=”03v8mbl1JZd7vD+fttVw5MrT3oj+UZqYZDYI/HlGZpU=” /} – My google webmaster tools varification number
{meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, all” /} – This tells the search engine spiders to follow all the links on the website
{meta name=”language” content=”en” /} – Its an english website
{meta name=”rating” content=”GENERAL” /} – with a general rating
{meta name=”distribution” content=”GLOBAL” /} – Has global distribution
{meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 Days” /} – Please come back and check for changes every 7 days!
{meta name=”author” content=”Francois Harris – francois@sa-nethost.com” /} I am the author
{meta http-equiv=”reply-to” content=”info@sa-nethost.com” /}

Now for your website content! I assume you have a decent amount of information on your page, at least 300 words worth. Now is where you make use of some of the other html tags to target your primary keyphrase.

Lets start with the heading of the page. Use the {h1} tag to create your heading. This tag is the biggest size of the standard html header tags, and holds the most weight of all of them. Put your primary keyphrase into here, this should be easy and make sense as the page text and the primary keyphrase are relevant to each other.

Next start your website text, be sure to put your primary keyphrase somewhere in the first paragraph, make it bold too, to give it some more prominence. Carry on with the rest of your web page text, without going mad on your primary phrase. You dont want search engines to think you are ‘page stuffing’ the keyword.

If you have any images that you use in the page text, make sure to put the ALT tag onto the image, with the description of the image, which could include your primary keyphrase again. EG:

{img src=”images/pic01.gif” alt=”Small business Linux Website hosting” width=”600″ height=”93″ border=”0″ /}
Notice how I try to make all the places where the keyphase is placed, as natural looking as possible.

Finish off the page, by placing your primary phrase in the last paragraph, and this time make it italics to emphasise it.

Remember, if you get the traffic, your information on your page needs to be able to convert a visitor into a customer. So really think about what you are going to put onto your page. Do research, look what your competition is saying, but most of all make it relevant.

Your page has now gone through its first phase of optimization. Something to remember is that the more text you have on the page, the less relevance or prominence your primary keyphrase might have. So if you have loads of writing, strategically place your keyphrase into the text a few times where it can fit without sounding stupid. You can now upload your page, and wait for it to get indexed. I personally dont believe in submiting your site directly to Google, it should get found by itself fairly quickly, if you use any of the strategies listed below.

An important note: SEO is only one piece in the puzzle to getting ranked high and getting loads of traffic to your site. If you are targeting a niche keyphrase where there is not much competition, you could rank high very quickly. Most sitest though would have to move onto the next phase of marketing, while constantly monitoring the traffic statistics and SERPS for the specific page.

Other marketing strategies to use to while monitoring your page are:

Add your website to google analytics and webmaster tools
Submit a sitemap of your site to google
Submit your site to website directories, especially DMOZ
Social networking websites are great to promote your site
3 way link exchanges with sites of a similar target market or website genre. (three way links: Site A links to B which links to C which links to A) Much more powerful than a recipricol link exchange.
Newsletter publishing, a great way to promote your website.
Signatures in email and forum posts, a nice way to leave your mark wherever you give your input
Hardcopy marketing – business cards, posters, flyers, adverts etc with your web details. People still tend to keep business cards etc on desks, fridges, notice boards and more around the world

Make sure to do this for all your pages, as each page will have different information, and can target a different key phrase. If you have 10 pages, each optimized and targeting a specific phrase, you effectively have 10 great avenues to get to your site from search engines alone.