Daniel Coburn

One very important thing about building links externally is to make sure you do not link spam.  What is link spam?  That’s when you post links to your site for the sole purpose of gaining a link in a post, comment etc.  While many of the blog’s out there now have rel=”nofollow” standard with all links there are still people that feel the need to spam it.  If you are going to go to a blog, or a forum try to make sure you add value.  First it gives people a reason why they might actually want to follow your link to see what you have to say.  So become a part of the community and not a spammer in the community.  It will give you credibility and a good chance of getting people to link to you because of the benefit you have shown them as an active part of the community.

Anyone who has even taken a physics class knows that matter is neither created nor destroyed….  The same sort rings true for pagerank.  All of the pagerank in the world is equal to 1.  If you add 1 million pages, the universal sum is still 1.  Since you cannot change the universe, you need to know how to massage it.  If you have a website with 5 pages, you cannot control a lot of the virtual real estate, and will have to create more depth to control more of the pagerank available.  If you want to grow pagerank on certain pages you need to funnel traffic through links to them.  For example pages that should not have pagerank are contact us, privacy policy, etc.  they don’t earn you money so don’t give them the benefit of pushing rank to them.  So how do you push the rank internally?  Simple provide links.

All page link to your home page, so the home page of a site typically gets more rank since more pages both internally and externally are pushing rank to it.  While pages that should also be considered are category pages etc.  Many of these will be part of your universal navigation so they will also get rank pushed to them.  It’s important that you use appropriate keywords were possible to allow search engines to know the phrase that is important to the page you are pointing too.

You also want to have links to your contact us page etc since you do want to allow customers to get there, and you need them for better ranking in Google, but instead of use <a href=”contactusurl”>contact us</a> use a no follow <a href=”contacturl” rel=”nofollow”>contact us</a> this will prevent you from passing rank from a page to that un “wanted” page.

SEO 101:

It is important to understand exactly what is search engine optimization.  I believe the easiest way to state it is that it is a method to make your website readable by search engines in such away that the pages you want to be displayed are for a given keyword.

So some major portions of it:

1. Site needs to be spiderable
2. Pages need to be unique
3. Proper use of basic HTML tags (i.e. Title, H1, H2 etc.)
4. Proper use of internal links
5. External Link Building

These are some of the very basics, the things I call SEO 101!

Your url’s need to be search engine friendly / safe.  In other words do not use query strings if you can avoid it for telling the server which page to serve up.  An Example of what not to  do: www.website.com/page.php?id=123  now if you have 10k pages you would have id= 1 -> 10,000 and Google will not like that. so instead do something like www.website.com/page/1.html where you tell the server that the 1.html is actually = page.php?id=1  this makes the pages “unique” from the url perspective.  This also makes the site more spiderable and has the ability to be completely indexed.  Also on the topic of spiderable all of the pages should be linked.  (ok well not all of them, I’ll write about page rank shifting later)  Also you need to use a sitemap.xml file!  That will make sure all of the pages are visible to the different search engines.

More in my next post.