Linktik

Just like any other topic with a big online following, SEO has its own colorful vocabulary.There are far too many terms to include here, but here’s a sampling of what you might come across in your own SEO endeavors:
SERP An acronym that stands for “Search Engine Results Page,” that is, the listings you see when you use a search engine. It is our opinion (as it is with other right-minded folks) that this acronym
has an ugly ring to it, so we’ve decided to ban it from the book!
White hat/black hat Stereotypically speaking, white hat refers to “squeaky clean” optimization activities, … Continue Reading

Age of domain In one of the more perplexing and frustrating developments in SEO in recent years, site owners have noticed that newer domains have a much tougher time making their way up the ranks than older ones. Read more about this in the sidebar “The Google Sandbox.” So far, this phenomenon has only been spotted in Google, but you know what happens when Google does something: Sooner or later the others are
likely to follow suit. You have been warned.

Lesser factors There are a large number of additional, lesser factors that can influence your ranking. … Continue Reading

Coming in at #3 in our list of search engine ranking factors is inbound links to your website. Why are inbound links so important in the search engine ranking algorithms? Because they can indicate a page’s quality, popularity, or status on the Web and site owners have very little control over their own inbound links. (Being off-page factors, inbound links can be influenced only indirectly.) Links with the most rank-boosting power are links from a home page (as opposed to links from pages buried deep within the site) and links from authority pages in the topical community, meaning pages with … Continue Reading

Here’s the lowdown on the most important factors:
• HTML page title
• Visible HTML text on the page
• Inbound links (quality and quantity)
• Inbound link anchor text
• Age of domain
• Lesser factors
We’ll get into how to optimize all of these factors . But for now, as you read through them, think about how much attention you’ve given to each of them on your own site. Maybe, like a lot of site owners, you’ve been focusing on the bottom of the list—the least important factors—more than the biggies at the top.

The simple premise of the Google sandbox is this: Google doesn’t want to list spammy sites. Some spammers, however, have been able to get sites listed quickly, get good ranks using questionable techniques, and make a buck before Google can react. Because of this, Google seems to have increased the importance of the age of a website among its ranking factors. So now, to be designated “Not Spam,” one of the things a site has to do is, apparently, get older. It’s age before beauty: A brand-new site, even one with no spam qualities, may disappear into ranking oblivion for … Continue Reading

Simply stated, Google is the standout leader in search today. It has the most eyeballs and the most new trends, and it’s the only search engine with its own entry in the dictionary. Once a search-only entity, Google now offers a mail service, a map service, and a traffic and conversion tracking service, not to mention a diverse menu of specialty search options, including video, image, blog, and local. Google has been an all-out trendsetter in the evolution of the search algorithm.

Link popularity? Google made it hugely important. The probable death of paid inclusion? Thank Google. A website’s … Continue Reading

We’re going to start with the basics of how the search engines work, and a major component of this is a robot, or spider, which is software that slurps up your site’s text and brings it back to be analyzed by a powerful central “engine.” This activity is referred to as crawling or spidering. There are lots of different metaphors for how robots work, but we think ants make the best one.

Think of a search engine robot as an explorer ant, leaving the colony with one thought … Continue Reading

In recent years, weblogs have grown from a band of sharp-tongued outlaws to the darlings of online marketing. From Stonyfield Farm Yogurt to the Republican National Committee, it seems that everyone has a blog, or two, these days. Whether you are an individual out to bring in an income through running ads on your site or a large business with a blog on the site as a way to create relationships with potential clients, you are today’s Big Thing on the Internet. Naturally, the major search engines should be catering to your every need. But you make it plenty hard … Continue Reading

So how do you get sites to link to you? Or rather, how do you get quality sites to link to you?

Directory Links – This is the easiest way to get links, but perhaps the worst. Do not submit your site to 200 directories — those links are usually worthless and associate your site with low-quality sites. However, submitting your site to a few quality directories is advised (you can sort of determine a site’s quality by their Alexa rating). Directories like JoeAnt.com and BlogCatalog.com fall into this category of “free high-quality directories.”

Social Links – When you think you have … Continue Reading

Here are a few key aspects of a good inbound link. Some of these aspects are out of your control, but you can still improve how people choose to link to you:

Good Anchor Text – This is the text that is used in linking to you. It is far better for someone to link to this site with the phrase Freelance Blog or Making Online Income rather than Wake Up Later. Remember, it’s the text in the link that helps search engines determine what the destination page is really about.

Variety of Anchor Text – You also want variety in … Continue Reading