What Do Your Links Tell the Search Engines? How to Tell Them What CountsBY: Matt Bacak
There is a lot of confusing information on the web - “secret techniques”, tag writing, and of course the complicated algorithms the search engine optimization specialists swear by. Just like content building, list building, and website development take a long time, so does complete website SEO. However, there are a few things you can do, today, to get the most out of the current links your website has. Here's a quick checklist to go over to tweak your links for better search engine results. Next time the spyders crawl by, you'll be able to see the difference in your link popularity and ranking. What do your outgoing links say? If you have a resources section in your website that lists your link partners, it's time to go over them. Search engines look at the words you use to describe links. This is great in one way - if your links are relevant to your website's content, then those keywords are applied, on a small scale, to your own website. What to tweak: · If you have any links that say "Click Here" or titled as the company's name, change them to keyworded titles. (For example, if you list Google.com as a resource, change the title to “search engine”) · If you have any companies that are totally unrelated to your website's topic, tell the search engines not to go there. How can you do this? Use the “no-follow” tag. Before: < a href="http://www.site.com/page.html">Visit My Page After: < a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page What do your inbound links say? Search engines always look at the keywords that point to your website, just as they look at the words that point out. Make sure that your link partners use your keywords in the clickable part of the links. If you can, take some time checking out the text they use and shoot them an email asking for a brief rewording of the link titles. (Of course, as their link partner, you should offer to do the same.) In the future, when listing your website, make sure you concentrate on your keywords when exchanging links. Tell the search engines you're legit - by getting listed in DMOZ.org Many webmasters, for whatever reason, ignore one of the largest human-edited directories on the web. It's a shame, really, since DMOZ.org is the really the only important directory on the internet. DMOZ is free to list in. Because it is human-edited, it can take a decent amount of time to list your site. It's worth it, though - thousands of international search engines and directories place DMOZ's directory on their site, including Google's directory. It may take a while to get listed and for the syndicated directories to update, but once it happens, your link popularity will skyrocket. Take some time, follow their directions, and wait politely. You'll be glad you did. It's important to recognize that link-building is an ongoing effort. If you simply add one link a day to various sites, you're building popularity for the future. Just make sure that you use honest descriptions and relevant keywords when exchanging links. Choose link partners that are willing to do the same.
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