Many people know by now that one of the best ways to increase your search engine ranking is by getting other web sites to link to yours. However, what many people do not realize is that just any link is not a good link. The link should preferably be a one-way only deal that means you should not need to link back. This practice is called reciprocal linking and the search engines recognize this as an attempt to trick the engines. Also, sites that link to you must be relevant to your site topic. The idea behind linking is that the engines consider every link a vote for your site, and a vote from someone who has nothing to do with what your site is all about is not weighted nearly as heavily as one that is directly on point.
There are many companies out there that will build links for you. However, you need to be very careful when signing on with one of these link building companies. Often they do not take SEO best practices into account, but rather put you up on lots of link directories, which will not really help. Often your best bet is to do one of two things: (1) Build the links yourself, by contacting other companies and asking for a link. This really works only if you have great content or a very useful tool. (2) Hire a full service SEO company to do the work for you. They will take into account what type of links you need.
Generally these link building companies claim sole ownership of all of the sites you could be linked to. This is interesting as there should be no concern that any site is not under their control. I mean really, do you want to be linked anonymously without full knowledge of just what type of site where your link will reside?
If you are a star trek fan, also known as a Trekie, there is surely only one search engine for you, and that is Google. You may ask the question why this is. Well, if you were to enter the following URL, http://www.google.com/intl/xx-klingon/ you would find a Google search engine that is programmed entirely in the Klingon language. If you want to find out where the best store to buy a bat'leth, the traditional "sword of honor" preferred by Klingon warriors adept at the martial arts. If you would rather locate the best Gagh which comes in 51 different varieties, including torghud qagh, vIlDIng qagh, mIcha' qagh, etlhul qagh, and wIStng qagh.
Not only can you locate these Star Trek terms in the original Klingon first translated for the 1984 Star Trek Epic “The Search for Spok”, but you can also look up anything else you might normally expect to find in the Google index. The twist is that the SERP will be returned to you in Klingon. Of course for those of us, who are not well versed in the language or simply not bi-lingual, Google.com will do just fine.
Google, who perhaps more so than any other web site portal, is relentlessly accused of copyright infringement. With that said, Google may be stepping out of the preverbal frying pan and into the fire with their quest to assemble a digital library. This quest has set in motion a philosophical debate with a substitute project promising greater online access to the world's books, art and historical documents.
The most recent pressure stem from Google's insistence on linking the digital content to its search engine, and the nine major libraries that have aligned themselves with the search giant.
A group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent accumulated knowledge of all human history from being controlled by a commercial company, even if it's a company like Google that has embraced "Don't Be Evil" as its creed.
"You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don't want any company to enclose it," said Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
A foundation announced last Wednesday, a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive, a leader in the Open Content Alliance, to help pay for digital copies of compilations owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of the pieces to be scanned are the personal library of President John Adams and thousands of images from the Metropolitan Museum.
Google's restrictions on its digital book copies stem in part from the company's decision to scan copyrighted material without explicit permission. Google wants to ensure only small excerpts from the copyrighted material appear online - snippets that the company believes fall under "fair use" protections of U.S. law. I expect that this policy, in addition to the fact that much of the material’s copyright protection had expired many years ago, might help Google avert another major law suit.
I recently took a short hiatus from blogging while I was on vacation in Hawaii. I am now back and ready to blog again. However, I thought I would take this opportunity to tie my vacation into SEO in some way. How you may ask? The answer is quite simple, by demonstrating a form of link bait on our blog that will not only educate but also entertain you. Below please find a video put out by Google on "Google Earth" which is called keyhole in this video. This Google program allowed me to revisit places I physically stood upon only a few short days ago.
Yahoo inc. among other ventures is a world famous search engine, the owner of some of the most widely used photo and bookmark sharing software and many other web-based ventures. However, one particular venture has landed Yahoo in court once again, though this time it is not for click fraud, but rather it is for their fantasy football game, and how it was advertised in both Sport Illustrated and in banners on the Yahoo Network.
The National Football League’s New England Patriots’ quarterback, Tom Brady, is suing the search giant for the misappropriation of his likeness by use of photographs of the all-star quarterback in action to help Yahoo garner a larger market share on the $4 Billion dollar a year fantasy football industry. In addition, to claiming the misappropriation of his likeness, Brady is also claiming unjust enrichment, which is a from of contract law, that requires the offending party to pay the injured party the profits made without giving anything in return. This in a sense is equivalent to a contract implied in law. Brady’s allegations that “Yahoo’s use of his image connotes a false endorsement and, as such, is seeking unspecified punitive and compensatory damages against the company.” The complaint states the football star is a "worldwide celebrity" who has become "famous for his prowess as an NFL quarterback, his fame is not limited to the world of sports. In 2005, Tom Brady hosted "Saturday Night Live."
It is estimated that Yahoo’s fantasy football site gets over 800 million page views during football season. It is only logical to estimate that a significant portion of users of Yahoo’s fantasy football game also visit other pages on Yahoo. This allows Yahoo to sell more banners, more sponsored listings and other forms of advertisement. Brady contends, that the use of his image has allowed Yahoo to increase the traffic thereby generating greater revenue, and but for the use of Brady’s likeness in a full page advertisement in Sports Illustrated, Yahoo would not have realized as high profits. Yahoo at no time received or even requested permission from Brady to use his image, and that is the stem of the problem.
It would seem that Yahoo has yet another potentially unwinable battle in the court room, not for misappropriating PPC funds, but this time for misappropriating the good name of the NFL’s golden boy.
Podcasting is the one the best ways to disseminate information on the web. It has the advantage of not requiring a screen reader for your audience if any of them are on a lower-end browser or are visually impaired. Moreover, it has the SEO benefit of being associated with and XML file, where you can list the title, description, and even ID tags to allow spiders to index the content of your voice or music. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that users can subscribe to your podcast, and if it is any good at all likely will set up a link to your podcast site, thereby increasing your inbound links. Generally those who listen to your podcasts are those who have blogs or web sites that are relevant to your content, and thus the inbound link will have some element of relevancy to boot.
Who can listen to your podcast? Any person with an MP3 player can choose from a huge number of podcasts to listen. If you have good content, and an interesting or controversial topic, you will likely get listeners quickly.
Setting up a Podcast is not nearly as difficult as you may think. The biggest issue is simply procuring the correct equipment. You will need a good microphone, and sound editing software. One good solution you can download for free is http://audacity.sourceforge.net . Once you have your equipment and your script ready to go, you can easily produce and save your podcast. Then comes the SEO aspect of the podcast, you will need to create an RSS feed. However, if you are using blogging software such as Word Press, the software will create the RSS file for you automatically as soon as you upload your podcast to your server and link the file to a posting. The final step which is of course the most important is to announce and then market your podcast.
There are many channels to publicize your podcast. The first and most obvious way to do this is though a blurb on your web site or blog with a link to the Podcast URL and a link to the RSS feed to those who want to subscribe. You will also want to send out a mass email to anyone in your address book. As you now have an RSS feed, you should endeavor to ping the RSS aggregators who list podcasts. You can do that at http://audio.weblogs.com/, and http://www.pingoat.com/. You can also submit your podcast into http://www.itunes.com/.
I hope this short tutorial on setting up and promoting your podcast has inspired or at least started you on a path to the world of audio media on the web.
Ok, so by now you have heard that the best way to generate better rankings on many search engines is to get more relevant web sites to link to your web site. This is all well and good, but how do you do that? The following posting is meant as a basic list of techniques that can be used to start the process.
1. Article, Articles, and Articles: It has been said more times than I can count that content in king. Ok, so how do you take advantage of this tid-bit of wisdom. Write compelling articles and upload them to article directories. If you write a good piece others will want to add the content to their site and give you a link back as the author.
2. Add a blog to your web and post your articles
3. Post comments to other blogs and forums which allow you to have a link to your web site in your signature.
4. Have a software engineer build a very useful web-based tool that can only be accessed on your web site. Others will link to such a page with the tool. Also consider having an add on tool to a web site which can be downloaded, but that has a link back to your site.
5. Submit to the most popular directories. There are only about 10 of these with any SEO benefit.
6. Just ask your suppliers and customers if they would link to your web site.
Many web sites are set up with dynamic content. However, no type of site has more frequently changing dynamic content than shopping carts. There are many carts on the web, from completely customized carts, to base applications such as OS Commerce to almost fully integrated sites such as eBay stores. The problem with all of these sites though is that the URL structure often has many variables, and the navigation is form based. Both of these issues create problems if not make it all but impossible for spiders to follow and index your e-commerce content.
For a quick analysis, let’s take a look at ECommerce, as that is the most popular shopping cart technology on the planet. It is PHP based software that is incredibly scalable to do what ever a developer wants.
Eliminate the session from the URL string. This can easily create duplicate content. In the admin panel, you can turn on the search friendly URLs, which will then store the session in a cookie.
The Googlebot will not following more than 1 or 2 levels of dynamic content. An easy solution to this might be to simply generate a Google site map and if you are on an Apache server the site map will update every time you update your cart.
Title Tags are a dynamic element which can be taken from your MySQL database product name and added as the Title to your detail pages. For example [ Product Name by Store Name] Content is still king, if you can get your keywords into the descriptions without forcing the content that may be your best bet of all.
There are many other things you can do, it is just a matter of thinking outside the box to some extent. Think Social Search.
