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admin
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Posted: Mon Feb 21st, 2005 10:39 am |
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A good linking strategy is important to being successful on the search engines and being linked to by other websites is the quickest way to get your site listed in a search engine – you shouldn’t need to add your site to Google or any other search engine by the addurl page it may even lengthen the time it takes to be listed in a search engine.
Many visually conscious photographers just don’t want text links or banners on their site so lets get this out of the way first
“Do I really have to link to other sites ?”
Answer: no you don’t but you need links in to be really successful and preferably with anchor text which targets your sites themes. The main way to achieve this is to find web directories which will list your site without requiring a reciprocal link DMOZ.org is an example of this skaffe.com is another, there are quite a few of these. These directories may not provide a lot of traffic but they show the search engines that your site exists because these sites themselves are spidered and will generate some PR for your site and as discussed below this is important. Some directories require payment, Yahoo is an example and this is another way of getting some links to your site – there are numerous directories which do this just make sure they are reputable. You can also buy text links on popular web sites, so if your pockets are deep enough and the return on investment is worth it then you could get excellent results.
Stay away from guest books, Free For All Links pages and the like, these are a waste of energy and will not contribute anything to your site because they are totally ignored by the major search engines. If you have listings on these sorts of pages don’t panic they are just ignored they are thought to penalise – most search engines won’t penalise a site for something that could be done by a malicious competitor. So if I went around and listed Fred’s site on every guest book and FFA page I could find it is unlikely to have any effect at all it would just be a waste of time and electrons. Also there can be negligible benefit from getting links from pages with huge numbers of link – Google apparently only takes note of the first 100 links on a page.
So what is an effective strategy? Again some research is required. A quick way to see what I am getting at is to go to Google at http://toolbar.google.com/ and install the toolbar if you are using IE as your browser. Once installed go to the options menu and make sure the Page Rank (PR) and Page Info options are turned on.
If you haven’t heard about PR it basically Google’s measure of the popularity of a web page it is essentially a function of the number of other web pages pointing to a page and the PR of those pages pointing to the page. In addition there are now weighting factors which means that if you have lots of pages from one web site (ie same domain name) pointing to a page then the value of the additional pages is less than what they would be if they were from separate sites – some people suggest they have zero value, that is only one page counts from each domain that points to your site. So the more pages, from as many sites as possible, pointing to your site the better, and the more pages you pointing to your site with high PR the higher the PR of that page will be. PR flows throughout your site – most people have links from other sites largely pointing to their index page and the PR from this page is distributed throughout your site but is diluted with the number of pages you have on your site and how your internal links flow. It is generally believed that you should at the very least point back to your index page from every page. Cross linking with a menu system to the other pages on your site which you have themed to target specific keywords is also a good idea because it will raise their PR which will improve their importance with respect to the search engine’s algorithm. The PR of your site is determined iteratively (ie Google does numerous runs through your site to calculate it) so your internal linking structure also effects your index page PR. The other useful statistic which the tool bar shows is the number of backlinks a site has pointing to it – this can be seen by clicking on the information icon and selecting “Backward Links”. This does a Google query equivalent to typing in
link:http://www.some-domain.com
Such a query can be done on any of the major search engines – Google doesn’t display a full list of backlinks but for the exercise below use Google as it is useful for the demonstration – they try and obscure stuff these days Yahoo is thought to give an accurate number of backlinks.
An interesting exercise here is to go to Google type in a search term you are interested and then go down the list say look at PR and number of backlinks of the top 1 – 3 place then look at some on the next page and look at a couple of sites then the next page and repeat – as you go down the list you will usually see a decrease in PR and the number of backlinks. The relationship between PR + Backlinks and position is fairly reasonable but a pages ranking is not entirely derived by these two factors alone. On page factors as previously discussed play a role but one other off page factors come into play.
To some degree the theme of the sites from which a link comes is thought to be important. So if we had 2 links coming to Fred’s site both with a PR of 4 but one was a black and white photography site and the other a car insurance site the photography site would would contribute more to setting the theme of Fred’s site.
But of more importance is the anchor text of the links coming to Fred site – What is the anchor text well it’s the text which makes up the link – see below. The alt tag on a banner can also have the same effect.
<A HREF="http://www.link2site.com">Anchor Text</A>
and would look like this Anchor Text
So for Fred to be successful he needs to get text links from other websites which include his keywords. Links like:
“Fred Smith Black and White Photography”, “Fred Smith Photography”, “Fred Smith Wedding Photography”, “Fred Smith Wedding Photographer”.
It is important that he should aim to get links with a range of anchor text as using the same text over and over is perceived as spam, at least by Google – mixing it up is critical.
One last point to consider – many website owners try to minimise the link benefits they send to their partners by placing code in the meta tags to stop the search engine robots, burying the links pages so far down they receive little PR and traffic and other tactics – this type of strategy backfires in the long run because having link partners which are well themed and with good PR through your links and those of other sites will help theme your site and send PR in return it’s a two way benefit – so helping others with the anchor text, giving your links page a photography theme by adding terms to the title and other meta tags, and by not over loading the links page with hundreds of links ultimately will help your site do better in the search engines.
Now it is up to you to go out and theme your sites and get more links and rise in the ranking. This approach does work but requires work to get it – so if you build it this way they will come.
Last edited on Mon Feb 21st, 2005 09:38 pm by admin
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mikef
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Posted: Sat Mar 4th, 2006 02:58 pm |
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admin wrote:
One last point to consider – many website owners try to minimise the link benefits they send to their partners by placing code in the meta tags to stop the search engine robots, burying the links pages so far down they receive little PR and traffic and other tactics – this type of strategy backfires in the long run because having link partners which are well themed and with good PR through your links and those of other sites will help theme your site and send PR in return it’s a two way benefit – so helping others with the anchor text, giving your links page a photography theme by adding terms to the title and other meta tags, and by not over loading the links page with hundreds of links ultimately will help your site do better in the search engines.
Could you exaplin, then, why Photographysites.com chooses to hide the link destinations on your site from search engines (while you require a reciprocal link)? Last edited on Sat Mar 4th, 2006 03:00 pm by mikef
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admin
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Posted: Sun Mar 5th, 2006 12:00 am |
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Well its simply a function how the script runs - we count the hits out and the hits in and we rerank our pages based on that data so that hits out are fairly distributed - this is very very different to site owners who bury link pages on their site so that no one visits it and ensure that search engines don't know about it - with the objective of only taking PR from link partner
we require reciprocal link in so the search engines can find us - if they find us they find those sites in the list - simple as that - as a result websites in our list get more traffic than just a straight exchange among sites
we are very open and clear about what we do we don't engage in the practice of getting link partners and then changing things around like adding norobots tags after getting partners - which is what i was warning about in that article as it was a growing practice that was being observed - we also don't force people remain listed with us if they don't like our systems they can simply remove our link
many members have written to me saying that we provide the greatest amount of targetted traffic to their websites - most sites get around ten hits back for one in many recieve much much more than this.
websites which would normally find it difficult to get very much traffic get a lot of traffic from us - simply we are not a run of the mill link partner we are a mechanism to let sites get more traffic and (more importantly) for visitors find websites which have been scrutinized for relevance and accuracy ie we look at every site added and deleted those which are inappropriate and move those in the wrong category to the right category (a service for our visitors) - its not some type of link farm its more which is what many link directories are
Digital PhotographyLast edited on Sun Feb 18th, 2007 02:35 am by admin
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