There has been much speculation over what is a good link and what is a bad link. Most of the time if the site is relevant to yours you would want to link, unless the site is a PR (page rank) of 2 or less. Even so, 1 or 2 sites that are low PR may not hurt your site, only provide more traffic or make it more noticeable. The more sites that your site is linking to makes more opportunity for your site to be in front of someone that would not normally make it to your site. Free directories (www.dmoz.org is a good place to start) and industry specific databases are a great place to start, especially with a moderate to less than moderate budget available for your website. If you are asking for someone to link to your site keep in mind that any links in and out of their site helps their rankings as well.
When you want a link to your site expect the other party to request a link back to their site for a reciprocal link, so you may want to develop a relevant links page for easy navigation for search engine spiders to find and crawl your relevant links. Burying your relevant links, may upset your link partners or the spiders in general and they may not crawl all of the sites. There is an undisclosed point structure for all items in an SEO strategy which provides enough information for a search query to search engines when anyone is using the search engine.
Everything adds up to equal your search engine rankings from page title, to meta-tags, to links to every last bit of text on your site, so be careful and very inquisitive when being requested to link back, not everyone does everything by the book.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
SEO vs. SEM
Since the ability to advertise on search engines became apparent to business owners and webmasters, variations of internet advertising and a combination of online and offline advertising for websites was born. Then the discovery of search engine indexing was exploited, and webmasters worldwide found various ways to trick search engines into ranking their web pages higher up on search engine results pages.
Search engine optimization and search engine marketing is a science. A perfect mixture of user experience and search engine spider experience makes a high ranking website. In the same breath of a perfect mixture, that mixture is very difficult to obtain. So there is much debate in what pays off more, search engine optimization or search engine marketing. I believe that both have their values and are both equally important to creating a successful website. You really use search engine optimization to pretty much index your site properly, monetize your site (again for proper indexing) and to link your site to as much relevant content as you can. When search engine marketing, Google AdWords for example, can be successful only when search engine optimization is done properly. With any ppc campaign you are looking for short term results and long term results, if you are looking to only use sponsored links to drive immediate traffic, then you need to re-evaluate your goals and try to find a purpose for spending the money. A good PPC campaign will bring in immediate sales with long term effect, maybe even repeat business. Let's face it, if you just built your website and nobody knows about it, chances are you are looking or have looked at different ways to get people to your site and SEO was one of your options. Which is great, SEO should be on your mind, but think of it like this, if you don't already have steady traffic coming into your site when you start to perform SEO, SEO is not going to start raking in the gold. You are going to have to market the new website in anticipation of it being useful to people. So when the spiders index your site and there are people worldwide that visit your site daily, it will have a very good result on your first indexing, giving you immediate results.
So again you ask which is better SEO or SEM, here is one reason why SEO and SEM should be thought of as a team, and not opposing teams. One looks out for the other, and without SEO there would be no SEM, and without anyone competing for the first page, there would be no need for SEO.
Search engine optimization and search engine marketing is a science. A perfect mixture of user experience and search engine spider experience makes a high ranking website. In the same breath of a perfect mixture, that mixture is very difficult to obtain. So there is much debate in what pays off more, search engine optimization or search engine marketing. I believe that both have their values and are both equally important to creating a successful website. You really use search engine optimization to pretty much index your site properly, monetize your site (again for proper indexing) and to link your site to as much relevant content as you can. When search engine marketing, Google AdWords for example, can be successful only when search engine optimization is done properly. With any ppc campaign you are looking for short term results and long term results, if you are looking to only use sponsored links to drive immediate traffic, then you need to re-evaluate your goals and try to find a purpose for spending the money. A good PPC campaign will bring in immediate sales with long term effect, maybe even repeat business. Let's face it, if you just built your website and nobody knows about it, chances are you are looking or have looked at different ways to get people to your site and SEO was one of your options. Which is great, SEO should be on your mind, but think of it like this, if you don't already have steady traffic coming into your site when you start to perform SEO, SEO is not going to start raking in the gold. You are going to have to market the new website in anticipation of it being useful to people. So when the spiders index your site and there are people worldwide that visit your site daily, it will have a very good result on your first indexing, giving you immediate results.
So again you ask which is better SEO or SEM, here is one reason why SEO and SEM should be thought of as a team, and not opposing teams. One looks out for the other, and without SEO there would be no SEM, and without anyone competing for the first page, there would be no need for SEO.
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