Building Search Engine Traffic
Users and search engines alike need to know that your website exists, and this general process is known as online marketing. Specifically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the art of optimizing web pages and back links to achieve the best possible search engine results for keywords and search phrases that best describe the product, service, or information that your website is offering.
New Table of Contents
Understanding the Product and the Target Audience
Plan Ahead to Get Ahead
Getting Backlinks
Remember: Quality over Quantity
What is a good link? It is a link from a related page using the anchor text you want to rank highly for. A related page means a page that discusses the same keywords as the anchor text, and this can be improved if it matches the website's title, headings, and commonly used terms.
For this squidoo page, a good link would be Website SEO for all the reasons mentioned above. Notice that the anchor text matches both the web page's title, and the URL of the link destination.
The other, almost ironic thing, is the page with backlinks needs backlinks pointing to it. The higher the rank of the linking page the more rank is pushed through the link to the destination.
Do Links Improve Over Time?
What is important is the rank of the page linking to you, and this is dependent on the number of pages linking there.
Sometimes when you get a backlink, it starts off at the top page of a high PR domain and then falls down to the archives. If this is the case and that page doesn't get its own backlinks, the value of your link probably reached its peak when it was new and steadily declined afterward. This could be the case on any of the user-editable websites like blogs, forums, and social bookmarking. If your link goes to the front page of Digg, you'll have a PR 8 backlink but only for a day.
On the other hand, maybe you leave a comment on a blog post that is rediscovered a few months or weeks later only to become its own viral hit. If people are constantly talking about and linking to the page that links you, that backlink with increase value over time.
PageRank, SERPs, and Traffic
How to measure your progress and success?
Pagerank is a value that Google assigns to a web page based on the number and importance of relative back links. In itself, this does not guarantee search traffic, but it is part of the formula that determines Google's search results. Paying for links can actually reduce your page rank, so stick to the natural links you can get and avoid buying them.
SERPs is how your site ranks for your chosen key words. This is based moreso on the anchor text of the links and whether or not those links are on related sites that share the anchor text's keywords.
Traffic is, of course, what ultimately matters. Google analytics is the best way to understand your traffic, because sheer numbers don't necessarily matter if people aren't staying to see your website or if they've arrived through unrelated searches. Good traffic means people found what they were looking for when they found your website. This is what truly counts.
Are you concerned with Google Pagerank?
Google Pagerank is an easily visible metric to measure a website's relative importance. But, it doesn't actually indicate how well your site will rank in specific search terms and it doesn't account for recent changes in link structure. How concerned are you about your domain's pagerank?
The Goal
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Questions? Suggestions? Add them here!
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- kenadams2 kenadams2 May 25, 2009 @ 7:56 am
- yup - too true. Here's more info about keyword research
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- kenadams2 kenadams2 May 25, 2009 @ 7:55 am
- yup - too true. Here's more info about keyword research
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- kenadams2 kenadams2 May 25, 2009 @ 7:55 am
- yup - too true. Here's more info about keyword research
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- DrRichard DrRichard Aug 12, 2008 @ 12:14 am
- Some great points in here. 5 stars and fave!
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The future of SEO?
Speculation and Hints from Google
If search engines continue to implement features of social bookmarking sites, the goal of Democratizing the internet will be another step closer to reality.
Rather than focusing on backlinks and offsite optimization, website builders will need to create the content that makes users glad to visit, look around, bookmark, and come back later.
Already, rumors of a browse rank help explain why some sites rank higher than others based on the actions of users once they arrive on the site, and this is likely to be the push that shapes the future of online marketing.
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