When it comes to any website promotion campaign, there are two
main areas to focus on. The first area to focus on is your
internal campaign, which deals with anything you can do to the
pages of your website, such as content, meta tags, and titles.
This is completely within your control even if you use a Web
designer to do any changes for you, as you can dictate what is
on your website. The other area to focus on is your external
campaign, which largely deals with getting links from other
sites – something that is mostly out of your control and is
usually a lot more work.
Internal Campaign
Links, or hyperlinks to use their full name, are often
misunderstood by people wanting to improve their search engine
ranking. Links from your website going out to other sites will
not boost your search engine ranking, although some relevant,
on-topic links to prominent sites can help. Also, creating lots
of links to your internal pages is not the same as links from
other websites in the eyes of search engines. These two
misunderstandings have caught out many a website owner.
The important thing to remember is that you do not want to have
too many links on your pages. This does two things that can be
deemed harmful to your goal of improving search engine ranking.
Having a large list of links on a single page can cause search
engines to suspect a link farm, Web ring, or other such
unnatural linking structure and your site may be penalized for
this. It would be safest to keep the number of links below 50
for any page. The second reason that you don't want too many
links is because they drain PR (PageRank). This basically means
that the importance of the page, the PR, is divided by the
number of outbound links. So you would be better of getting a
link from a website page that has a PR of 6 and only 10 outbound
links rather than a PR 6 website page with 200 outbound links.
External Campaign
The real value in links, as far as gaining better ranking in
search engines comes from external links. External links are
also known as backlinks, and they basically are just links to
your website from someone else's website.
There are two types of external links – reciprocal and one-way.
Reciprocal links are links from a website in exchange for a
return link to that same website. Hence the term reciprocal.
Reciprocal links were very popular a few years back but are not
as valuable as one-way links. If another site is relevant to the
theme of your site then a reciprocal link is still useful so
don't dismiss it entirely. What you really want is a one-way
link to your website in order to boost your rankings. Gaining
one-way links usually comes from supllying a brilliant resource
or software. If your site is deemed to contain lots of excellent
information that is freely available and original then many
others will be happy to place one-way links to your site.
When someone creates a link to your site the text that is used
for the link is very important. This is known as the link anchor
text. If someone kindly offered to place a link to my website on
their homepage, I would ask if they would use specific anchor
text for the link. This makes the link much more relevant. My
website is about website promotion in New Zealand, so I would
want something similar to the following:
Website Promotion New
Zealand
as opposed to:
Good NZ promotion site. Click Here
You can see that in the first example, the anchor text is
relevant and would help me to rank well for terms such as
"website promotion", "website promotion New Zealand", and "New
Zealand website promotion". In the second example, I would be
improving my ranking for the term "click here".
Conclusion
There are lots of very technical requirements to getting the
right linking strategies and nobody really knows for certain
what the exact requirements are. This is because search engines
do not disclose information about their ranking algorithms in
great detail and also because these algorithms change with time.
Different search engines have different requirements that they
are looking for, which further complicates matters. Unless you
are happy to get involved in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
and spend absolutely ages on it, simply following my advice in
this article will improve your search engine rankings and save
you a lot of time and headaches.
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