Daily Web Dev

Building Links to Help Search Engine Rankings

Websites are becoming more and more common these days, especially with user-friendly programs that allow you to build websites with a few clicks of a button. With all this competition, the true challenge comes with how to get attention from the major search engines. When people search for information relevant to your website, you want your pages to come up first so that you can receive the most traffic. The best way to boost this search engine visibility is by building links.

Building the most quality links you can is the name of the game, you want your websites’ link profile to be as strong as possible. The stronger your link profile, the more credibility you will receive from major search engines. Even if other webmasters are reluctant to link to your site, there’s plenty of other ways to get good quality incoming links.

A common method of link building is to submit your website to free or (better yet) paid SEO friendly web directories. Web directories allow you to submit your website into relevant categories. This way, web directories give you a great opportunity to get relevant one-way backlinks to your website.

Submitting articles to article directories is another popular method of link building. The resource box at the end of the article allows you to put in usually at least 2 links back to your website, thus building on the strength of your link profile. You’ll also recieve traffic from the article itself as well - interested readers will click on your link after reading your article.

If there’s blogs related to the content of your site, take the opportunity to visit a few and leave comments on some of the posts. In your comment, don’t forget to leave a link back to your website. Search engine spiders will pick up your link and add it to your link profile. This might not work all the time, though. Some newer blogs have nofollow attributes attached to the comments section, which prevent you from getting any benefit from the link.

Link building is a super important aspect of search engine optimization that should not be ignored. Your traffic depends on it.

1. Search Engine Traffic
Search engine traffic usually the best and most relevant traffic. However, getting it is difficult and often takes alot of time. Some companies spends thousands to improve their rankings, however, I will give you some basic guidlines to help increase your search engine rankings. First of all, make sure your site’s URLs are search engine friendly. This means that they contain keywords related to your website or page. If you have a forum, blog or are using some script for your website, there are usually mods to improve this. Another key factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is making sure that your site has good link popularity. This means that your site has links to it from other sites. A good way to build up link popularity for free is to submit to dirrectories, this may generate a little traffic as well. Making sure your page have good keyword density is critical. I would suggest going for one or a few keywords and making sure they appear alot in your website and you use <h1> and <b> tags for your keywords will help with your rankings.

For More Information on SEO:
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php
http://www.seobook.com/

2. Offline Promotion
This is one of the best ways to promote your site. Most likely you know people who are interested in the topic of your website. Telling friends, colleagues and family about your site is a great way to promote it. If you get a small group of people you know to tell others, your site can really take off. This is a good way to promote your site if it is a niche topic. You can also promote your site by going to events related to your topic and telling people about your site in person.

3. Link Exchange
Link exchanges are a great way to get traffic to your site. The best link exchanges are with sites that are in a similar topic, but not exactly the same. Basically, you put a link to someones site on your page, in exchange for the same on their site. It is hard to exchange links if your site has little traffic, but you can always offer the other person things such as more time or better placement. The best place to find link exchange requests and to post for requests are on webmaster forums, such as www.digitalpoint.com.

4. Social Bookmarking Sites
With certain web sites, you can generate alot of traffic by using social bookmarking site is StumbleUpon. If you have a good site, you can submit it to stumbleupon by writting a review of it. People who use the StumbleUpon toolbar can give it a thumbs up and your site will start getting traffic from Stumbleupon. Also, I suggest that you submit your articles to Digg. To get people to give your site a thumbs up on Stumbleupon or to Digg your site, I suggest visiting webmaster forums, such as, www.digitalpoint.com, where people exchange such services.

5. Posting on forums
If your site is just starting out, a good way to get new visitors is by making quality posts on forums related to your topic. Put your website along with a little description of it in your signature. Then, make some quality posts, for example, make posts that really help people out or spark alot of discussion. The traffic wont be enormous, but is a good way to get some new visitors into your site. If you really help someone, they will often check out your signature.

On Feb 1, 2010, Google officially announced the discontinued support of Google Apps for older browsers.

Google sent an email to all Google App users:

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Keep in mind, Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above. Although this may affect many users and corporations dependent upon older browsers, the innovation of new technology only calls for updates. We can view this as a great step forward for the virtual world.