Getting Backlink Guide

Many times I’ve heard it asked in webmaster forums: “How many
backlinks do I need?”. Worse yet, many more webmasters never ask
that question. Instead, they ask why they are not listed well with Google. Investigating their site we find a severe lack of backlinks in almost every case. There are also those of us interested in raising our PageRank with Google for various reasons, (usually egoistic in nature), but what does it take to raise my PageRank one notch upward?

Getting To The Top

For the first question, the number of backlinks needed to have your site listed in search engine results depends greatly on the competition for your keywords. Do a search for your most wanted keyword and notice how many results are returned. The higher that number, the more competitive your keyword is and the more backlinks you’ll need. If the number of results returned is more than one million, you’re in for a tough battle to the top. You’ll need thousands of backlinks from trusted sites. On the other hand, if the number of results are less than 100,000, your journey to the top ten search results will be much easier; 1,000 backlinks from decent sites should do the trick. Lastly, if the number of results is less than 10,000, you should be able to place in the top ten with just several hundred good backlinks.

Increasing Your PageRank

The second question, how to increase a site’s PageRank, is an even trickier question to answer. Explaining the original PageRank algorithm, PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)), is beyond the scope of this article, however, we can make some educated assumptions without being math Phd’s. The first and most important assumption regarding Google’s PageRank algorithm is that it is based on a logarithmic scale
of 5.5. Remember, this is not fact, but just an educated assumption among those who have studied the algorithm. The logarithmic scale of 5.5 means that a Google Toolbar PageRank, (TBPR), of 2 is roughly 5.5 times as important and as valuable as a 1. This same “importance” factor can be applied to any TBPR.

For example, a TBPR7 is equal to 5.5 TBPR6’s.

Therefore, if your homepage has a TBPR5 and you are striving to increase it to a TBPR6, you’ll need 5.5 times as many backlinks as you already have assuming that your new backlinks are of the same quality as your current backlinks. That’s a huge leap! Alternatively, you can try to get backlinks from sites that have a high TBPR, such as TBPR5. If so, five to ten TBPR5’s should bump your site up to a six. That’s over simplified, to be sure, because the numbers showing on the Toolbar are approximations.

David Benware is an avid researcher and writer particularly interested in the areas of keywords and pagerank. To learn more about these topics, visit his websites at: http://MisterTypo.com/ and http://megalinkexchange.com

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Here are some useful tips to optimize your site for search engines:

Frames

Using frames in a website can simplify the web design work. Unfortunately, most search engine crawlers have trouble moving around a framed site and may fail in adding all your pages to the listing.

Sitemaps

Making a sitemap will make sure all the pages on your website are indexed by the search engines. If you own a dynamic website, you can use Google Sitemaps and XML to create a dynamic sitemap that will update along with the website itself.

Redirected Homepage

This is probably the most common mistake people make. All web server software has some way of telling which page is the default homepage for the site. If your homepage www.yourdomain.com redirects itself to www.yourdomain.com/anotherpage.html, then you need to change anotherpage.html to whatever file name your web server reads, most likely index.html or index.php. Why? Your domain name is what most people will link to from other websites. If your homepage isn’t exactly that domain name, you’re missing a lot of backward links that probably will boost your search engine rankings quite a bit.

Use META Tags for Duplicate Content

Many times search engines index same or similar products as duplicates, which results in the product page disappearing from the listing. To make your product unique from the other similar products out there, use the META tags to your advantage. Make sure you have a unique title, description, and keyword tag on every page of your site.

Horace Lai, journalist for http://www.ECommerceDay.com, has well over 5 years of experience in search engine optimization and email marketing.

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Trying to get good page rank for your website can be a most frustrating experience for webmasters. After all, what is page rank and why should you care about it?

In the simplest terms, page rank (PR) is how much of the Google toolbar for page rank that is filled in with green. If the page you are looking at has a PR1 then 1/10th of the bar will be filled with green. If it has PR4, then 4/10ths of the bar will be green. Mostly only Google gets all of the bar filled green for a PR10, which is the highest possible rating.

To get the Google toolbar, which has the page rank bar, go to http://toolbar.google.com/ and download Google’s toolbar. It will sit on top of your browser. The toolbar will not only provide you with lots of Google resources but it will also give you the page rank bar so you can see the page rank of your site and also that of any other site that you visit it.

But what exactly is Google’s page rank system? Well, Google doesn’t tell us exactly. However, we do know page rank relies primarily on Google’s algorithms for determining the “importance” of the site or individual pages. The higher your site’s PR, the more often it will show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

I can’t speak officially for Google, but what webmasters have learned is that page rank is based primarily on the links to your site (called backlinks) that determine for Google how important your site is.

Google relies on a fairly democratic system by using its vast link structure to determine a page’s value. Very simply, if your page gets a link from another site, that’s a “vote” for your site. The more votes, the better.

However, Google also analyzes where the “votes” come from. If your site gets links from high-quality, authority sites with high PR, then your site benefits more from links from those high PR site sites than from links from non-authority or low PR sites.

Furthermore, if you put your link on another site with thousands of other links to other websites, then just be aware that Google will take that into consideration and will give your link its relatively small slice of of the other site’s PR divided amongst all of the other links, if the site has any PR at all. So putting your site’s link on a page that has a lot of other links may not do you that much good.

It’s just good business to always check the PR of the sites with which you may want to exchange links by using the Google toolbar. Also, be sure to check out the page the other site wants to put your link on so you know how many links they are publishing. Less than 100 links is what you are looking for and less than 20 links is ideal.

Also, realize that reciprocal links (where your site links to their site and they link to yours) is less valuable in Google’s eyes than one-way links to your site.

Once you get the Google toolbar and start seeing the PRs of other sites, you will be able to see the sites that get good PR and be able to model your site after those. I can’t stress enough the importance of having the Google toolbar …

Karen Kirby has over 25 years’ experience in the computer industry and an MS in Computer Science. She has been helping people with Internet marketing since 1995. For more tips on generating website traffic, see http://www.belowtheeight.com/Internet-Marketing-Strategy.htm
— get a free copy of “Internet Marketer’s Guide to Free Traffic” at http://www.aimbright.com/survey2.htm.

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