Getting Backlink Guide

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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Start a Community of Websites

One of the easiest ways to gain backlinks is to start other websites and have them linked to yours. Blogs are a great way to get traffic because there’s no cost, they provide free traffic, and are easily searchable throughout the blogging community. I’ve seen other various websites that target a younger audience even using myspace as a source of traffic and backlinks. And the list goes on and on for other quick sites you can start with a good amount of traffic.

Email Campaigns

Some people are hesitant to do this because they think no one would ever go to their site if the email even gets opened, or they have no idea who to email a promotion letter to. While the person who doesn’t have an idea of his audience can easily fix this problem, I’d say for every website that has updated content that isn’t gibberish, somebody has to like it and for every email sent out, there is probably at least 10% that the email gets opened if you target your audience precisely. Give yourself some confidence, and keep in mind that none of these techniques would get your website blacklisted or has any risk to it, except for wasting your time. But if you have the time to waste, research on who your audience is, get a list of emails of your audience and compile it in an excel sheet, and start your email campaigns. One person that I work with has a job site, which gets employers and job seekers together. Well all job sites needed jobs, so he started emailing to a number of colleges and got links for Rutgers, Harvard, and other colleges across the nation. Doing this boosted his Google rankings from 2/10 to 6/10. Just keep in mind that 1 email will not do the trick. You need to keep emailing the people in your excel sheet, but change the content of the email each time you do so.

Unless you don’t a good amount of time to spend on getting backlinks, I wouldn’t worry about how well your methods are working. Most of the techniques listed above as well as others you might think of should give you some increase in traffic that would last a very long time, as well as boosting your search engine rankings. These things suck up a lot of time, but the rewards can be high.

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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As websites age, they will naturally gain popularity. For the newly born websites, they are at a slight disadvantage. Fortunately, the SEO playing field is very fair amongst all competitors. Here are some things you can do to spice up the traffic and rankings.

Unique Content

Although I cannot promise anyone, it would make sense that this rule applies in the far future also. The quality of content will almost always have a decent if not huge impact on the ranking of your website. The amount of content matters, but even more so is the relevancy of the content on your website. For low cost ideas, try hiring ghost writers or college students. Some websites only have a message boards loaded with people using it to their advantage. These sites are very lucky to have other people generating content for them for free. Pages with only keywords and no real usable content will often get your website blacklisted. This doesn’t mean you have to be a master at writing to develop the content for your site. Not unless the search engines become so sophisticated later on.

Links

Having internal pages linked within your website is a good idea. Linking to other websites won’t help your ranking nearly as much as having other websites linking to yours. Some people try to build a community of sites, and have them linked to each other. Others submit their sites to online directories such as Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. This helps your startup site a little bit but not nearly as well as it used to.

URL

Yes! The website address matters more than people think. I’m not talking about the domain name. The chunks of characters after the domain name often contain characters like “?” and “=” for dynamic pages. These characters are not supported by many major search engines and will create difficulty for spiders and bots to crawl through your website.

These are just a few tips to get most people started in marketing their site to the world. The work required is a never ending project since search engines keep updating with more complex search algorithms. When your site grows and surpasses your traffic and ranking expectations, remember, SEO takes more hard work than genius.

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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