What do we want linking to do for us and what can linking actually do for us? Well we want it to get us traffic. Most of us think it can get us traffic two ways. One way we hope to get traffic is by making the search engines think we are good because of all the links to us. We are hoping that will rank us higher in those search engines.

All the SEO companies want to help us be on the FIRST PAGE of Google. Well with the billions of websites now and all the keywords maxed out – can we all be on the first or second page? Of course not! So, how much does it really matter where you rank in Google?

Let me give you an example provided by David Notestine from Zeus link management programming. He will provide server logs to back up stats that show:

• they get 6000000 hits per month for Zeus
• about 20 of those hits are from search engines
• about 3 percent result from paid adwords (not profitable he says)
• the remainder are from hits from links on other websites

What should we really expect from our linking strategy. Let’s get hits from links on other sites. Forget that other stuff about pleasing the Google Gods!

So why don’t we all help each other with good linking practices? If you are going to link to me so that others can find my site, why in the hell don’t you make it easy for those visitors to go from your home page to your link index? WHERE IS THE DAMN text to click on for links? If I can’t find it to verify my link, then I know damn well that your site visitors won’t find it or even look for it if it’s that hard to find. As you can see, this really irks me.

Secondly, for your link site to be useful to me, visitors need to find me or my product in that huge directory that we all are trying to develop. The best way to make it easy for searchers to find a link to a website or product is with a “search utility” installed and kept current on the page of that big link directory. Visitors can then search for a product, name or contact and get easy and immediate results.

Oh yes- one late addition here and get one more pet peeve off my chest. Don’t email me requesting a reciprocal link and then tell me to do the work at both sites by adding your link to my directory and add my link to your directory. This really gets my goat!

I hope you can see that a few little things like this will make linking work the way it should for ALL of us and not for just ten or twenty websites! It really can be a simple thing to make linking work for you!

Tom Henricks
Amateur webmaster for my little shopping website

http://www.tomsvirtualmall.com

Source: http://www.365articles.com

Currently, MSN still displays search ads from Yahoo! Search Marketing, through a contract that runs until July 2006, but the new technology from Microsoft is just a few steps away from being fully implemented. In the first phase, MSN AdCenter was put to the test in France and Singapore and it was launched to public access in Singapore on August 31 and in France on September 26. The results from the two pilot countries were very promising so, apparently, the paid search program will go into beta testing in the United States in October 2005.

Advertisers love the PPC system rather than others because it’s cheaper and more targeted; they only pay when their ads get clicks. Until now the two major choices for PPC were Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. However, when a third major competitor turns up, one can only hope that cost per click (CPC) gets cheaper, thus lowering the advertising costs.

As to what the new service features, the competition promises to be tough, especially in the research and targeting tools area. The advertisers are able to specify what kind of audience they wish to target by demographics – geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day – and the system can provide keywords to be used in search campaigns. All these data can be accessed before the advertisers place their ads. Even more, it seems that the Adcenter program will provide feedback related to keywords performance and advertisers will be able to switch to more effective ones during the ad campaigns. Eric Hadley, senior director of advertising and marketing for MSN, says the new platform is meant to help users drive ROI from a search campaign beyond just knowing if somebody clicked on it, but also knowing if someone is likely to click on it. As for Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, they both provide geographical targeting but they don’t have demographics features. Meanwhile, the new AdCenter platform goes more towards customer profiling and behavior.

Search engine advertisers can’t wait to see their keyword based campaigns become even more targeted. However, they’ll have to wait a little bit longer, because there’s no serious encouragement that the full-scale deployment of AdCenter will be possible before the end of this year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Select the right keywords. You can pay a visit to your competitors’ websites (only those with top-ranked search engine placements). Through analyzing their web contents and meta tags, you can easily find out the keywords they are using. Overture keywords selection tool can also provide you valuable information. Open your favorite browser, enter http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/, type in the search box your keywords or phrases and see how many times they were searched last month. Select those with high search frequency. Google also has a similar keyword selection tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox. You can have a try of both of them and balance the search results.

Target your web site content at selected keywords. After finalizing the keywords, you can now build up your web pages with them. But, be careful, don’t overuse any keywords on your web pages. Overuse of keywords may make search engine spiders think you are spamming and get your website banned. How can I judge overuse or not? Go to http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ to have a check of your keywords density, make sure it is within a reasonable range.

Make search engine friendly URLs. Although some of the search engines can follow all dynamic URLs, like http://www.scriptmenu.com/detail.php?id=25257, some of them still prefer static URLs ended with html, htm, etc. To make search engine friendly URLs, you can create real static pages, but you don’t have to. The web server URL rewrite engine can make this job much easier by reinterpreting the URLs before getting actual pages. If you need more help or tips on how to implement URL rewrite model, follow the link http://www.scriptmenu.com/detail_24379.html and get a tutorial.

Get quality backward links to your page. Although keywords optimization of your web pages can improve significantly your search engine placement, it is still far from sufficient to get your pages top ranked. You have to get some quality backward links to your websites. You need at least 35 quality back links to make google going to your web site and take a look at you. You can get these quality links by submitting your site to high-ranked web site directories or by writing some quality articles and then submitting them to the high-ranked online article archives. Many other ways exist, but remember, only backward links from quality web sites count. Websites poorly indexed or with very low search engine ranking have no value to you.

Keep on improving your website. By keyword optimization, URL optimization and quality backward URLs, your website should have gotten remarkable search engine placement. However, the placement is not static, you competitors are optimizing their websites and trying to kick you out of your current position. To maintain a good search engine ranking, you have to keep on improving your website. Keep on optimizing your website navigation, content and structure. Keep on getting more quality links from top-rated sites…. The battle for top search engine positions will never end. Good luck,

About the author

Rory Canyon is the founder of ScriptMenu.com, a free web directory for PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, PERL, XML, Java, JavaScript, Flash, CFML, Python and other web programming resources. For more information, visit http://www.scriptmenu.com

Source: http://www.365articles.com