Strategies for Success

Links Improve Rankings & Success

Good-quality incoming links are an essential part of search-optimizing website pages. Incoming links help search engines determine the importance of the information you provide to visitors. When search engine robots and spiders visit internet pages, they follow the hyperlinks contained on various pages. Therefore, the more links that direct these web crawlers to your site coming from other important sites, the higher you can expect your page to rank in search results.

You can increase incoming links using many different techniques. Participate in forums where you are permitted to include your website's URL in your signature information. Spend the time to locate recognized directories and submit your website's URL. Don't go to the "link farms"; instead turn to directories such as the Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web, and others. Search for relevant directories that are smaller and less well-know which contain links to websites that are topic-driven. If your website fits into the topic of the directory, you can build some great links through these submissions.

Locate websites which are relevant to your products or services and request in a personal email that the webmaster place a link to your website in exchange for linking to the webmaster's site. This is called "reciprocal linking" and, if your website is a quality source of information, other websites that are not in direct competition but related to the topic in some way are usually pleased to share links with you.

While linking to other SEO-friendly, top-quality websites and allowing other quality websites to link to your site are both good, avoid linking to any website that might be considered part of a "bad neighborhood". Any website that uses cloaking, keyword spamming, or other less-than-ethical techniques should be avoided.

Long-Tail versus Short-Tail SEO Keywords

Perhaps you have heard of the terms long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords. Because search engines have become very sophisticated in recent years, the use of SEO keywords in websites has also become more advanced. Let's look at the difference in these two types of keywords and how they can benefit your website:

Short-tail SEO Keywords
Short-tail SEO keywords is often one word but it may be a keyword phrase. It is a rather general keyword that might be used to search for a product or service. In the example about dog training, "dog training" is a short-tail keyword. It is very generic rather than very specific. Anyone wanting to know a bit about dog training in general would be interested in the main landing page which is really an introduction to dog training.

Long-tail SEO Keywords
Long-tail SEO keywords do not really have to be long. Instead, the term refers to keywords and keyword phrases which are very specific. They may be much longer than short-tail keywords, but sometimes this is not true. What is always true is that the long-tail keywords will be specific. In the example about dog training, a long-tail keyword might be "teaching my dog the sit command". A person seeking a specific type or segment of dog training would be attracted to this subordinate website page.

Continually Update SEO Pages

Once you have built an SEO-friendly website, it can be quite easy to decide to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labors. But, if you want to maintain great page ranking, you should continually update your SEO web pages. As the spiders and 'bots crawl the internet, they will notice the updates and potentially bring your website even higher in the search results.

Adding continual updates does not have to be extremely labor intensive. You can add a blog, post your newsletter contents on the site, invite other experts in the field to provide an interesting article which can be placed on the website as a search engine optimized page; the options are endless.

Your next step should be to get further informed on advanced search engine optimization techniques. An excellent e-book on the topic of Search Engine Optimization is “The SEO Book” by Aaron Wall. Here you can find a detailed review.

All the best in your success!
Mark Melnik