Yesterday I got an email from a pool company in Virginia. They wanted to exchange links with me.
“Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: http://lillicotch.com/Blog/2008/02/28/add-additional-income-to-your-site/”
For those of you who don’t have blogs, when you allow visitors to post on your site you will get blog spam. Some of the posts will attract more than others and this page is one of my worst for spammers. So what I’m guessing here is that this pool company hired an “SEO company” to help them with search engine rankings and that company probably first tried to post an ad as acomment on this page and then when my spam filter stopped it they tried this email.
Have a look at my page that they wanted a link from. There was nothing about swimming pools on it, in fact, I can’t think of any page on my site that has anything to say about swimming pools except this one.
I also went to visit the pool site and it looked fine. All about swimming pools. Then at the very bottom of the page there was a link to “Resources”. This was a link to page after page of completely unrelated links (a link farm). While this may have been an effective and acceptable form of promotion in 1996 it won’t help you at all today and may actually hurt your rankings. At the very least it looks your site look cheap and spammy.
Of course they probably never actually visited my site, but how much more simple would it have been for them to find any post of mine that they had some interest in and to write a short relevant comment? If the comment was related to my post I would have allowed it along with a link to their site and I probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared that it was a swimming pool site. Not only that one way links tend to be much more valued than link exchanges anyway.
If you want to know the right way to get traffic to your site there’s a good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the USA Today’s site. Anyone want to trade links?
It is a pretty much undisputed truth these days that getting inbound links to your site will move you up the search engine rankings. It’s also true that higher ranking sites pointing to yours will help more than lower ranking ones.
I can’t even guess how many times that I have heard people say that I’m not going to bother trying to get links from “them” because they are too new and won’t be worth anything. That may be true if you are planning to close down your site tomorrow, but do you think that these sites will always be new and low ranking?
You may be able to look into the future and see which of these will grow and which ones won’t, but I’m willing to bet if you could do that you would be retired, living on a tropical island somewhere and probably not reading this blog.
I believe a couple of things. First that unless your link is on a link farm page or some kind of spammer/scraper site that all inbound links will help your rankings right now. Is is also much easier to get new sites to mention you, especially if you offer them something (your help, advice, encouragement or just a friendly word).
High ranking sites are just not in the habit of giving away free mentions. Just try to get Yahoo, Cnet, WSJ, etc. to link to you and you will see what I mean. Newer smaller sites will be much more receptive and some of them won’t always be smaller. They will grow and so will the value of their links to your site.
If you would like to read more there’s a post on the Search Engine Watch site by Justilien Gaspard that I recommend called…
One of the things that I tell my customers when we first start to design their site is to try to think of keywords that they should use in their content to help search engines find them. To put these keyword(s) in the headlines and once or twice in the main text.
I have written before about keyword suggestion tools that help you determine popular keywords that people search for, but what I never really had was a process for deciding which words that my customers should be using. I usually have them tell me what keywords that they want to be found for and many times they weren’t the best ones for people to find them for or were not very popular search terms at all. I’ve said many times before what good are millions of visitors if they just come and then leave right away? You want keywords that bring traffic, but visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.
Recently I read a post on the SEOmoz blog that described a step by step process for helping discover what keywords would work best for a customer’s site. This is some great advice and it always helps to have a standardized process for determining what needs done. I highly recommend reading…
Whenever I design a new site I like to have a look at in all kinds of different browsers to see how it looks. Now days I usually have a look at it with my phone as well.
One of the most popular ones has always been Internet Explorer and as I have written about before Microsoft tends to make up their own “standards” and you can never be sure how your site is going to look in IE. Firefox has a cool little plug in called IE Tab that lets you switch between Firefox and whatever version of IE that you have installed in your computer.
The problem becomes when you want to see it in older versions of IE. I don’t worry too much about version 5.5 any more, but I still see quite a few visitors stopping by with IE6 and once you have upgraded to IE7 it’s pretty hard to go back.
I used to dig my old computer out of the drawer, fire it up and go to the new site, but now I’ve found IETester. It’s a free program that lets you view pages in IE 5.5, 6, 7 and even IE8 beta 1. It’s a really useful tool for web designers and it’s free.
I was reading an article from the Wall Street Journal on line the other day and it was about how you can find hidden deals on Ebay by searching for misspelled words. The idea being that if you searched for items that were listed, but misspelled that there would be fewer buyers looking for that item, so fewer bidders and a lower price.
While reading I thought that this could also be an effective strategy for site owners who are bidding for pay per click keywords on search engines. Here’s how:
- Site owners who want a particular search term will bid on it and very popular terms can be very expensive to get your ad somewhere near the top of the sponsored listings.
- Misspelled keywords are not nearly as popular so they won’t be nearly as expensive. Of course there won’t be as much traffic, but most likely the searchers will be looking for the same thing and there will be fewer or maybe no other advertisers.
- Since you don’t pay for these ads unless someone clicks on them it’s really not costly to experiment.
- There is the possibility that the searchers who are seeing your ads are looking for something other than what you have. That possibility exists no matter what keywords that you are buying and I don’t believe that misspellings will affect that much or at all. Writing a good descriptive ad of what you are promoting will cut down on you having to pay for people clicking on your ads who don’t want what you have.
The article on the WSJ also has links to sites to search for these misspellings if you are interested it trying this.
It seems that a person named Jason Gambert is trying to trademark the term “SEO”.
There is no reason to believe that he will be able to accomplish this, but I have seen some strange things come out of our courts.
There was a great article on the BBC News site over the weekend talking about how users are going deeper into websites right from the start and seem to only be interested in finding what they are looking for.
What does that mean for your site? Several things, but first of all you need to make sure all of your pages are indexed by the search engines. Visitors won’t read what they can’t find and this new research convinces me that they won’t visit your main page and search. If a searcher doesn’t find just what they are looking for on their first try they will go somewhere else.
It looks more and more like only once you have them in your site and engaged can you get them to sample some of your other pages. That’s when internal links like this post that talks about internal links or the random posts on the sidebar menu on this page can be valuable.
Another good method to try is to link to one of your internal pages with content that related to your discussion when posting on other blogs, forums or social networking sites.
There’s a great post on the Wall Street Journal ’s Small Business site that talks about what can happen if you suddenly get some great free publicity.
A service called Bag, Borrow or Steal which rents high end designer handbags and sunglasses is getting a mention in the new Sex and the City movie. The company is doing some really great things to take advantage of the expected traffic. Things like adding bandwidth, contests, games and inventory.
You might think that there’s nothing that could be bad about this, but there is. What if they buy too much inventory or their mention gets cut out of the film? It’s a fine line to walk. A new customer might not come back if they can’t get on to your site or you don’t have what you want and too much inventory can easily put you out of business.
I think that Bag, Borrow or Steal seems to be doing things right and I look forward to finding out how this turns out. It’s an article worth reading and remember something this large might not happen to your business, but you can try to get free or paid mentions in your local media and then plan well for the results.
A couple of things happened to me this week that made me say Hmmmmmmm.
I find it interesting how often things happen in groups. Maybe when I’m doing or thinking about an issue I’m just “tuned in” to finding more.
First I got a postcard form my old High School, Taylor Allderdice. They are putting together an Alumni Directory and they want me to give my contact information to a third party company who will catalog it for them.
I’m not sure that I’m in favor of giving my personal information to someone who then plan to sell it back to me. They have a privacy policy that says they will not share it with anyone but alumni, but as we all know privacy policies can be easily changed with the stroke of a keyboard.
That same day I see a post on Bruce Schneier’s blog called Our Data, Ourselves and I thought Wow!
Then, the next day, I met with a Realtor about his site and we got to talking about the MLS. I have written before how I don’t like the MLS. You give them your listings and they sell them back to you. Not only that they make it complicated, secretive, and very expensive. I explained to my potential customer that someone is going to do this better, make it easier and probably free.
The very next day while looking for something else I found Real Estate Search on Google Maps.
To try it yourself go to Google Maps, select your area and click on “Show search options”
Then, Restrict results to: Real Estate and click search.
This could be it!
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
In an effort to open up their formally (and still) secretive formulas for ranking your web page Google has added to their Official Webmaster Blog. It’s a very nice post called “Introduction to Google Search Quality” and is written by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality.
He (I think it’s a he) explains that web spam is just one part of their job. Their overall goal is to give their customer (the searcher) the best possible experience.
How does this help you? By letting you know a bit about how they work and what they want can go a long way toward helping you give your visitor the best experience by providing them what they are actually searching for. It’s a win, win situation for everyone.
If you are a site owner I would definitely advise that you read this and
