You will have come across the term "backlink" in your research by now. A backlink is an inbound link to your website, article or other content from another website. For example, let's say Bill Frug has written an article about computer sound card hardware on his blog Twist And Frug. Another site that deals with computer hardware called Tech Up may produce an article about sound cards that links to Bill's article with the blurb "If you want to find out more about the Colobus Sound Chunder XVII, here's a great article from Twist And Frug." The link from Tech Up is Bill's backlink.
Why Backlinks are Important
Backlinks are important for several reasons. Firstly, when you link to other sites from your content, it gives visitors to your site a way to discover more information in an easy and direct fashion and improves their overall experience. Relevant links to other articles are therefore very worthwhile.
Another factor
is that some search engines including Google will give your site more
credit if it has a decent number of quality backlinks leading to and from it. Your site will
gain more relevancy compared to others in a search enquiry. Backlinks are therefore very powerful indicators of your site's quality. The importance of quality here cannot be stressed enough. The search engines will scan the site doing the linking to determine the quality. If the content of the linking site is relevant to that of your article or site, then that will be considered a higher quality link, and your content will gain higher search relevancy. The
more backlinks you have, the better, for obvious reasons. You want to
attract traffic to your site by whatever means possible. Backlinks are
hugely valuable for this reason, particularly when they are on popular,
high-traffic sites. Manipulating links or trying to game the system will not help your cause, though. Search engines will look for organic, natural link patterns that grow over time, and massive link spam farms will be ignored, or worse, may damage your search engine score. You should also be careful about what sites you link to, as some may have a bad reputation which will bring down your own quality score. Creating high quality backlinks is therefore crucial to Search Engine Optimisation, and should be high priority in your SEO strategy. Later we'll examine how to go about getting backlinks from other sites in detail, but for now focus on the importance of high quality content that others will want to link to.
SEO is a way to place your website at a higher ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). You ultimately want to have your article or site showing up on the first page of results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and the rest. This involves the proper use of the keywords that people employ when they search for a topic. How do you improve your search engine ranking? It's really quite simple. Select the keywords to place in your text that people use the most often. Repeat these keywords more than once, or variations of them, in your article - but don't over use them. As noted before, spamming of keywords will not help you, in fact it will hinder you, since Google filters out this noise. Now promote your article online at websites that have high traffic, and through social media. This is the real trick, though, and we'll devote more time to promotional methods in another article. While this is a basic and simple approach to increasing your sites appearance in natural (unpaid) search engine results, it still requires that you do the proper keyword research and actually have well-written, content-rich articles to publish on your site! For some people, coming up with content is the hardest part of the process.
Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is a technique by which search engines such as Google attempt to parse the content of a page other than by using straight keywords for indexing and retrieval. Using complex mathematical methods they attempt to find patterns in text and relevance of synonyms. Why? To make search results more efficient and appropriate for the user. If a user types in a word or sentence, and the search engine can link that input to a range of different terms, phrases or even concepts, then the information retrieved is much more useful and wide ranging than simply looking for instances of the input alone.
LSI has come into use because of this natural efficiency, and also because of black hat techniques used by site developers such as the overloading of a page with keywords and link text overuse, often not relevant to the topic or cluttering the page, in an attempt to artificially increase search engine results and ranking. This is now, thankfully, an obsolete technique, as Google will filter out this kind of noise.
Advantage: Good Writers!
Using LSI effectively is actually far more intuitive for the writer than one might imagine. Instead of robotically loading the text body with keywords cobbled together from research site lists, the author uses the natural flow of language with multiple alternative words and phrases to describe concepts. A page with quality and variety will score higher with LSI than a page that hammers away with only a limited number of terms. To take advantage of LSI, authors need only create content-rich, high quality page offerings that use their natural affinity for language in an interesting and detailed manner.
There are common misunderstandings among webmasters and content managers about the way that search engines treat "no follow" links.
What is a No Follow Link?
A no follow link does not add value to the page in terms of boosting PageRank, and does not affect the document's placement in search engine results pages. They are used when you may want to link to something but do not want to transfer PageRank value to that target. For example, if you are being paid to display a link, or get paid commission for people that follow such a link, you do not want to add PageRank to that target, because this is viewed as spam by Google, and you could be removed from Google's database. Additionally you might want to point to something on the internet that is poorly made, fraudulent or just generally bad for some reason, but you don't want to give PageRank to that target.
It's as simple as that.
Here's how a selection of search engines treat no follow links:
Google: The Googlebot does not follow the link. Easy.
Yahoo: Any found link is made available to their algorithms for finding new content, irrespective of the no follow attribute. However, Yahoo does exclude the link from ranking calculations.
Ask.com: They do not recognise the no follow attribute, so it makes no difference either way.
Bing: might or might not recognise no follow links depending on context, but does exclude the link from ranking calculations.
Google's Matt Cutts has weighed in about PageRank and the
no follow link attribute. If you're up in the air about how to treat your links, then his advice may be useful to you.
Brett from Michigan asks Matt Cutts of Google:
“Are there negative SEO implications to having a blog with do-follow comments? What about commenting on do-follow blogs?”
Question: Can having do-follow comments on my blog affect its reputation?
Short answer: Yes.
Question: Are there negative implications to having a blog with do-follow comments?
Short Answer: Yes.
Watch the following video for more detailed information:
Keywords are the index terms or descriptors which allow for subject or article identification and search retrieval. It is essential to use keywords in your online material to increase traffic to your site via use of search engines.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is tricky, and it takes a lot of effort to find related keywords. Thankfully, many software developers have produced keyword research applications, which save a great deal of time and expense when researching campaigns.
There are quite a few out there and new iterations are being developed all the time, but for starters we'd like to list a few that we use and have found effective:
Google Keyword Planner
Google's old Keyword Tool has been replaced by this new streamlined service now called Keyword Planner which locks neatly in to AdWords.
KeywordSpy Tool
This is a paid service with a free option, and it is an effective one that has powerful research choices that make for profitable data collection. As the name suggests, it allows you to "spy" on keywords. You can check out what competitors are spending on their own paid search campaigns, their competitors, and other factors.
Keyword Research Tools from Wordtracker
This can be tried free but has a more extensive paid service, but again is an effective tool-set with a simple and intuitive interface.
KeywordEye
This is developed in the UK so it uses Google UK. If you're using it in another country such as the US you'll have to change your default location. The free option limits you to 100 keywords, so while useful, it's not something that can be used as your only campaign research tool.
