Don't swap links with 'link farms' - or sites that may have a penalty* All links aren't equal - value of a link decreases as number of links on page increases and Page Rank of a site will determine how valuable its link is to your site. When submitting your link to another site, try to get them to use meaningful link text with relevant keywords. Ensure that links to and from your site are relevant to your site content *A penalty can be indicated by a grey Page Rank bar or a white 'PR-0' bar. However, a grey bar can also indicate that a site has not been indexed and a white bar can indicate a site has been indexed but only recently - or has no recognised back links. Penalties are incurred when a site breaks rules set by Google - SEO crimes include:

Cloaking - a page is made to grab SE attention and redirect to URL of site in question. Keyword stuffing - keywords are 'stuffed' into image tags & other places where they shouldn't be, or aren't relevant. Hidden text - text on a page that matches background colour - so it's invisible to site visitors but not to search engines.

There are many resources on 'net to help you optimise your site safely. Search Engine Ethos has resources and links to get you started.

Some search engine robots just will not follow links that include a "querystring" as part of URL. You have seen a querystring if you have ever looked at URL of a page of search results in Google. For example, if you look for "blue widgets" on Google, not only do you get page after page of blue widgets, you also see that these pages have very complicated-looking addresses

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=blue+widgets

In this address, everything after question mark ("?") is a querystring. This is used to pass additional information to web server. While some search engines can follow a complicated address like this, many simply will not follow such a link. That means that if you use a URL like

http://www.mycompany.com/catalog.html?item=widget&color=blue&model=1

that robot may not be able to follow it. This is bad.

On other hand, an increasing number of search engine robots will follow such links. Usually, links like this are created "on fly" by filling-out forms and clicking a "submit" button, but that doesn't have to be case. You can grab that address, querystring and all, and put it into a "normal" link, like this

blue widgets style 1

Put several of these on a page and search engine robot can now visit your dynamic pages from links that require no button-clicking. Remember that not all robots will follow these links, so your mileage may vary.

As long as link to page exists in a form that does not require human intervention to get to it (pulldown menus, search results, form submits, etc) then a bot will follow it.

Widgets Out The Door Using any of these methods will help search engine robots to find dynamic pages on your site. This means that important content on those pages is more likely to be included in search engine databases, and that people will be better able to find you. That, of course, means that Widget Queen will reign supreme, knowing that widget customers world over will now be able to find you and buy your widgets.

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Dale Goetsch is Technical Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses and non-profits. He has over twelve years experience in software development. Along with programming in Perl, JavaScript, ASP and VB, he is a technical writer and editor, with an emphasis on making technical subjects accessible to non-technical readers.

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