Search Engine Publicity - The Free Ride is OverWritten by Neil Street
For years, almost anyone involved with promotion of their website, be it for commercial or other purposes, has come to either love, or hate, search engines. Whether it is Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, or one of literally thousands of smaller search engines and directories, website owners have known that by “optimizing” their site for search engines, they could hope to rise to top ranks of a leading search engine when an applicable keyword or phrase was entered in search engine by a user.Back in 1997, when I started a small retail website that sells antique maps, http://www.vintagemaps.com , all it took to get indexed in Yahoo directory was a free submission. My site was dutifully submitted, and within four weeks it was #1 for its most important keyword phrase, and it remained in Yahoo’s top 10 for at least a year. Today, by contrast, it would cost $299 to even submit a commerical site to Yahoo directory, and there is no guarantee that it will even be indexed! The world has changed. For observers of search engine phenomenon, it was only a matter of time before free ride was over. How could it be otherwise? For years, website owners such as myself had been enjoying vast, and free publicity, courtesy of various search engines and directories. It could not last forever. First came search engine optimization, whereby savvy website owners hired specialists to “tweak” their sites to get better placement on search engines. As soon as search engines saw dollars being pumped into search, they began setting up their own payment models, including “pay-per-click” methods that allow an advertiser to display a small ad, adjacent to free search results, tied to specific keywords.
| | Links! Links! Links!Written by Neil Street
Website owners: do you know how many links are out there on Internet, pointing back to your site? If you’re interested in getting free search engine placement for your site, you ought to know. An easy way to find out is to download Alexa toolbar from http://www.alexa.com. One of its many useful features is that it shows you how many links are pointing to site. High quality links are one of most crucial aspects of good search engine optimization. When you think about it, this makes sense. After all, this is Internet, World Wide Web, we’re talking about. And in a web, everything is... right, everything is LINKED.Links have always been a priority in search engine optimization. Search engines have long used link popularity as an indicator of a site’s “importance,” and this in turn affects site’s performance in search engines. Until recently, many different schemes existed that allowed a website owner to garner dozens, or even hundreds of links, simply by using specialized tools, reciprocal programs, and like. Then came Google “update” of November, 2003. In that now legendary update, Google penalized tens of thousands of websites by dropping their placement in index or eliminating them entirely. While Google isn’t talking about what happened, it is very likely that “undeserved” links, or links that do not have anything to do with quality content, played a role in this episode. Most website owners now seem to agree that while links are as important as ever, they have to be added old-fashioned way – they have to be earned. What does this mean? Simply put, it means that a link between two pages on Internet should have some valid reason for its existence besides desire of website owners to hit page 1 on Google. So if Joe’s Auto Shop and Cindy’s Interior Design trade links, in order to boost their rankings, link only exists for that reason, and it may well lead to lower search engine rankings for both Joe and Cindy. On other hand, if Bud’s Cabinetry Shop, on its page describing different types of woods, is linked to National Association of Wood Products, this is very likely to be viewed as a “quality” link by search engine, and may help rankings.
|
