Archive for March, 2008
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Basics
The answer to this question is really short - less than 100. According to Google’s design and content guidelines you should “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).” Though the actual reason for this is not stated it is logical to assume that this has something to do with the bot’s ability to crawl the links. If you place more than a hundred links in one page chances are that the search engines spiders wouldn’t be able to crawl all those links. Since you cannot say which links will be the ones crawled and which wouldn’t important pages may be left undiscovered.
Use common sense and simply obey Google. Of course this rule doesn’t apply to you if your website is actually a directory or contains listings and you need to pur more than 100 links on a single page. However, it still does make sense to limite the links in a page because cramming all the listings in a single page will make it hard for users to skim through them. By limiting the links in a page it will not only be good for your SEO but will also make your site more usable.
Popularity: 14% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Strategy
Still can’t get enough links? Here are some more link building ideas you might want to try out (if you haven’t tried it at this point yet).
- Free Stuff - Give away free stuff to people in exchange for links. This is like buying links but can’t be considered a link scheme if you ask for reviews/feedback on the product you give away instead of just a link. Make sure reviews contain links or else this won’t do you any good (in terms of link building). If you do not have any products to give away a free trial service/subscription would do.
- Donate to Charity - Of course this goes without saying that you should donate to a charity that has a website and that lists and links to donors on their site. You can also donate to charities by selling items and giving a portion of or your entire profit to eBay Giving Works (for eBay.com) or eBay for Charity (for eBay.co.uk) since most of the charities that get the donation link to the donor’s site.
- Participate in Link Exchanges - Hannah has a good post that outlines some guidelines for exchanging links. In addition to her guidelines though I think you should also make it a criteria to only exchange links with sites that get a lot of traffic.
Popularity: 14% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Strategy | Social Media
Running out of link building ideas? Here are a short list of sites where you can submit your link without any hassle. Note though that you should NOT resort to spamming these sites. Always submit a link only when it is relevant and do not do so excessively.
- Digg - Who hasn’t submitted something to Digg? If you haven’t it might be time for you to submit a really good blog entry of yours. If you have no blog you can submit a link to the most recent article about your website.
- Yahoo! Answers - Answer questions where you can site your blog/site as resource. Make sure your link really is relevant to the answer. With so many questions in Yahoo! answers you it shouldn’t be hard to find a question that would serve your purpose.
- Forums - Join a a good forum about your niche and be active there. DO NOT link drop but use your website URL as part of your signature if allowed. At the very least you can put it in your profile page.
- Craigslist - Post an ad at Craigslist. You can post a new ad each time you have a new product/service you want to promote. Free advertising and free inbound link. What more can you ask for?
Popularity: 19% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Basics
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for search engines to access all of a website’s contents is are forms. Often entire pages of submission forms or at least portions of it cannot be crawled by search engines via hyperlinks. This is actually a good thing if you specifically want that form to not be indexed by search engines (like for credit card information forms). However, in certain cases, when the content does not pertain to sensitive information, it makes sense to ensure that the content can still be indexed by search engines. Make sure that these forms can be accesses through a link so that search engines can crawl these pages.
Aside from making sure that the they can be accessed by search engines you should also make sure that they are error free so that users can also access them. There is no point in having the page be indexed by a search engine and showing up in SERPs if the users that find it through search are unable to use the form. Though this falls more of under web design as I have mentioned repeatedly you can only optimise a website if it does not contain too critical errors. Testing and debugging should always be done even before you start optimisation.
Popularity: 15% [?]
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