Search Engine Placement

We’ve just added another entry to our collection of SEO tools. The Google PageRank Checker is designed to check the Google PageRank and Alexa Rating of not just one, but multiple websites. Enter a list of website domains (separated by commas) and compare their respective rankings.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google PageRank and Alexa…

• Google PageRank is a measure of link popularity for a given website. Google rates the quantity and quality of a website’s backlinks on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best. Only massive websites like Google and Adobe receive a 10.
• Alexa Traffic Rankings is essentially a measure of how popular a website is. The lower the number, the more popular the site is. That’s the abbreviated version anyway. If you really want the long version, check out Alexa’s explanation.

Article submission marketing is so 2006, but unique article submission is very 2007. See most SEO’s and “internet marketing” companies are going about it all wrong. The typical company will write an article (or worse take one from your site) and submit it to a few hundred article directories.

The problem with article submissions is the potential for duplicate content. You either gain very few back links (removed for duplicate content) or worse you get penalized if the article is hosted on your site.

To really benefit from article submissions; each article you submit must be original or at least original enough to not look like duplicate content.

Shameless Self Plug: Use our article submission service. We re create each article to so every directory has a unique listing. The end result: you gain maximum link juice and many many more back links.

It looks like it’s that time again…when newbie websites earn their wings by receiving that coveted bit of notoriety from Google. I’ve yet to see any official postings from Google or even from fellow bloggers, but I have noticed that quite a few of my websites and client websites have received their initial PageRank update from Google. The update appears to be affecting only new websites sites that have not yet received a PageRank status from Google. We’ll post more on this in the days to follow as news regarding the specifics begins to surface.

Deep linking is when you build back links to your site using one of your sub page URL’s instead of your home page. This looks more natural to the search engines then just aquiring link after link to your homepage. Also, your overall link popularity benefits from deep link.
So next time you request a link from somewhere, use one of your sub pages. =)

So you want to increase your link popularity and your not sure whether to outsource the work or do it yourself? Link building can be a difficult task to accomplish.

Many ill informed web site owners think they just need to exchange links with site owners of similar and relevant sites, but alas this will not get you far. Unfortunately, unscrupulous site owners trying to take advantage of the search engines have ruined it for us all by abusing the system. Usually they would join link farms (or link exchange sites) and blast their site with hundreds, even thousands, of these reciprocal links. So now the search engines don’t give nearly as much value to reciprocal links.

Now the only viable way to build your link popularity is by building one way links. This can be very difficult unless you’re offering something of value to other site owners. This can be accomplished by “link baiting”. Offering a valuable tool, a free service, some funny content, or some valuable information.

Since link baiting can be very difficult to the average small business, many site owners choose to outsource their link building to companies offering link popularity services. There is all types of options to chose from such as; directory submissions, article submissions, online press releases, or simply buying text links on relevant sites.

But its not as easy as it seems. There’s many ways for site owners to devalue your one way link, from using automated scripts to even informing the search engines not to read or follow the link (called a no follow tag). Some link building companies will submit your site to their “network” of internal sites, often times these sites won’t have relevant content or are even hosted on the same IP block, so your site does not benefit at all.

The long story short is, link popularity building is not easy. Do your research. I highly recommend reading the blog post by Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans here. Of course, you can always use our link building services as well.