Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. It's all in the planning - Part 9
Massaging your search engine ranking by using links
In the last episode, I showed you how to go about submitting your site to search engines. Being listed is all well and good - and if you've chosen your keywords properly and carefully, you should achieve fairly good rankings straight off the bat. You can, however, move your site further up the rankings still, by the judicious use of links to your site from other sites.
Come again?
Don't blame me for this! Google started it and other search engines have followed suit. How it works is this:
There's a theory that, if your site is being linked to by a very high profile site, then it must be a good site. For instance, if the AOL UK home page on the web has a link to your Web site, then your Web must be a pretty good one, on the basis that the AOL UK site is (in Web terms) huge and very popular. It's a lot like a word-of-mouth recommendation from someone - along the lines of "Well, if they're good enough boots for Beckham, then they're good enough for me", or, "Wow, if Clapton uses that guitar, it must be good!"
You get the drift? Now, I'm not saying that it's right, or that it necessarily follows that any site linked to from a high-profile site is going to be a good site. All I'm saying is that's how it works - that's how the search engines decide (at least partly) your ranking.
The trick, then, is to get your site linked to from a high-ranking site on the search engine of your choice. Obviously, the ranking needs to be for keywords similar to your own, although in the case of really major portals and hugely visited sites, it really doesn't matter.
For instance, if you could get a link to your site plonked onto one of the many BBC sites, you'd benefit greatly in search engine rankings. I'm sure you could come up with a list of top sites that would look much better with a link to your site on them, as well!
Link Exchanges
The engines also count the number of links to your pages - something that so-called link exchanges tried their best to exploit. You offered up the URL for your site, and, in return, created a "links" page on your own Web, into which you pasted a whole great long list of the sites that were also part of the Link Exchange. They worked for about five minutes, because as soon as the folks behind the engines discovered what was going on, they changed their code. They really don't like webmasters trying to exploit loopholes!
So, link exchanges tend not to work anywhere near as well - in fact, they can work against you, as they're now considered to be a form of Spamming.
So, what should you do?
Well, in the case of my own Strange Brew site (www.strange-brew.com) I spent some time following links after searching on "Strange Brew". I visited loads and loads of sites, and made a note (by bookmarking) of sites of other bands called "Strange Brew". They were my first port of call. I dropped them an email, asking whether they'd like to trade links - some said yes, some said no.
With that done, I next turned to the shops from which the band members buy their gear, and asked whether they'd like a mention on our site, and would they be prepared to reciprocate, and carry a link back to our site. Again, some said yes, and some said no.
By the time I'd finished this round of emails and phone calls, I'd sorted out a few reciprocal links. As luck would have it, one of the Strange Brew bands was very highly ranked, and as soon as their link to our site took, I noticed our own ranking had shot up. Nice!
The next port of call is to online chat pages - especially very popular ones on major portals. By rigging a signature that had www.strange-brew.com in it, I achieved links back to our site from very highly ranked sites. Be careful with this, though - have too many messages up there with your URL in them, and you find yourself being regarded as a spammer! Keep them select, and don't post millions of them!
Oh, yes. I managed, also, to get a link to our site on one of the BBC sites, by dint of doing a show for them, featuring the band. That did no end of good for page rankings.
The upshot is, now, that if you drop into most of the major search engines, and do a search on "Strange Brew Band" you'll see a link to the "the band for all reasons" in the top ten.
Time and effort
I'll be honest - it's taken a lot of effort and a lot of time. I dread to think how many sites I've visited, how many emails I've sent, and how many times I've massaged the keywords we use.
I've tried as far as is humanly possible to be honest about the site and what it does when it comes to descriptions and keywords - I'm looking to attract visitors for two reasons. One is so that we can get more bookings, and the other is to present a way for our fans (all three of them!) to discover where we're playing next, and also to be able to listen to some of the tracks we play.
I only want folks to come to our site if they want to come - I'm not looking to trick them into entering the site at all. If you follow the same sort of idea, you'll get good solid traffic that comes back time after time - and isn't that what a Web site's all about?
Well, that's it - the end of the series. I hope that it proves useful to you, and that your site is successful.
