Do I need Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is simply the practice of making your website or blog more accessible to both search engines and search engine users; in other words, you’re making it easier for them to find you.

Do I really need to optimize my site?

Well, of course, you have the option of not making your site accessible to search engines and directories…but what’s the point of that? If you want your site to be found, then you must optimize it for search; and basically, that means you must make it visible to search engines. Web sites in today’s competitive business market that are not optimized for search don’t have much of a chance of being found by potential customers; and that goes for non-business sites as well.

Why is Search Engine Traffic so important?

Search engine traffic is the term used for traffic that is directed to your site via the results of a search performed through Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other of the myriad search engines out there. These days, the vast majority of internet users navigate the internet and find the information they want through performing searches, so most of the traffic coming to many websites is search engine traffic. Therefore, if you can tap this market, you’ll have access to that vast majority of users. Search engine traffic is much easier to cash in on then hoping someone stumbles across your web site randomly.

What is Link Popularity? Should it be a part of my SEO campaign?

Link popularity is a term used to describe the amount of links to one website from the rest of the internet. Link popularity is most commonly used when referring to search engines and search engine optimization, as link popularity is one of the most important factors in how search engines decide to rank web sites in the results pages of searches. The rationale behind this is that if your link popularity is high, and many people are linking to your site, then it must contain content and information that people find useful.  The most common example of how link popularity is factored into search engine results is Google’s Page Rank.

What are Inbound Links? What is their importance in terms of SEO?

Inbound links are probably one of the most important parts of successful search engine optimization. Inbound links are the number one factor in Google’s determination of your Page Rank, which has a huge influence on your position in their search engine results. Since Google accounts for roughly 80% of the searches performed on the internet, inbound links are very important if you’re looking to reach the majority of internet users.

Inbound links are defined as links found elsewhere on the internet that direct users to your site only. Inbound links differ from reciprocal links, which occur when someone links to your site and your site links back to them in turn. While these do factor into Google’s Page Rank assessment and other search engine algorithms, they do not carry the same weight that one way, inbound links do. In addition to increasing your Page Rank and appealing to search engines, inbound links also work to increase traffic to your site.

What is Page Rank? What is its importance in terms of my SEO strategy?

Page Rank is the number one factor in Google’s determination of the search engine ranking of web sites. Page Rank is a numerical figure assigned by Google to expressed the importance, relevance and validity of a website based on the number of links pointing at the website. By determining the volume of links pointing to certain websites, Page Rank attempts to determine that site’s importance. However, Page Rank also analyzes the links themselves, and assigns higher importance to links coming from site’s that have high Page Rank values themselves. In essence, Page Rank is a complex algorithm that plays a major role in the ranking of web sites on search results pages, and thus catering to Page Rank is a major part in the plans of web optimizers and search engine optimization.

Should I use a Site Map?

Every site should have a sitemap of some sort. It provides a way for visitors to navigate your site, as well as a shortcut for bots to crawl all your pages.

Google for “sitemap” and you’ll find nice examples, although it would be advisable to follow Google’s official guidelines and keep the number of links per page under 100.

What is Reciprocal Linking or Link Exchange?

Link exchanging or reciprocal linking is where two sites exchange links. Usually this occurs when a webmaster sends an email to another webmaster requesting a link on their site.

Because of how easy it is to get a link this way Google has greatly dis-valued these types of links. They are still worth something but not as much as they have been in
the past.

What are some tips in doing link exchange?

1. Only exchange links with related sites, don’t reciprocate with sites who are irrelevant even if they have a high Page Rank.

2. Don’t reciprocate with sites who link to anything, only exchange links with sites who are particular about who they link to.

3. Don’t reciprocate with sites which have categories for every industry or hobby ever invented. Again keep it relevant.

4. Don’t reciprocate with sites whose link pages contain hundreds of links.

5. Before reciprocating view the source of the page (CTRL + U for FF | View > Source for IE) and check that NONE of the links on the page contain a no-follow tag. A quick way to check is to use the find tool and search for “no-follow”.

6. Also go to http://www.domainname.com/robots.txt that way you can see if they have excluded the links pages.  Also do a search in Google for cache:domain.com/linkspage to see if the page your link will be placed on is indexed.