Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

In my last article I talked about how content is the most important aspect of a website.  While this is true, it is only part of the equation.

If you have ever lurked around any of the webmaster forums you may have received mixed signals in that there doesn’t seem to be consistency on what’s most important to achieving good search engine rankings.

When you go to a search engine and perform a search many people don’t understand how those results end up there.  Some people may think that sites are submitted while others know that a piece of software finds the pages.  This article explains one piece of that puzzle:  The search engine crawler.

If you frequent different SEO forums you may have received mixed signals on things like Flash or JavaScript.  You may be wondering if it’s safe to use these and if so, what the impact will be.  In this article, I attempt to address your concerns over JavaScript.

Basic On-Page SEO

On-page optimization is often ignored by the top sites on Google - after all, who cares about a few percentage points when you can literally buy your way to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) with a bucket-load of inbound links?

Today I’ll discuss a bit about why, contrary to common practice, why on-page SEO is so important and then tell you how you can quickly optimize your web pages even if you have very little time!

For those of you that dont know who Dan Thies is, he is one of the most well known keyword specialist out there. Aaron Wall did an interview with him a few days ago.  A good portion is focused on discussing ways professional SEO’s market themselves and build links.  It then goes into depth about keyword research, which is a very important topic IMHO. There are lots of good links to resources and articles.

Read the full Article Here: Interview with Dan Thies

Sitemaps are more important then most webmasters realize.  Even some SEO’s dont use them, which is shocking.  This article will explain to you how to properly create a sitemap, as well as some popular tools to do it.

Keyword Research is still just as essential today as it has always been, for SEO.  This Article gives a step by step example on how to properly pick Keywords for a Niche site.

Bob over at Seocompany.ca keeps a very nice list of both paid and free web directories.  Since our last posting he has added hundreds more. It’s worth taking a look at again.

http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html

Google’s backlinks command stopped showing the whole story earlier this year and now shows just a small sample of backlinks, conspicuously omitting most links from high-PR pages and homepages. While this does make it much harder use google’s link: command to reverse engineer their algorithm (how long did you think they’d keep letting us do that?), it does have a side-benefit: its now much harder for your competitors to figure out where you’re getting your best backlinks.

For example: http://www.cnn.com links to http://www.novell.com/products directly from their homepage and it doesnt show in backlinks at all. Read on for more examples. Anyone have some more to add?

Eight Keyword Research Tools that are very helpful in doing keyword research. The following review looks at some of the best free internet based keyword research tools.  You need to make sure you are not targeting keywords that no one is searching for!

This is straight from Google:

“Google automatically takes a “snapshot” of each page it crawls and caches it. This enables us to show the search terms highlighted on text heavy pages so users can find relevant information quickly, and to retrieve pages for users if the site’s server temporarily fails. Users can access the cached version by choosing the “Cached” link on the search results page. If you do not want your content to be accessible through Google’s cache, you can use the NOARCHIVE meta-tag. Place this in the section of your documents:

This tag will tell robots not to archive the page. Google will continue to index and follow links from the page, but will not present cached material to users.

If you want to allow other robots to archive your content, but prevent Google’s robots from caching, you can use the following tag:

Note that the change will occur the next time Google crawls the page containing the NOARCHIVE tag (typically about once a month). If you want the change to take effect sooner than this, the site owner must contact us and request immediate removal of archived content. Also, the NOARCHIVE directive only controls whether the cached page is shown. To control whether the page is indexed, use the NOINDEX tag; to control whether links are followed, use the NOFOLLOW tag. See the Robots Exclusion page for more information.”

http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html

A webmaster or a Search Engine Optmization expert alike, often face the challenge of doing a redirect of old pages/files to newly named or newly created pages. While there are many types of redirects possible, a 301, a.k.a “permanent redirect” is the most used redirect type among the SEO community. When a website or webpage changes its name, that equates to starting all the link popularity related works from scratch. But, with a properly executed “301 permanent redirect”, you are telling a S.E spider that, this page has moved to a new location permanently, hence update all the related information to the new location or the filename. This relieves you of the painful redoing of the link popularity from scratch, apart from giving other user benefits.

But 301 redirect is a highly mis-understood and improperly executed function too, among many newby webmasters and SEOs. Here is a useful collection of “How To” of 301 redirection.
If your website is hosted on MS IIS 5.0 server, then you should read this

----- Update -----

This article was written in August 2004 and was speaking mostly about High Pagerank Monthly Links.  At the time I saw a lot of people spending massive amounts of money on monthly high PR links without any consideration of whether or not the links were actually working.  It can get real costly if you buy a lot of links and only half of them work, but you dont know which half since you bought them at the same time.  In that scenario it would be impossible to tell which links you should keep and which ones you shouldnt

It is just as good of an idea today as it was back then to build links slowly over time.  Too many links at once is a good indicator to the search engines that someone is artificially trying to inflate their rankings.

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The tiered approach to buying links is a simple concept that will save you money. Buy a few links, see how they effect your rankings, and then buy a few more. If you buy tons and tons of links all at once there will be no way of knowing how many links you actually needed to get to the top of the rankings.

Here’s a robots.txt tutorial to help you make sure you have your robots.txt files are properly set up. Mistakes can be costly.
Here’s a handy robots.txt validator