Carrie Hill just published a summary of directories that should be on every one’s link building list. These are credible sources that the search engines use to help determine the relevancy of your site for things like products, services, or locality.
See Carrie’s list of Must Have List of Directories
Related:
There is a new Canonical tag that is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. This is important news, especially as people are working more and more with CMS systems and database driven websites (such as Joomla, WordPress, etc).
The issue is that people can arrive at your content in a variety of ways. The simplest variation being www. versus non www. version of your site. What’s that, you say they are the same? Au contraire mon fraire, to a search engine www is a separate sub-domain. There are some easy programmatic ways to address the www versus non www issue, however the problem starts to get sticky in when you mix in the wide range of variables such as dates, tags, and categories that can be included in the URL structure.
The search engine spider may find variations like these all pointing to the same content:
Worst still are session ids (used on larger sites) which can cause a single page of content to be indexed hundreds of times:
Add to this that you can’t control how others link to your content and you begin to understand why duplicate content is such a large issue.
Why should you care? From and SEO perspective 1 page with 100 incoming links has far more relavency than 100 pages with identical content having one incoming link each.
To address these concerns, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to take the content of the Canonical Link Tag as the preferred name for a page.
So adding a tag such as:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization“/>
will indicate that the page should be indexed as www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization, regardless of how the spider found the page.
Here’s a link to more information on this topic by Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land:
http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537
Google’s Matt Cutts posted this video on the Canonical Link tag.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
The discussion begins hitting of some of the finer points of this topic starting in at about 12:05.
One of the cornerstones of improving any business is referrals. Nothing promotes a product or service better than positive comments from someone you know and respect or from an authority in the field. The same is true for your website.
To explain the importance of incoming links to grow traffic to your website, I often use a metaphor of selecting a roofer. You don’t know a roofer, but you have a friend that builds houses, so you ask who he would use. The answer provides not only who to call, but provides immediate credibility for that roofer. If you asked another contractor, and he recommended the same roofer, it increases the credibility of that roofer ten fold. However, if some anonymous bystander overheard you asking about a roofer and said “hey I know this guy”, it probably wouldn’t carry a lot of carry a lot of weight in your selection process.
The message here is that both the quality and the quality of the referral matter.
Likewise, one of the cornerstones for improving Search Engine traffic is by growing referral links from credible websites. The larger and more credible the referring website, the better. Likewise, the greater the number of referring websites the better. However, this can be overdone and, like the anonymous guy who overheard your conversation and offered a name, if the referring websites have little or no credibility in the Search Engine, they will have little or no influence on your traffic.
You may remember or have heard about “link exchanges”, essentially an “I’ll link to yours if you link to mine” strategy. These use to be very popular and were a good way to grow incoming links. However, the Search Engines algorithms have evolved making it doubtful that sites of equal rank linking to each other would provide any benefit. Paying people to post in blogs has also become popular in recent years, but just like finding an ad for “loans” posted in a Laundromat, would make you question the credibility of the loan company, links sprinkled in unrelated blogs across the web can cause the Search Engine Algorithm to question the credibility of those links.
So how do you grow links? My answer would be slowly my friend, one at a time.
There is an interesting discussion the Search Engine Land website that asks the question “Who Owns Link Building” and my earlier discussion on Directories and Incoming Links that may be of interest.
It is beneficial to separate and track your Pay Per Click traffic from Organic in Google Analytics. If you don’t make the effort, PPC and Organic traffic will be lumped together, making it difficult to know how your SEO efforts are progressing.
Once you make the link between Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, the tracking will occur automatically. To set this up, simply access the Analytics tab in your AdWords account and then either select Create New or Link to Existing. Once you have done this, all your campaign information, keyword information et cetera will be nicely broken out in your Google Analytics account.
If you previously messed up and selected Create New (when you had an existing account) this can be corrected. You use to have contact Google to have this done manually. This recently changed with this AdWords announcement explaining how you can now un-link and link AdWords and Google Analytics.
In addition to seeing Google (CPC) broken out, you can also have Yahoo (CPC), MSN (CPC), and others broken out in Google Analytics. While tracking additional marketing campaigns in Google Analytics requires a little extra work when you set the campaign up, it’s definitely worth the effort.
Tracking other campaigns is accomplished by editing and adding a tracking code to the end of each of the URLs used in your ads. While adding this “tracking code” stuff may sound complicated or technical, it’s not. But just in case, Google has created a tool that simplifies things. To set these up go to the Google Analytic URL builder , enter the URL of your landing page with the associated campaign information and the tool will generate an updated URL complete with the code . The codes can be placed on any incoming links you wish to track enabling you to track banner ads, paid placements, and so on with your Google Analytics account.
Note: AdWords will automatically appear in your Analytics account as “Google (CPC)”, so using “CPC” (cost per click) as the “Campaign Medium” setting for other Pay Per Click marketing campaigns will make them appear in like fashion, Yahoo (CPC), MSN (CPC).
Perhaps the single most important thing that affects your web sites ranking is incoming links. However, it isn’t as simple as just getting incoming links pointing to your site, the links need to come from credible sources. To boost relevancy, links surrounding text need to contain industry phrases and the link itself can give you a boost if the linked text contains a key phrase that you would like your site to be known for. See: URLs and Linking for SEO
Before I start working on directory listings I use Google’s Webmaster tools (look under >Statistics >What Google Sees to see what phases the site is known by and then under >Statistics >Index Stats Read more…
I mention on my SEO page that having a descriptive URL is a good thing. In the example I say that www.huntsville-bike-parts.com is better than having www.bobsbikes.com. Why?? — You know that incoming links (sites linking to yours) are very important, perhaps equally important is the phrase that links the URL. When you have a descriptive URL, this link and phrase association are one and the same.
For example, here I have linked the phrase Search Engine Marketing to www.marketing-ontheweb.com.
