Posted on Dec 28, 2008
To find the broken inbound links in a quick manner, I suggest using the Google Webmaster Tools which provides a report that shows inbound links pointing to nonexistent webpages. Inbound links are an important factor in search engine rankings, so you do not want to link to pages that do not exist as this will have no affect on your serps. Additionally, broken links are not user friendly and can agitate your visitors. You may have accidentally created broken internal links by making your website have keyword friendly urls. To fix these broken inbound links, you can contact the sites that are linking to the nonexistent webpages, or the easier method is to just fix it yourself using 301 permanently moved redirects. It is essential that you fix broken links as your website’s full potential is not taken advantage of with broken links. By fixing broken inbound links, you can improve your visitor experience and improve your search engine rankings at the same time.
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Posted on Dec 24, 2008
Instead of buying links, which violates Google’s webmaster guidelines, you can buy existing websites that are related to your niche. Granted it costs more to buy an entire website as opposed to a link, this is a legitimate method of acquiring links to your website, but can also benefit you in other ways. You are not only acquiring potential links to your website when you buy another, but you are gaining all of the content, age, and authority that this domain may have. You can choose to simply add links on the existing website that you purchased to pass on some PageRank to your website, or you can slowly move the content to your domain. If you choose to move the content, then be aware that you should slowly 301 redirect pages over to your site; if you 301 redirect all of the pages to your website at once, then search engines will be suspicious. After you have moved all of the content to your domain, you should see noticeable changes in your existing website as the content, age, and authority will be passed on. By buying a website that is in a related niche, you can significantly improve your own website by slowly transferring the website, or by adding a few links to your website and maintaining the website that your bought. Both of these methods can have great impacts and improve your website through the acquisition of another.
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Posted on Dec 17, 2008
Having keyword friendly urls is an extremely important part of seo. Let’s take two urls for example and compare how they will do: (1) http://yourdomain.com/page1.html vs. (2) http://yourdomain.com/keyword1-keyword2.html. The first url does not include any of the keywords and it lacks any description as to what the page will contain. It is clear that you want to include your targeted keywords in the url of a page. This will significantly improve how a particular page ranks for those keywords. I recently worked on one of my sites that had non-search engine friendly urls. They were not quite as nondescriptive as the first example, but I went though individual pages on the site and reworked the urls to include the keywords that the particular page targeted. I used 301 redirects to fix the broken links and allows the search engines to realize that I had permanently moved these urls to another location. After this change so that my urls matched the second example, it took a while for the search engines to accounted for this move and reindexed the pages, but after that time I saw that these pages started to rank much better for their keywords. Even though creating urls with your keywords in them sounds like common sense, we sometimes neglect to do it or need to rework old errors. I assure you that changing your urls to make them seo friendly with your keywords in them will have a noticeable difference when it comes to serps.
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Posted on Dec 5, 2008
Properly using meta tags can improve your serps; whereas improper usage of meta tags can hurt your site regarding seo. The key meta tags that are important regarding seo now are your websites title tag and description tag. The reason for the great importance of these two meta tags is that they are seen by potential viewers from search engines. These tags should be related to your pages content and the keywords that this page targets. By being consistent with the usage of your keywords in your content and in your title as well as description, this will drive targeted visitors to your website and improve your seo. Many studies have shown that users are more likely to click on links that contain their search term in the title tag on search engines. Additionally, the description tag is of significance because most users read your site’s description before clicking on the link via the search engine; a bad description tag can turn potential visitors away from your site. These are the reasons that properly using title tags and description tags is of vital importance and the strong effects that these factors can have on your website regarding seo.
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Posted on Nov 24, 2008
The anchor text is the text that is shown to the user, so in <a href=”http://seoly.com/blog”>Webmaster Blog</a>, “Webmaster Blog” is the anchor text. This anchor text is extremely important because it tells the readers or search engines what type of information this link contains. When you are linking to another site, ensure to use proper relevant anchor text; additionally, when other sites are linking to you, ensure that this site rightly represents your website. Below is an example of proper and improper usage of anchor text:
The first link clearly has more relevant anchor text because it states directly what the link is about; the anchor text should be able to stand alone and give the user a complete idea about what this link will have information regarding prior to opening this link. Furthermore, you can interlink many of your webpages by simply adding links, where relevant, to other webpages on your site that discuss that topic. For instance, if you mention the terms “smart priced”, then you can use these terms as anchor text to the related webpage: “What are the chances of being smart priced by Google?” Anchor text has significant importance when it comes to seo, so use it in the correct manner to optimize your website.
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Posted on Nov 20, 2008
You should use dashes, -, instead of underscores, _, generally when it comes to urls in seo. If you have term1-term2 in a url, then the search engine will see these terms as the following: term1, term2, term1 term2, or term2 term1. This is must more friendly to search engines. The exception to using dashes is if you have a term like _MAXINT, which may be different from MAXINT in programming languages. In reality though, Google has made adjustments for dashes and underscores, so that you can use them interchangeably with some respect. It is possible for Google to make a mistake in parsing your url terms if you use underscores, thus it is safer to use dashes to avoid any problems. These are the differences in how search engines view dashes and underscores, and the reasons that dashes are better to use in normal circumstances.
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