Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
When submitting press releases as part of our SEO services we are often asked why we chose PRweb.com as our vehicle for submission rather than PRNewswire. When compared across our big three parameters PRWeb is the better service for our purposes. PRNewswire seems more like something large companies use to get out news because they send your release more to journalists and less to Web outlets. This summarized it nicely: “Services such as PRNewswire and Newswire provide a far more targeted channel to specific demographics than the cheaper alternatives, however unless you’re willing to pay top-rates, the SEO benefit (on a keyword level) is less.”
Pricing
PRWeb.com is more affordable, which our clients certainly appreciate.
| PRWeb |
PRNewswire |
| No membership fee. Their “average” press release costs is $80 with the SEO Visibility option being $200. |
Membership based with annual fee of $150. From their site: “The cost of distributing your news release is determined by the newsline you select and the length of your news release. Each newsline covers a specific geographical area ranging from local, regional, national and international. Prices start at $180 for a city/metro or statewide distribution. A national distribution starts at $680.”PRNewswire Toolkit |
Reach
The reach appear to be better on the web, which is our focus.
| PRWeb |
PRNewswire |
| “Gets picked up in leading online news sites like Yahoo! News, Google News, Ask.com, and Topix. Additionally, your press release is distributed through a host of other online news sites including our own PRWeb.com and eMediaWire.com, which deliver over 50 million page views each month.” |
“Your message will reach mainstream and industry trade media, thousands of web outlets and PR Newswire for Journalists, a digital media channel serving more than 85,000 registered journalists across the globe.” No mention of Google News ” among 3,600 of the world’s most widely accessed Web sites” |
Cached Pages
Of course this is just one example, but Google may index PRWeb better as well.
PRWeb: August 28 press release - Cached
PRNewswire: August 28 release - Not cached
Both sites have their advantages, but for SEO, it would appear the PRWeb.com is still the best choices for helping your rankings.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Strategies | 1 Comment »
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
If you read my post about Squidoo last week you know I got addicted to it just a little bit. Our SEO company has started using Squidoo as a tool and sometimes one tool can lead you to another. This discovery was totally serendipitous. As I was trying to market my own Squidoo pages (lenses as Squidoo calls them) I had a thought on how to use Flickr to build links. (Flickr is an online photo management, photo sharing web 2.0 site.) I had been placing some images on Flickr so I could then link to them from my Squidoo page. Once all the images were in place I went back to Flickr to start naming them and adding descriptions. Then I thought, “Can I place text links in the descriptions?” And you what, I could and you can too. Flickr allows you to place links in the photo descriptions and they are real HTML links that are followed by the search engines.
I’m sure you can see the uses for this. Does you site sell products? Can you place the photos on Flickr? If so, you should add your product photos and each photo should have a title, description and link to that product. These links meet many of my perfect link criteria especially since you control the anchor text of this one-way link. Of course you should always make sure the link makes since. If you are selling a bike, take a picture of the bike put it on your Flickr account and then link to that bike on your site.
Flickr images are returned in search results and Google currently has 26 million pages cached so Flickr has good search engine visibility.
To further prove this works, do a search in Google for ‘dark phoenix costumes‘. I’m a bit of an X-men fan and so I posted some artwork of the Phoenix character which is the subject of my Squidoo page. As of August 19, 2007 you should notice that the #9 search result is my Flickr page I created and the #6 result is for my Phoenix Squidoo page. The Flickr Dark Phoenix Costume page only took one week to be cached by Google and now a one-way link has been cached with keyword rich anchor text.
Please don’t abuse or spam this technique but instead try to provide information for your customers with the photo. I’m sure Flickr would have no problem turning all the links to redirects or nofollow links such as Wikipedia. Don’t abuse, just use.
Let me know if you have tried this already or what success you have had with this strategy.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Social Media Optimization | 8 Comments »
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Update October 29, 2007: Well, after a brief few months my first Squidoo pages have acheived PR values of 5 and 4. My Jean Grey Squidoo Lens is a PR5. So as a high PR link building service Squidoo works quite well.
As an search engine optimization consultant I sometimes have a hard time deciding what is the best use of my time. Research, link building, writing or what have you. Well, this week I did more research than usual and found a site that I had heard about, but had yet to fully explore:
Squidoo. What is Squidoo? Well, to put it simply, it is a collection of web pages that users can build on any topic, and I mean any topic that you can imagine. And if you can’t find it, you can create a new page on Squidoo yourself. Squidoo says you can do it in under 5 minutes, but you’ll want to take longer to build a respectable page, or “lens” as they call it.
Once you do you can add modules that let you make money from affiliate sales to online stores such as Amazon and Overstock. I don’t know how much of a money making opportunity it is and I would dare say you
can’t make a lot of money with Squidoo, but it did give me some ideas on how to use it for SEO purposes. As a business owner and website owner, you can use Squidoo for two important tasks to help your website: link building and visitor traffic.
Testing SquidooI decided to test this out and I built two lenses for fun. I like smoothies, so I tried my hand at creating a
smoothie drink lens to support my personal
smoothie recipe blog. It was simple to build and I followed the advice for getting the word out and then spent the next 4 days investing a few spare moments here and there, adding new content and pulling information from my smoothie recipe blog and now I have a fairly large lens, compared to most. As of today (8/12/2007) there were over 213,000 lenses on Squidoo. My smoothie lens was ranked #132 and at times has been as high as 128 with less than 8 hours of work total over one week. The second lens is for a favorite comic book character,
Jean Grey (Phoenix) from the X-men and has done for pure entertainment and even that has achieved a rank as high as #376. The lenses were fun to build and I enjoyed both immensely.
Getting Traffic from Squidoo
Okay, big deal on my “success” within Squidoo, it hasn’t earned a single cent yet and might not ever. I have many links on my smoothie lens pointing to my smoothie blog and the good news is that these links have driven more traffic to my smoothie blog in the last week than all other incoming site traffic combined. The reason it has been successful is the fact that the Squidoo lens I created is already showing up in the search results, after less than a week, for terms related to smoothie recipes. (See results.) So it is driving traffic to my smoothie blog and could be doing the same for your business. If you sell toys you may want to create a Squidoo lens one of your products like yo-yos. The idea is to create a lens about something specific so your lens can rank for it and then link to your site. Which brings me to my other reason for creating a lens. My SEO heart practically skips a beat.
Link Building with Squidoo
As any SEO company can tell you, link building is the most time-consuming and hardest part of our jobs. Everything come down to link building. That is what increases your rankings, helps people find you and so forth. If you have an SEO company working for you now and they aren’t putting forth a majority of their time finding and placing links for you, it is time to move on. With Squidoo you get an awesome link building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on the page and what is written around it. It also comes from a high PR site. It is almost the exact definition of my idea of the perfect link. If you look at my smoothie lens you can see dozens of links pointing to my smoothie blog. And not links just to the homepage, but deep linking to internal pages which are important links very difficult to get usually. Well, with Squidoo you can make many deep links which will help your site’s search engine visibility and increase rankings to those deep pages. One-way, keyword-rich, high-quality links are all made easy with Squidoo. If you spend a little time with your lens you may soon see it increase to a PR 4 or PR 5 webpage on its own and we know how hard PR 4 and 5 links can be to get on our own.
Google & Squidoo
Of course, with all good things there come people who look to ruin it by misuse. Well, the same can be said of Squidoo. Many spammers have tried and are trying to create a glut of spammy pages on Squidoo for the purposes of SEO. Google saw this and minimized the importance of Squidoo but in return Squidoo has made spamming harder and set the bar higher for a Squidoo lens in hopes of getting more quality lenses. It looks as though Squidoo may have weathered the fury of Google and for the time I would recommend highly creating a quality Squidoo lens to help your own site. Heck, create more than one if you need it, but be good stewards if you do and create lenses that have weight of their own and are not a pure marketing ploy. Those lenses will be the most effective in the long run and help Squidoo remain a useful tool in your marketing tool belt.
Final Thoughts on Squidoo
Give it a try, it will only take an hour or so, despite the 5 minute promise from Squidoo, and then see what you think. We will be including it as part of our work for our clients, as we do with all new strategies that can help. Of course, Google could decide they don’t appreciate the work being done by Squidoo members, Squidoo could decide to make all links not SEO-friendly (nofollow or redirects) or any number of SEO killing decisions, but until then I personally think it is a good use of a few hours.
YouTube Video about Squidoo Marketing
You can find many videos on how to use Squidoo and here is one of the better ones I watched.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization | 33 Comments »
Friday, July 27th, 2007
SEO companies have two major functions when working with their clients: optimize the site content and finding quality, relevant links. So please forgive me if you already know this simple yet effective SEO tip, I’m sure those new to the SEO game will find it helpful. This tip on link building will help you find link opportunities but it will be up to you to acquire link placement.
I am posting this tip in response to a question I receive on a continuing basis from perspective clients.
How do you find links?
We have many methods but the simplest way to find links, that aren’t paid links, is to search for them. Searching with the right terms will increase your efficiency and success in securing the maximum number of links in the shortest time. What are these terms? I’ve listed some of the search terms we use to find good linking sources. Of course there are many others to try but this list should get you started.
Search Terms to be used with your keyword or phrase:
- Add URL
- Links
- Resources
- Related sites
- Related urls
- Submit a link
- Submit a site
- Submit URL
- Suggest a link
- Suggest a site
- Suggest URL
- Suggest an URL
- Directory
- Recommended Sites
- Add Profile
- Add Site
- Article
For example, if you are trying to find quality links to help market your website which is selling pet turtles (We bought two, Bear and Grylls, while on vacation last week.) you would type into the Google search box something like this: “add url” + pet turtles. It would give you these results Links for Pet Turtles. The page shows five promising link opportunities that are already in the Google index. From here you can try more of the search phrases and then try different keywords and phrases to match with them.
There are also free tools that will help in finding backlinks. Some that I like are:
http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php
http://tools.seobook.com/general/link-suggest/
If you have any other tips on finding links, please share by commenting, we are always looking for new and better ways to do our jobs.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building | 3 Comments »
Friday, June 29th, 2007
If you have been following this blog or looking into SEO you know how very important building links can be to your site’s success in the search engine rankings. Link building involves two types of links: Links pointing to your site (external linking), and links on your site pointing to other pages of your site (internal linking). While we don’t always have the ability to control external linking, a poorly worded internal link is inexcusable. The single, easiest and least low effort thing to remember is to make your links descriptive. If that is too much to remember, then just remember this, no links should be labeled “click here,” “more information,” “read more” or any other variation of these words.
I realize this might bring disagreement from the user experience community but I think we can all agree that your average user doesn’t need to be told to click a link and if it isn’t obviously a link (underlined) you have bigger problems on your site with usability.
Every time I see a “click here” link I shake my head at the wasted link opportunity that is being lost. You probably know how powerful link text can be in helping your rankings so it shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the site that ranks for the term “click here” doesn’t even have those words within the text of the page that is ranking for “click here”. Care to guess what company’s site is ranking for it?
I’ll give you a hint; you’ve most likely downloaded the application and probably more than once. The site, or page actually, ranked number one for the term “click here”is the Acrobat Reader download page. Make sense? This clue might help: Click here to download Acrobat Reader. This proves the power of the text in your link, so why waste it with a non-descriptive textual link?
I can provide thousands of examples, but let’s look at a few examples where a descriptive text link would be much better.
Early Detection Key to Preventing Vision Loss from Glaucoma More than 2 million Americans over the age of 40 have glaucoma, but many of those living with the disease don’t even know it. - Find out more HERE
Instead, remove the “Find out more HERE” and place the link on the headline text and best of all it doesn’t require any rewriting:
Early Detection Key to Preventing Vision Loss from Glaucoma
More than 2 million Americans over the age of 40 have glaucoma, but many of those living with the disease don’t even know it.
- Apple’s iPhone Page
Being the huge Apple fan that I am it pains me to point to them as a bad example, but the new iPhone page is just that, a bad example. On this page I count five “read more” links and one “learn more”. It can be argued that Apple doesn’t need SEO help for the iPhone, but the principal and lost opportunity still applies.
- Joint Commission Home Page
I count five “read more” links, incredibly listed below descriptive titles without a link. What better way to get listing for their top stories than linking to them with keywords in the story? Placing the link on the headline would solve this, much like we suggested for the Prevent Blindness site.
- Burst Media Contact Page
One of the more ridiculous offenders of the “click here” mistake.
Making simple changes would have helped all of these sites make better use of their internal linking as well as helped with their site’s ranking for the words in the link.
Of course, going beyond the decision to not use useless text links and thinking about the best keywords and phrases to use will help even more. A few seconds, or better yet, a few minutes applied to thinking about your internal, contextual linking can bring in great rewards. Take the time and…Think before you Link!
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Copywriting, SEO Mistakes | 6 Comments »
Friday, May 25th, 2007
This week’s SEO tip gets to the heart of the linking question. We know we need links, but what kind of links? (See our article on Dissecting Links) Well, what if we could choose a link to have all the qualities that would benefit our site? This “perfect link” would benefit our SEO efforts, and it would be useful at driving traffic through clicks as well as inflating our link popularity and increasing our search engine rankings. Of course, this is can be subjective and I always welcome differing opinions, so if you feel I’ve missed something, please add your comments to this post.
The anatomy of a perfect link:
- It would be a simple HTML link as follows: <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html”>keyword phrase</a>.
- The anchor text would would include keywords that are important to your site.
- It would be part of a sentence, which would be part of a paragraph.
- The content surrounding the link, and the entire page, would be on topic with your site.
- It would reside on a site with a similar theme as your site.
- The page would have links to other sites similar to your site.
- It would be on a trusted site, with the site itself having backlinks from many sites including .edu and .gov sites.
- The link would drive direct traffic to your site…targeted, highly converting traffic.
- It should be an authoritative site.
- The site the link resides on should be popular and well-read.
I think you can also see why the perfect link is only slightly easier to find than Bigfoot or Nessie - much of the link’s perfection is derived from the site and page where the link resides. The old adage in real estate applies to link building too, it all about location, location, location!
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, May 18th, 2007
Most websites focus on their home page which is of course a good idea. It is the most important page of your site whether you are looking at search engine optimization, internet marketing or customer conversion. Making sure you homepage is optimized and marketed should be of primary importance, but be sure not to forget your interior pages.
Often the arm chair optimizer will make the mistake of only trying to rank their home age. By this I mean they will only build links to the home page or make sure it is titled with the most important keywords and so on. And while the home page should get the most SEO love, it is also important to your online marketing success that you show your interior pages some SEO attention. Do you interior pages that aren’t ranking well, but should be? Not every keyword can be crammed on to your home page, although I’ve seen it attempted. A car dealer has tried this approach.
Supporting the Home Page
While marketing the home page is a monthly focus for us here at Big Oak, we are also aware of the power interior pages have for converting visitors into clients. We think of the home page as a lobby that helps direct you to the page that will provide the information or product you are searching for. If we can skip the lobby altogether and get the user directly to the page that would be better. That is unlikely to happen without providing deep linking to your interior pages.
Marketing Interior Pages
I like providing examples so here are some real world examples from our own clients. Our client ExhibitDeal provides trade show displays and accessories. Their number #1 term is “trade show displays” and as of today May 18, 2007 they are ranked #1 in Google (Trade Show Displays Ranking). They also rank #1 in Google for the term “trade show flooring (Trade Show Flooring Ranking Screen Shot). If you click the links to view the screen shots you will notice the #1 ranking for trade show flooring is an interior page of ExhibitDeal.
Trying to rank the home page for trade show flooring would have been impossible. So we marketing both keyword phrases for their respective pages and achieved high ranking rankings for both. Currently the trade show flooring page has 89 backlinks according to Yahoo. Not an extremely large amount but decent amount when a targeted strategy is applied to a single interior page. Of course it helps that the site has 4,374 links overall, but only 3,009 links are pointing to the home page.
Obviously it works for ExhibiDeal. Leading searchers to a page about trade show flooring when the search matches will increase sales.
Choosing Interior Pages for SEO
Decide on a a few interior pages that can help your conversion efforts. If placing a user directly on an interior page, bypassing the home page, would help the sale or get them calling wouldn’t you want that? After you have decided which pages might help your business if they ranked well, maybe 2 or 3, start optimizing them and then start link building.
Providing deep linking to these pages will allow your site to have increased value overall and not just on your home page and the search engines like to see a site with popularity throughout on just on the home page. This can increase you authority and your ranking for your entire site.
Sound link a lot of work? It can be, but the rewards will be a website with much higher search engine visibility. If you need help, Big Oak SEO is available.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, May 4th, 2007
Directories are an easy way to build links because anyone can submit and get listed. Directories can, therefore, be of little use for the same reason. Of course getting in directories can be time consuming but it is a one-time affair and usually worth the time. They provide one-way links which will increase your online presence. Not all directories are created equal and paying for the better ones is often money well spent.
Inclusion Tips
Select the best category for your site and follow the instructions on the submission form carefully. Write your descriptions without sensational text. Descriptions of sites should describe the content of the site concisely and accurately When submitting to directories, make sure to vary anchor text and use keywords in the description and title fields.
Choose the most appropriate category for your site. Finding a category that best matches your site’s theme or content will increase traffic from the directory and provide higher quality one-way link to your site for the search engines to follow.
Good Directories
A few of the more search engine friendly directories for valuable links are the following:
Yahoo! Directory: The Yahoo! Directory is the biggest and oldest directory on the web, and one of the few directories that can provide traffic.
DMOZ: The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is a free, volunteer-run directory. Google and many other sites pull information directly from DMOZ and display the description in the search engine results.
Business.com: A huge business-related directory.
Best of The Web: One of the oldest directories on the web.
Aviva Directory: A well-marketed directory.
GoGuides.org: Another well-run directory that has been around a while.
Blog Directories
Here are some recommended blog directories.
MyBlogLog: Everyone who reads a web site or blog can learn about and engage with one another, and in the process take the conversation to a whole new level.
Blogcatalog: Labeled as “the premiere blog directory on the internet”. Promote your own blog or find blogs on various topics.
Bumpzee: join a community, you are fed with an ever-updating list of blogs and blog posts submitted and chosen by like-minded individuals.
A more complete list of online directories is on our website. Aviva Directory has has a list of the best directories.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Strategies | 4 Comments »
Friday, April 20th, 2007
Submit Press Releases for Link Building
Finding one-way links to your website can be a tough task. Finding quality one-way links to your websites can be even more difficult.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people put links to your site without you even asking them to? Well, submitting a press release can help accomplish this. Similar to my tip on SEO with articles, using a press release to build links and increase search engine rankings can also be effective. What so many people overlook submitting press releases, which are copyright free, is the fact that you can put links to your site within the content of the press release. We used this method of promotion for our online toy store client and you can see one of their press releases.
Not only can you place helpful links to your home page in the body of the press release but you can use deep linking and link to interior pages of your website. Deep linking is often harder to do as most websites would rather link to your home page. We use PRweb.com and the cost is higher to use text links rather than actual URLs.
Press Release Submit Site
As I wrote, PRweb.com does charge a fee for submission, but there are many free press release submission sites as well. Here are some that we also use:
Press release submission is not the magic bullet for SEO success, but it is a valuable tool in the SEO consultant’s toolbox. Whether it is a product release, a major hire, or a strategic acquisition you can make the press release perform double duty as both a internet marketing tool and a link building tool. Big Oak provides press release writing & submission as part of our SEO strategy.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Copywriting, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
If you have been involved in the mad world of search engine optimization for any time you know that building links to your site is importance in achieving high search engine rankings, especially in Google. You might also know how important writing and submitting articles can be in your quest for one-way links which lead to page one results.
Before starting an article marketing campaign, make sure you invest in a sound strategy. You don’t want to write an article, submit it and then forget it. Article writing should be part of a bigger SEO plan. What do I mean? Well, I like real world examples and Big Oak has many great SEO success stories, so lets take a look at one of our many successful clients who have used articles in their SEO campaign: Danforth Diamond.
Articles, A Gem of a Strategy
Danforth started with us with a brand new site, no search engine visibility and a small budget. Of course they had lofty goals. They wanted to rank highly for search terms such as diamond engagement rings and engagement rings. Both are very competitive search terms and needed an aggressive, yet ethical SEO Company. We have helped them achieve the rankings they were hoping for (#4 in Google, for engagement rings) and article marketing was an important part of the SEO process.
We have published many well-written articles for Danforth, with a variety of links from the author’s box and the article itself pointing to the jeweler’s home page and internal pages of the site. Quality writing is a standard at Big Oak and this has allowed us to have a greater distribution across of the Internet which provides more inbound links for Danforth. Be sure your writing stands above the competition. Take a look at similar articles and be sure your article says something new or at least says it better.
SEO and the Article: Working Together
So what is the strategy I’m talking about? Use articles are part of a coordinated marketing effort. Back up your article with multiple SEO strategies to make the article more effective. Danforth decided to sell a new metal called Palladium. They are ranked #3 in Google for the search term ‘Palladium Jewelry’ and rank well for other palladium search terms so our strategy works. Here is how we did it. (Links show actual examples)
- Write the landing page for palladium jewelry.
- Write article about palladium and why it is a good choice for jewelry. Distribute article.
- Write press release about palladium being available at Danforth Diamond. Distribute press release.
- Frequent posts on company blog about palladium.
- Focus link building with keywords such as palladium, jewelry, rings, etc.
- Be patient a few months and watch top rankings appear.
Trusting the Article Source
All of these steps were vital to search ranking success but article marketing was key. Not only did it provide one-way links, it gave the potential customer information about Palladium so they could make an informed decision. It also established Danforth as a trusted and knowledgeable merchant, which made buying from them with confidence a given.
Running a successful SEO campaign requires a lot work and expertise. Well, it requires a lot of quality writing and expertise. Don’t overlook the importance of article marketing and be sure to use it wisely with other SEO efforts. It will be a better tool as part of a holistic SEO strategy rather than a one-shot, short-sighted strategy.
Article Submission Sites
It is good practice to find article sites that specialize in your article’s topic. It will give you a higher chance for being published and makes backlinks more relative. Be on the lookout for sites that have articles catering to your web site’s subject matter. You can easily find such sites by searching for your “keyword” + article in the Google search box. Here are some generic article submission sites we use at Big Oak.
There are hundreds more to be sure, but I would say less than 30 generic article submission sites are worth your time when submitting. Be sure they article submission site you are looking into will provide good marketing exposure for your masterpiece!
–
We hope you are learning from our weekly SEO tips. If you have any suggestions or questions, please let us know. If you submit a good question, we may use it in our tips. If you wish to contact Big Oak to help you drive traffic and sales to your site we look forward to speaking with you. Contact us today!
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Strategies | 6 Comments »
Friday, March 2nd, 2007
The last few tips have been a little longer than I planned when I originally came up with the idea to post one SEO tip per week. On the other hand I wanted the SEO tips to have some meat to them so I’m okay with making the posts more than a few sentences. But I thought I’d give everyone a break and do a tip that was short and sweet, but very important, of course.
Be sure to provide a link to your home page.
Pure genius, right? Of course we all know we should do this, but how you do it is just as important. I think examples work best so here are some ways not to link to your home page. Let’s assume your page filename is index.html.
<a href=”/index.html”>Home</a>
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/index.html”>Home</a>
What is wrong with this you say? The problem is linking to the filename. Always link to the root address. Your links on your site and any external links pointing to your site’s home page should look something like this.
<a href=”/”>Home</a>
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/”>Home</a>
The reason we do this is so the search engines don’t split our PageRank to multiple web addresses of our home page. If all the links are pointing to the root address (http://www.mysite.com) then all the PageRank will be gathered in the root address and not split between the root address and the filename (http://www.mysite.com/index.html).
Get on the Same Page
Be sure all the links on your site point to the root and check them to be sure; even images on your site should follow this advice. It doesn’t matter if you are pointing to the root with just a “/” or using the full url (http://www.mysite.com/), both work the same way. You want any external links to point to the full url as well and ask anyone linking to your website to use the “www” in the link. The key is uniformity. We want all links pointing to the same web address for maximum PageRank and search engine rankings.
Bonus Tip
As a bonus tip, try to use a keyword in the internal links to your home page when possible. Using the link text “Home” provides little ranking support unless you sell homes. Don’t let this cloud your judgment though, having a link to your home page with a three word keyword phrase might look ridiculous and unprofessional.
Next time you are surfing around, click a link to a home page and see how many are linking correctly and how many aren’t.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Strategies | No Comments »
Want to know what Shell is doing?