Link Building!

Link building is an essential and a widely used activity in search engine optimization (SEO). It involves the generation of links, whether through, but not limited to, blog and forum posting and directory submission. SEO services are usually sought by website owners to increase the popularity of their websites on the Internet. The establishment of several inbound links leading to your main website helps your pages rank higher in search engines, depending on the keywords you are optimizing for. One-way links are much more help in boosting your page rank than reciprocal or multi-way links.

A website's targeted traffic is a main consideration before starting link-building activities. It determines where you want to place the links leading to your website to ensure that you will fetch users that are highly interested in your products or services. The more relevant traffic you drive in, the more chances of your profit increasing.

The most effective method of link building is by establishing one-way links directing to your website, as SEO experts say. It is an inbound link pointing only to one direction and it is given the highest recognition by search engine bots in defining the relevance of your pages. One-way links could be built by sending articles related to your site to article directories and content sites, many of which could be found online. Such sites usually have a resource box, where you can type in the link pointing to the resource website.

Another method of link building is through multi-way linking, which entails the creation of several non-reciprocal links among at least three partner websites. The links only go one-way. Other ways of building links include posting videos, images, o RSS feeds on your partner sites.

A website owner could embark on a link campaign with the help of professional SEO services. Such companies offer to do your link building campaign for you at specific rates. Professional link-building services usually offer to increase the relevance of your web pages through planting relevant and permanent inbound links pointing to your website.

Their activities include submission of articles to directory listings, submission to sites with high PR links, distribution of articles to article and blog sites, and social network listing. The main goal of link building is to help you reach your marketing goals by driving your targeted traffic back to your main website and allowing them to convert or take the course of action most profitable to your business.

This means that your inbound links should be placed in sites related to yours, sites that preferably have high PR links. Most link-building services usually promise positive results for your online presence within 90 days at the most.

Website owners should, however, be warned to avoid overlinking, which means having too many hyperlinks. Search engine bots for main search engines such as Google and Yahoo re capable of recognizing whether or not certain links are relevant. They "sense" excessive links on a page and disregard them in determining your page rank.


http://www.isnare.com/?aid=321312&ca=Internet

For more information visit SEO Link Building category


Source: seoseonews

Want to know how Google is about to change your life?

• By Steven Levy  
• February 22, 2010  |  
• 12:00 pm  |  
• Wired March 2010

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even “capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share its name with this conference room. Udi Manber, Google’s head of search since 2006, leads the proceedings. One by one, potential modifications are introduced, along with the results of months of testing in various countries and multiple languages. A screen displays side-by-side results of sample queries before and after the change. Following one example — a search for “guitar center wah-wah” — Manber cries out, “I did that search!”

You might think that after a solid decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax. After all, it holds a commanding 65 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search. But just as Google isn’t ready to rest on its laurels, its competitors aren’t ready to concede defeat. For years, the Silicon Valley monolith has used its mysterious, seemingly omniscient algorithm to, as its mission statement puts it, “organize the world’s information.” But over the past five years, a slew of companies have challenged Google’s central premise: that a single search engine, through technological wizardry and constant refinement, can satisfy any possible query. Facebook launched an early attack with its implication that some people would rather get information from their friends than from an anonymous formula. Twitter’s ability to parse its constant stream of updates introduced the concept of real-time search, a way of tapping into the latest chatter and conversation as it unfolds. Yelp helps people find restaurants, dry cleaners, and babysitters by crowdsourcing the ratings. None of these upstarts individually presents much of a threat, but together they hint at a wide-open, messier future of search — one that isn’t dominated by a single engine but rather incorporates a grab bag of services.

Still, the biggest threat to Google can be found 850 miles to the north: Bing. Microsoft’s revamped and rebranded search engine — with a name that evokes discovery, a famous crooner, or Tony Soprano’s strip joint — launched last June to surprisingly upbeat reviews. (The Wall Street Journal called it “more inviting than Google.”) The new look, along with a $100 million ad campaign, helped boost Microsoft’s share of the US search market from 8 percent to about 11 — a number that will more than double once regulators approve a deal to make Bing the search provider for Yahoo.

Team Bing has been focusing on unique instances where Google’s algorithms don’t always satisfy. For example, while Google does a great job of searching the public Web, it doesn’t have real-time access to the byzantine and constantly changing array of flight schedules and fares. So Microsoft purchased Farecast — a Web site that tracks airline fares over time and uses the data to predict when ticket prices will rise or fall — and incorporated its findings into Bing’s results. Microsoft made similar acquisitions in the health, reference, and shopping sectors, areas where it felt Google’s algorithm fell short.

Even the Bingers confess that, when it comes to the simple task of taking a search term and returning relevant results, Google is still miles ahead. But they also think that if they can come up with a few areas where Bing excels, people will get used to tapping a different search engine for some kinds of queries. “The algorithm is extremely important in search, but it’s not the only thing,” says Brian MacDonald, Microsoft’s VP of core search. “You buy a car for reasons beyond just the engine.”

Google’s response can be summed up in four words: mike siwek lawyer mi.

Amit Singhal types that koan into his company’s search box. Singhal, a gentle man in his forties, is a Google Fellow, an honorific bestowed upon him four years ago to reward his rewrite of the search engine in 2001. He jabs the Enter key. In a time span best measured in a hummingbird’s wing-flaps, a page of links appears. The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google’s servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there’s no direct referral to Siwek.

The comparison demonstrates the power, even intelligence, of Google’s algorithm, honed over countless iterations. It possesses the seemingly magical ability to interpret searchers’ requests — no matter how awkward or misspelled. Google refers to that ability as search quality, and for years the company has closely guarded the process by which it delivers such accurate results. But now I am sitting with Singhal in the search giant’s Building 43, where the core search team works, because Google has offered to give me an unprecedented look at just how it attains search quality. The subtext is clear: You may think the algorithm is little more than an engine, but wait until you get under the hood and see what this baby can really do.

Source: wired.com

Google's search

Co-founder Larry Page once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” We can’t claim that Google delivers on that vision 100 percent today, but we’re always working on new technologies aimed at bringing all of Google closer to that ideal.

Before you even enter your query in the search box, Google is continuously traversing the web in real time with software programs called crawlers, or “Googlebots”. A crawler visits a page, copies the content and follows the links from that page to the pages linked to it, repeating this process over and over until it has crawled billions of pages on the web.

Next Google processes these pages and creates an index, much like the index in the back of a book. If you think of the web as a massive book, then Google‘s index is a list of all the words on those pages and where they‘re located, as well as information about the links from those pages, and so on. The index is parceled into manageable sections and stored across a large network of computers around the world.

When you type a query into the Google search box, your query is sent to Google machines and compared with all the documents stored in our index to identify the most relevant matches. In a split second, our system prepares a list of the most relevant pages and also determines the relevant sections and bits of text, images, videos and more. What you get is a list of search results with relevant information excerpted in “snippets” (short text summary) beneath each result.

Describing the basic crawling, indexing and serving processes of a search engine is just part of the story. The other key ingredients of Google search are:

• Relevance. As Larry said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want.” When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis. For example, we offer personalized search results based on your web history and location.
• Comprehensiveness. Google launched in 1998 with just 25 million pages, which even then was a small fraction of the web. Today we index billions and billions of webpages, and our index is roughly 100 million gigabytes. We continue investing to expand the comprehensiveness of our services. In 2007 we introduced Universal Search, which made search more comprehensive by integrating images, videos, news, books and more into our main search results.
• Freshness. In the early days, Googlebots crawled the web every three or four months, which meant that the information you found on Google typically was out of date. Today we’re continually crawling the web ensuring that you can find the latest news, blogs and status updates minutes or even seconds after they’re posted. With Realtime Search, we’re able to serve up breaking topics from a comprehensive set of sources just moments after events occur.
• Speed. Our average query response time is roughly one-fourth of a second. In comparison, the average blink of an eye is one-tenth of a second. Speed is a major search priority, which is why in general we don’t turn on new features if they will slow our services down. Instead, search engineers are always working not just on new features, but ways to make search even faster. In addition to smart coding, on the back end we’ve developed distributed computing systems around that globe that ensure you get fast response times. With technologies like autocomplete and Google Instant, we help you find the search terms and results you’re looking for before you’re even finished typing.

Source: Google

SEO Mistakes most made

Targeting the wrong Keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

Ignoring the Title Tag

Leaving the <title> tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title.

Flash

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

Javascripts

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

Lack of consistency and maintenance

Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done forever. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

To much concentration on metatags

A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.

Ignoring  URL’s

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

Not enough Keywords

Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

Source: webconfs

The Facts About Facebook you probably didn't know....

1.     By summer of 2010, facebook officially passed 500 MILLION users. (That is about the entire population of the European Union)

2.      “Facebook Addiction Disorder” has officially been deemed a mental health disorder by psychologists.

3.     77% of workers who have a facebook account, admit to using it at work.

4.     Facebook is the most trafficked website in the world. Even more than GOOGLE.

5.     The Average facebook user has 130 facebook friends.

6.     There are about 30 million new photo uploads each day.

7.     The Average facebook user spends 55 minutes a day on the site.

8.     Facebook has an about 10,000 servers to support the infrastructure.

9.     More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared on facebook every month.

10.   More than 66% of facebook users have a college education. Perfect for businesses to advertise to.

11.   More than 150 Million users access facebook through their mobile devices.

12.   Facebook has a  partnership with AMAZON to provide users with Purchase Recommendations.

13.   It is estimated that facebook has doubled it's profits every year since it was founded, currently valued upwards of 20 BILLION.

14.   Advertising on facebook has tripled in the last year.

15.   On average, facebook consumes 4.5% of corporate bandwidth. Accounting for 7% of all outward business traffic.

16.   The average user is a fan of 4 Pages.

17.   People who access facebook via mobile devices are twice as active as computer users.

18.   Facebook has become the business networking forum.

19.   60% of the world's top retailers have an active presence on facebook.

20.   81% of business executives state that facebook marketing boosts sales and customer relationships.

21.   Over 1.5 million local businesses have active facebook Pages.

22.   63% of marketing agencies have implemented Social Media programs.

23.   Almost ½ of all facebook members admit that they use it for businesses purposes.

24.   Facebook provides Page owners with key demographic research of their fans.

25.   31% of consumers state that they look up retailers on their facebook page, almost doubling since last year.