Posts Tagged ‘approach’

Search Engine Optimization-Inter-link your Blogs

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Increasingly bloggers are starting or joining blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. One of the advantages of networks of sites is that they usually link to one another. In doing so you have complete control over how your sites are linked to from multiple domains. It is worth noting that you should be careful with this approach - if all your sites are hosted on the one server many think that Search Engines will work out what you’re doing and the impact will be lessened.

SEO:Concept-based searching

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Excite used to be the best-known general-purpose search engine site on the Web that relies on concept-based searching.  It is now effectively extinct.

Unlike keyword search systems, concept-based search systems try to determine what you mean, not just what you say.  In the best circumstances, a concept-based search returns hits on documents that are “about” the subject/theme you’re exploring, even if the words in the document don’t precisely match the words you enter into the query.

How did this method work?  There are various methods of building clustering systems, some of which are highly complex, relying on sophisticated linguistic and artificial intelligence theory that we won’t even attempt to go into here.  Excite used to a numerical approach.  Excite’s software determines meaning by calculating the frequency with which certain important words appear.  When several words or phrases that are tagged to signal a particular concept appear close to each other in a text, the search engine concludes, by statistical analysis, that the piece is “about” a certain subject.

For example, the word heart, when used in the medical/health context, would be likely to appear with such words as coronary, artery, lung, stroke, cholesterol, pump, blood, attack, and arteriosclerosis.  If the word heart appears in a document with others words such as flowers, candy, love, passion, and valentine, a very different context is established, and a concept-oriented search engine returns hits on the subject of romance.

How to generate quality inbound Links?

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

* Quality Content - There are all kinds of link generating systems out there but in my opinion the best way to get links to your blog is to write quality content that people will want to read. You can solicit links with others or sign up for different link building programs or even buy text links on other sites but the cheapest and probably safest approach is to build inbound links in a natural organic way as others link to your quality content.
* Notify Relevant Bloggers of your content - Whilst I don’t advocate spamming other bloggers and asking for links - I would recommend that if you write a quality post on a topic that you know will interest another blogger that it might be worth shooting them a short and polite email letting them know of your post. Don’t be offended if they don’t link up, but you might just find that they do and that in addition to the direct traffic that the link generates that it helps build your own page rank in the search engines (more on letting other bloggers know of your posts here).
* Directories - Another way to generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. I know of webmasters who swear by the benefits of such a strategy - the first thing that they do when starting a new site is to do the rounds of directories - submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords in the links. There are loads of directories out there - many of which offer a free submission. Ari Paparo has compiled a list of blog directories that you might want to start with.
* Inter-link your Blogs - Increasingly bloggers are starting or joining blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. One of the advantages of networks of sites is that they usually link to one another. In doing so you have complete control over how your sites are linked to from multiple domains. It is worth noting that you should be careful with this approach - if all your sites are hosted on the one server many think that Search Engines will work out what you’re doing and the impact will be lessened.
* Buy Links - Many professional web masters have a budget to purchase links from other highly ranked and and relevant sites. I won’t go into this too much here but you might like to read more about it in my recent post On Buying Text Links. update: I’d encourage anyone wanting to buy links to think very carefully about this. Google have been cracking down on sites that use this practice. They can’t catch everyone but some have been caught and seem to have been penalized for doing it.
* Swap Links - Similarly many bloggers swap links with other bloggers. Sometimes this happens pretty naturally (you see someone linking to you so you link back) but in many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between site owners. I get daily requests for such reciprocal links (I rarely act on them). Whilst there is some benefit in such link swapping I would again advise caution here as many SEO experts believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the links. Some try to get around this by doing indirect or triangulated links. ie instead of site A and B doign a direct swap they involve other sites. So A links to C in exchange for D (also owned by C) linking to B (also owned by A) - makes your head hurt doesn’t it!?! There are also a variety of systems around that say they’ll take care of such interlinking for you - I know many who use Digital Point’s Free C0-Op Advertising system. Personally I tend to avoid such schemes and have a policy of linking to sites I think are valuable to my readers. If they link back then so be it.