There are numerous Search Engine Optimization techniques, and I have spent a bit of time lately mastering a few. So what have I learned? Actually, quite a lot, but to condense what I have learned, there are two basic techniques to growing back links to your website to increase the site’s rank on the primary search engines. The initial step is to establish organic back links with anchor text from the billions of sites that exist on the net. The second method is to create your very own sites that you manage and add your back links to those sites that link back to your own. Both techniques can be performed legitimately, or through less scrupulous methods, but utilizing both techniques together is very effective at boosting your page rank into the top ten.
The first method is pretty straight forward and self explanatory, so let us instead focus on how to use the second approach. The second method is what I want to talk about because we are talking about establishing good page rank links back to your website from other websites that you manage. What are the steps to get started? I have developed the list below to help get you started:
1) You would be surprised how high social networks rank. Strangely enough, pageflakes and not so weirdly facebook rank very well on search engines as does Linked In links. Use online social networks to establish some authoritative links back to your site as well as increase your online footprint.
2) Take a look at Hub Pages, Squidoo, and even Tumblr: Use these sites to get some basic and relative back links. These sites rank relatively well and by using them, you can get a great deal of authority with very little effort.
3) If you are web savvy, you may want to establish your own forum or directory. There is a lot of software available in the open source area that you may use to develop unique websites that focus to your area of specialization or your locality. Create them and sponsor them from your home page with anchor links.
4) Blogging tools. I understand that blogging takes a commitment, but as a Google product, Blogger has a very high page rank; which means any links from a blogger site will have a high weight. Develop numerous blogs, (don’t link them together) and add back links with anchor text to your focus website. Recruit guest bloggers or pay per article ghost writers to create content. There are software programs out there that will actually scrape content from other sites, but these will get you banned from blogger. Unique original and legitimate content is best.
By taking this approach, you can increase your online presence and increase traffic to your site. Use the free blogging and website tools that are available online to create links and drive traffic to your website. I know that time is valuable and what I have reviewed above may initially take a lot of time, but the real estate market is becoming extremely cutthroat and your success may ultimately rely on how many people can find you online.
Randy Xysllion manages lockbox and mlsni as a service for midwestern mls and real estate. Centered in Northern Illinois, Randy serves the real estate community both online and off
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Search engine ‘spiders’ are robots that seek out webpages to display in search engines. Below we’ll discuss how they work and why they’re important.
Robots actually have the same basic functionality that earlier browsers had. Just like these early browsers, search engine robots do not have the ability to do certain things. Robots cannot get past password protected areas. They do not understand frames, Flash movies, nor Images or JavaScript. Even if you use a robot, you have to click the buttons on your website. They can cease to function while using JavaScript navigation or when indexing a dynamically generated URL. A search engine robot retrieves data and finds information and links on the web.
Spiders are able to determine the content of your page by looking at the visible text, the HTML code, and links. Based on the words it finds, the spider determines what the site is about using a complex algorithm to determine what is and isn’t important. Spiders also collect links from websites to follow later, which allows them to effectively hop from site to site to site. Since the entire internet is made up of links between websites, the robots use them to make their way through the internet as they search.
Submitting a new URL to a search engine adds this URL to the queue which the spiders are due to ‘crawl’ or visit. However, even if a URL isn’t submitted directly, the spiders usually find it through links from other websites. If you build link popularity, this will help the spiders find you faster. When the robots arrive, they’ll check your site for a file called ‘robots.txt,’ which will tell them what areas of the website they are not allowed to visit. Off-limits files may include things like binaries or other information that the spiders need not report back.
When the robots return, the information they gathered is assimilated into the search engine’s database. Through a complex algorithm, this data is interpreted and web sites are ranked according to how relevant they are to various topics that would be searched for. Some of the bots are quite easy to notice – Google’s is the appropriately-named Googlebot, where Inktomi utilizes a more ambiguous bot named Slurp. Others may be difficult to identify at all.
There may be robots that you do not want to visit your website such as aggressive bandwidth grabbing robots and others. The ability to identify individual robots and the number of their visits is useful. Information on the undesirable robots is helpful also. IP names and addresses of search engine robots are listed at the end of this article in a resources section. These robots read the pages on your website by visiting your page and looking at the text that is visible on the page, and then looks at the source code tags such as title tags, meta tags and others. They look at the hyperlinks on your page. From these links, the search engine robot can determine what your page is about. Each search engine has its own algorithm to determine what is important. Information is indexed and delivered to the search engine’s database according to how the robot has been set up through the search engine.
If you’re interested in seeing which pages the spiders have visited on your website, you can check your server logs or the results from your log statistics. From this information you’ll know which spiders have visited, where they went, when they came, and which pages they crawl most often. Some are easy to identify, such as Google’s ‘Googlebot,’ while others are harder: ‘Slurp’ from Inktomi, for example. In addition to identifying which spiders visit, you can also find if any spiders are draining your bandwidth so that you can block them from your site. The internet has plenty of information on identifying these bad bots. There are also certain things can prevent good spiders from crawling your site, such as the site being down or huge amounts of traffic. This can prevent your site from being re-indexed, though most spiders will eventually come by again to try re-accessing the page.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Consultant expert who provides world class Search Engine Optimization to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za
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