Search Engine Optimization & get more Backward links to point back to the selected page

Note I said selected page since it is almost impossible to persuade other web owners to link back to more than 1 or 2 pages. The other important point is to cultivate links back from similar sites as far as possible. Avoid totally dissimilar sites purely to gain link numbers.

The links back should be directed to the one you deem most important which would often mean a web page optimised for a very difficult (high competition) keyword or a home page.

Do not make a mistake here.

It is conceivable that once you have an important and highly ranked page that other sites will automatically link to you without your even knowing about it. These should be considered bonuses.

Discovering how many and which web pages are linking back to you

Towards the end of the book is a list of the various commands you can use at the different search engines to discover this information. Using Google the query to type into the search box is link:www.yoursite.com. Here is an example done for the number 1 site that appeared for the search water.

Notice there are 1,770 links back to this one site.

There are a few very interesting free web sites that will do this job for you and provide other useful information. Examples are the Axandra and Marketleap tools given in the appendix.

Marketleap queries more than 1 search engine and displays the results in a table. It is able to query multiple web sites simultaneously this tool allows monitoring of and comparison with competitors.

The table from a Marketleap report provides useful information on the efficiency of various engines in monitoring/reporting this linkback information. It is for example acknowledged that AllTheWeb.com search engine tends to return the highest number of backward links by virtue of deeper crawling than other engines. This knowledge creates an opportunity for all those determined to get maximum Google linkback exposure. Consider this Google can only provide the link back reference if that web page has been indexed by Google. Obviously if the link appears on AllTheWeb or Alta Vista but not Google it means that the web page has not been indexed by Google. You might wait for ever for the owner to submit the site so go and do it yourself. Google does not ask you to verify that you are the owner.

Excellent commercial tools are Zeus and Arelis. These tools help considerably with getting links back to your site but it still takes a lot of work. I use the Zeus tool and have found it extraordinarily useful and highly recommend it. I have devoted a chapter to this useful tool and exactly what it can do to improve your web marketing attempts.

Yahoo and ODP (The Open Directory Project - owned by AOL) as sources of link popularity

Yahoo and the ODP (http://dmoz.org) are very important human operated web directories. Because applications to join these directories are only approved after detailed inspection of the web pages content (and payment of $299 per URL as far as Yahoo is concerned) by editors they carry high influence in Google SERPs.

Lets take a look once more at our garden ponds SERPs again to get a feel for the potential influence that an ODP listing can give a web page.

URL in rank order Google PageRank Total of incoming links Total all words on page Total keys on page Keys in Title Keys in link text Keys in actual link Keys in header Keys in body text

• Patio-garden-ponds 5 20 99 5 1 0 1 2 0

• Gardenponds 6 204 738 4 1 0 0 0 2

• Pondmarket 5 224 1714 1 1 0 0 0 0

You have seen this table twice before but this time I have included the Google PageRank.

PageRank is still to be discussed but all else being equal for Google SERPSs the highest PageRank SERP will get number 1 spot. The number 5 or 6 above is NOT the PageRank this integer represents a range occupied by the mathematical log of a range of actual computed PageRanks. No-one outside Google knows the basis for the log but the Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page paper confirms it is a log function.

Note that patio-garden-ponds.com has a lower PageRank (= 5) than gardenponds.com (= 6) but beats it in the SERP ranking. This is probably due to better on-page optimisation combined with an actual PageRank on the high side of the 5 range and/or the low side of the 6 range and also maybe more links (Google backlinks does NOT show every link). Keyword density was much higher for the top site.

It should be easy for gardenponds.com to take the number 1 spot just by improving its on-page factors. Refer back to how overall ranking in the Google SERPs is obtained (on-page factors x PageRank = the basis for ranking score)

Despite having apparently relatively few back links the patio-garden-ponds.com SERP has a good PageRank and this is in my opinion the result of its ODP back link.

This ODP ranking influence actually works through Googles PageRank factor. Google has given the maximum PageRank to both Yahoo and ODP and this reflects as an enhanced link factor on any web page linked from either of those two directories.

To reiterate this important point it is NOT just the listing and back link from Yahoo and ODP per se it is the influence that Yahoo and ODP play in propagating PageRank influence by virtue of Googles algorithm trying hard to return SERPs of high quality.

By now we have all agreed I hope that getting lots of links and especially high quality links is a vitally important objective for any web marketer.

Link analysis continued