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In this month's issue:
The second of two articles on factors effecting your search position
Customer of the month - It has to be Kids Exchange - quality used designer clothes
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Word count for that issue: 600 words
Approximate time to read: About 5 minutes
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Off-Page Factors affecting your Position on Google Searches
Different search engines use different algorithms to calculate where you
appear on their search results. We will divide the major factors into two
main types, namely, on-page and off-page factors. The on-page factors were
covered in last month's ezine and are those things that you can do to
improve your ranking by adapting the actual coding of your site.
Off-page factors are those factors mainly relating to incoming links to
your site, and this article, the second of two will focus on off-page factors.
The areas we will cover for off-page factors are:
IBLs – inbound links to your site
Directory Listings – which directories feature your site
User Statistics – who visits your site and for how long
Inbound Links (IBLs)
Many of you may not be aware that many sites may be linking to your own
site and sending new users and traffic to the site. You can check who links to
your site using an IBL checker, like the backlink checker that can be found
on SEO Gurus Free Tools.
These checkers allow you to see which sites have linked to you as identified
by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Interesting, the Google list is always smaller and
more quirky than the other two. This is because Google has decided that pure
volume of links is not a good measure of your site’s attractiveness since this metric can be spammed by the use of links farms, where unscrupulous webmasters
can buy loads of links for free.
So Google uses other factors to check your site’s IBLs, and one of these is
certainly pagerank. The concept of pagerank was developed by Google to rank
sites across the web on a number of factors that overall aim to show how
attractive your site is to potential viewers. Your site will have a pagerank,
even if you don’t know about it. Again you can check your pagerank for free at
SEO Gurus Free Tools.
Sites with a pagerank or PR of 4 or more are considered worthy sites by
Google and so if you get a link from a site with PR 4 or above it is more important to your
site’s overall ranking. PR starts at 0 and goes to 10, with only sites like
Microsoft, Apple, Google or NASA getting a perfect 10. The PR scale is somewhat
logarithmic, hence a PR 5 site is many times more powerful than a PR 4 site.
It is also very useful to get sites to link with consistent anchor
text to you ; this is the text description of your sites URL. So we try and use SEO
Gurus for all out links, but some sites seem to take pleasure in changing
this for us. The point is the more consistent the anchor text is the better
you will be found. The old example of keying “miserable failure” into Google
is a good one to demonstrate the power of consistent anchor text. This search
gives George Bush’s biography on the Whitehouse site – no mention of “miserable
failure” on the site, but it has many sites linking to it using those words as
anchor text.
So try and get lots of sites with a PR 4 or above linking to you, especially if
the site has a similar theme to your own site. However, don’t grow your links
too fast as Google sees this as spammy, and try to avoid reciprocal links
where possible (these are links where each site agrees to two-way links to each other).
The best way to get links is with consistently good, well-written content
that interests people.
Directory Listings
There are many directory listings sites on the internet, but some are much
more important than others, because they are big and powerful with a high PR.
Top of the list must be DMOZ, with a PR of 9. Also known as the Open Directory
Project, DMOZ, is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of
the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of
volunteer editors. It gets the name DMOZ from the acronym for Directory
Mozilla, as it is administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. It costs
you nothing to get your site onto DMOZ, except blood, sweat and tears – see
SEO Gurus Free Tools
for more details. DMOZ is important because it is one of the places Google
looks when deciding the importance of your site. Hence, a listing on DMOZ
almost guarantees better search results performance.
Yahoo is probably the second most important listing, but costs $299 a
year to list your site, but it does have a PR of 9. There are many other sites, far
too many for us to list, that may be useful to you. Some are free, others ask
for reciprocal links or a payment. You must be selective on your links
and we have as yet not paid for any links. Interestingly, even without
paying Yahoo you can get high on their searches if you have a listing o
n DMOZ, so worth persevering.
User Statistics
Google has developed a number of measures to record the amount of
visitors your site and individual pages visited. How did they get there
(keyword searches), what pages did they visit, how much time did they
spend on each page, did they bookmark your site, etc.
After all, the true measure of where you should appear on the search
results is how popular and interestingly your site is. The only real
way you can have this is by having interesting, or to use marketing jargon,
“sticky” content. Many sites are trying to add news feeds, puzzles or
quotes of the day to try and achieve more stickiness.
But, in our opinion the reason people come back to your site has to be
the quality and quantity of information that you have presented and
organised for easy access by them.
Content is king, long live content!
SEO Gurus Free Offer
All you need to do is send me,
john@seogurus.co.uk, your website URL and we will give you our free audit of your
html code. The audit will show you if there are any broken links on your site, which makes
it more difficult for the spiderbots to index.
Customer of the Month
Every single month we will endeavour to bring you a "Customer of the Month", a successful
site which you can visit and compare to what you may have in mind for the future yourselves.
This month, it is the Kids Exchange, a great company providing top quality used
children's clothes at affordable prices. So come and join the club at
Kids Exchange.
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