St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Link building campaign is a pretty straightforward term. Basically it just means trying to get web-sites to publish search engine readable links to your site.

Why?

Well Search Engines think the more links there are to a web site, the more important and relevent that site must be. It almost sounds good on the surface, but actually it’s quite the moronic idea.

Here’s some things you can do to increase the effectiveness of your link building campaign:

• Get links from sites that are related to the keywords you which to market.
• Use your chosen key phrases / words in the text of the link that others place on their sites. The text of the link matters a bunch.
• If your going to pay for links, make sure they’re NOT “Jump links”. Jump links are coded in such a way as to be not readable to search engines.
• Make sure the links that point to your site don’t use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. that asks a search engine not to follow (therefore count) the link in question.
• Get links from sites w/ as high of a PageRank as possible. Search Engines mistaken believe this has something to do w/ site quality too.

Well this is an easy question. Not only can I answer it easily and quickly but I can point you to a few tools that can help you measure the page rank of any web site you view in your browser.

Google’s Page Rank is a number form 0-9 that Google places on every page in it’s index (or database if you prefer). The higher the number the more important Google thinks your web site is. In addition to 1 - 9, there is the additional ranking of n/a that means the page is not in Google’s index, either because it has come across it yet, Google thinks it’s not important enough to include or it has been banned.

(more…)

The google sandbox isn’t actually a place or a thing at all. It certinley a place where google employees play during breaks. The google sandbox alludes to a term that programmers of web “Content Management Systems” (CMS) where the users of their web content management systems (typically not programmers or even technically inclined at all) could learn to post articles and stories using that partcular CMS by praticing. The sandbox was an area where they cpuld pratice and ewxperiment with all aspects of the systems methods of making articles without saving them permanently and displaying them to the public as real articles.

Google’s Sandbox isn’t quite that, but it’s similiar. Evidently google in their all knowing wisdom has decided that it takes several months for a web site to decide what they are about. Perhaps a lot of people change thier message and keywords alot during this first period. I’m sure they’ve read the tags on way more sites than me. When I do a site, it’s get fully planned before implemented so there isn’t much changing after it goes live. But I understand not everyone has my skill or even uses a professional.

The Googlew sandbox is actually a status unofficialy given to web sites by google. They may have them in their index but they usually won’t list them in the search results unless the search is for the address. Yes, some people still type the address into a search enginge instead of the address bar. This period can last from a few weeks to a few months.

Little is know about how it exactly works. In fact some people in the search engine optimization business try to say it doesn’t exsist. Well rest assured it does. I have discovered two things about the google sandbox however:

• Whatever the cause, new sites do not get listed in google’s search engine results for a considerable longer period than other web sites.
• This effect can be mitigated (not entirely), by submission fromm someone who has successfully submitted sites that were index by google in the past.

Most of the time when a client starts a new web site the just assume google, yahoo, MSN and the other search Engines (SE’s) will index their web site and show it their search results. This is just not the case. Why?

Well there are several reasons:

• Search Engines make more money when they don’t relative content in their results. After all no one would buy those ads if the search engines worked the way they should.
• IT’s hard for a robot to tell what your site is about. The SE’s don’t have humans reading the sites, they use “bots” to do it. That’s where the Basic SEO I give to all web site design customers comes in. This valuable service lets the SE’s know what your web site is a about and tells them “Here’s a quality web site you should include.”
• Competition. For most search terms there are literally at least hundreds of thousands of competitors. They haven’t decided “I want to compete against you” (most of them anyway), but their web site content is similar to yours (at least the SE’s bots think so).

(more…)