SEO – Guide
Posted By Melanie Prough on June 23, 2009
1. Alexa Ranking Tool:
Alexa is a pretty powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. Find out how your web site traffic stacks up against all your competitors! This is one of the fairly accurate freely available tools to find out how well your site ranks up against millions of other sites on the Web.
Remember:
“The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site.”
Some examples are:
Traffic Rank for Yahoo.com : 1
Traffic Rank for msn.com : 3
Traffic Rank for google.com : 5
Traffic Rank for ebay.com : 8
Traffic Rank for Rediffmail.com: 3,338
Traffic Rank for amazon.com: 14
These rankings are generally consistent with the amount of traffic they have.
2. What is PageRank?
In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page). Your PR is reflective of many factors, most accurately described as a score of the number of backlinks a page has.
How many links you have from other web sites are the votes you get for your web site?
3. How is Page Rank Used?
Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one small part of the story when it comes to the Google listing/ranking, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.
Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar.
4. What is SEO and why is it so important?
It is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in Internet marketing and usability, this also helps your site get the exposure it deserves and increase your website traffic instantly.
5. Site Maps?
Site maps are useful in at least two ways:
1. If a user types in a bad URL most websites return a really unhelpful “404 – page not found” error page. This can be discouraging. Why not configure your server to return a page that shows an error has been made, but also gives the site map? This can help the user enormously and perhaps save the sale.
2. Linking to a site map on each page increases the number of internal links in the site, spreading the PR out and assisting the search engine crawlers in finding your pages more effectively.
6. Your Link Popularity:
Utilization of the search engines is a very important aspect of marketing; they are usually the first means by which prospects can find your site. That’s why link popularity is so essential. If the customers can’t find your web site, you will not see any sales.
The term “Link popularity” refers to the ranking assigned to your web site by the search engines. It determines the position your page gets displayed on when people search for certain keywords in a search engine. I can already hear you screaming… “Cool, tell me how to get my link popular!”
7. Link Exchange?
Link Exchanging, is no important unless it can drive more visitors to your site. Link exchange or reciprocal links are devalued backlinks for scoring.
8. Reciprocal links:
1. Reciprocal linking is another name for swapping links.
2. That’s a link from you to someone and a link from them to you.
3. These links are not as helpful as one way links.
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Link exchanges can be useful, if like you say it drives direct traffic from one relevant site to another. What I don’t like is directories that ask for reciprocal links – these are usually a bit of a waste of space!
Asking is ok, requiring… Well not so much =-)