Internet Marketing Basics

Recently, one of our most important clients asked us for some advice on getting their Website noticed on the major search engines. We spent the better part of an hour providing some basic insights on this topic, which as it turns out, is the basis for the next five articles in this section of the monthly newsletter. Although Prodigix is by no means an authority on Website optimization, search engine submissions, and Website ranking strategies, we believe that over the past two years we have learned a few things that might be of help to our clients.

Part 3
Cooperative Linking Strategy

Once you have started submitting to search engines (see last month's article here), you should begin developing a cooperative linking strategy with other Websites to boost your page rank with Google and other search engines.

In the last article we emphasized the importance of the Google search engine and directory. Google is now more popular than Yahoo! and as mentioned before, even Yahoo! now uses the Google search results in their own Website results, with a few minor rating differences.

Google assigns a page rank to your website once it's indexed in their system and directory. Page Rank is the most important factor with Google. This rank is constantly changing based upon some very secret algorithms safely guarded by Google.

The single most important Page Rank factor in Google is your Link Popularity.

Your link popularity is a measurement of how important you are to other Websites that are indexed with Google. The more Websites that link to your Website the higher your popularity.

But, having a lot of links back to your site is only part of the secret.

The links back to your site must be relevant...

To be more specific, there are two fundamentals you need to know about "relevant" linking:

1. Link Text - Ideally, you want the actual link text to be the most important keyword phrase for your site. For example "lose weight" might be the most important keyword phrase for your site, so the ideal link tag back to your site would ideally look like this:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com">Lose Weight</a>

Obviously you'd want more written about your site after this tag, but the link text is the most important factor. Now, getting the friendly site to list you this way is harder, but not impossible. To ensure control over your link text it's a good idea to join a link exchange. We recommend the one that comes with the AddWeb Website Promoter software recommended in the last article. There are hundreds of link exchanges out there to choose from; why not join all of them?!

If you want to see what our link exchange page looks like, go to http://www.prodigixsoftware.com/links.htm. We belong to a few exchanges, but our best links are with our partners found under our recommended resources page at http://www.prodigixsoftware.com/recommended_resources.htm.

2. Relevance of linking page - The page that provides the link to your site should be relevant to your most important keyword phrase; sites from your same industry, partners, resellers, consultants, etc. In addition, the friendly Webpage/site should have the highest Google Page Rank as possible. Even better, if you can get this highly relevant site to put your link on their Home page, you're set! Don't count on it, but don't turn it down if someone offers to do it.

Managing a linking strategy is a lot of work. That's why most sites you go to don't do it. But, it's well worth the effort. Using these simple techniqes, we were able to boost our own website from 14th to 4th position on Google within 60 days.

Next Month: Part 4, Advanced Strategies for Serious Marketers

Recommended Resources:

AddWeb Website Promoter Software - helps you track your link exchanges and more!