It's all about the backlinks

I know I've written in the past that I primarily do "on site SEO", making sure my client's site is friendly to both human visitors, and search engine spiders, but once that aspect is done, all that is left to do is build up the number of relevant backlinks to your site, and of course continue to add quality content to it.

So, how do you do that? Well, there are numerous ways, one is to write witty articles and cross your fingers that some of your viewers will link to it. Great for organic (as in non-automated) backlinks, but not so good if you need to build up backlinks quickly.

You can also make your articles available for other webmasters to publish on their sites via RSS, or use one of the numerous article syndication sites out there.

Another way is to give away a freebie web widget, like a small but useful javascript widget that other webmasters can include on their own sites, of course including a plain text link in the copy/paste code you provide them. The drawback here is you have no control over what the subject, or the quality of the linking site is, but typically the majority of these types of links will be beneficial to your site.

And yet another way is to visit other sites related to your topic, posting in forums or commenting on blog posts, including an occasional non-spammy link to your own site. Emphasis on "non-spammy", because if those webmasters are anything like me, any comment spam will be removed within minutes of you posting it.

There are likely other ways, but the one remaining I can think of at the moment is to pay for them. Granted, search engines like Google have some pretty intelligent ways of detecting paid links, and if you set off the "paid link" alarm, you are basically throwing your money away. Worse, you might trigger a penalty and wind up worse off than you are now.

I won't go into detail about how to avoid setting off that alarm, because I truly believe in order to rank well in search engines you need to actually provide something that is useful, entertaining or informative (hopefully I do all 3 here)

One service that I know of, which works pretty well is called Text Link Ads. Says what it does, does what it says. I've been both a publisher and an advertiser using their services, and it does work, if you are willing to shell out some cash, and be picky about what sites your link will appears on.

Another method, although I've had mixed results, is to find a freelancer that specializes in back link building. Scriptlance is a good place to look, but be careful.

Hiring whomever has the lowest bid is likely to be a waste of time and money. It could also damage your site's search engine rankings if done incorrectly.

Whomever you hire, ask to see previous examples of their work. Are the links they've created grammatically correct? Is the syntax correct? Are they in context with the pages they appear on? Do those pages appear in Google's index ? Does the page have noindex/nofollow tags ? Do they look spammy? Automated ?

There are a lot of things to consider when going this route. It can be done, but results can vary, widely. The main thing to consider is the fact that Google has a legion of some pretty bright people whose sole purpose in life is to detect and devalue non-organic back-links. Actually they teach computers to do it, but you get my point.

This concludes today's witty, useful, entertaining and informative article.

Until next time. Cheers !

Save the binvironment !!!

I came up with an expression about 10 years ago regarding 2 major players in the
realm of technology, Intel makes em' faster, Microsoft makes em' slower...
Taken at face value you might not get my meaning. What I mean is software developers will continue pushing the limits of the hardware of the times.

The same is true today but now a broadband internet connection is a required hardware component for my system, without it I can't work or play. And of course software developers, rather web developers are working hard to reach the limits. VOIP and streaming media are good examples of this trend.

But I'd like to draw your attention to the unwanted/unintentional bloat that is getting into the mix, particularly the bloat that comes about in HTML code when using WYSIWYG editors, or image files that have not been optimized. BLOAT BAD! for numerous reasons, some of which you might not realize.

Another contributor to the total saturation of the information highway is web sites not responding to "if-modified" requests correctly, which is esepcially true of many PHP driven web applications. This in turn can prevent the content from being cached properly, and must be re-served for every request.

And yet another contributor, most web servers are capable of compressing content before sending it to the viewer. In most situations enabling this compression is a good trade of spare cpu ticks in exchange for smaller amounts of data to send down the wire.

So yes, save the binvironment.

If you are a web developer..

• Optimize / crop images
• Inspect your HTML, removing bloat code.
• Avoid inline CSS styling, use an external css file
• Avoid inline Java, javascript use an external js file
• Check that your web site responds reasonably to "if-modified" requests.
• Check that your web server is compressing content before sending

By the way a pretty handy place to check server responses is http://redbot.org
After submitting your domain's URL, click the "check assets" link. They even
have a handy bookmarklet you can use. SWEET!