In my last installment I promised that this time around I would discuss the importance of links in your search optimization efforts as well as how to get them. Unfortunately this article got long in a hurry, so we’ll just tackle the importance of getting external links now. I think you might be surprised at how vitally important they are, and mildly depressed at how hard it is to get high-value links. But stay tuned: Part 4 of this series will improve your mood.

In my opinion, the entire field of search engine optimization has become a lot simpler in the last year. In a nutshell, keyword optimization is nice, but getting external links is basically the whole enchilada. If you need to focus your time and energy, focus on acquiring unreciprocated external links.

Proving the Point

If you want to see how important links are, open your web browser, go to Google.com, and do a search on “Click Here”. The first result is Adobe.com’s Acrobat Reader download page. Interesting, no?

Even more interesting is the fact that the words “Click Here” are nowhere on the page. It would be silly to use “Click Here” as keywords because it is not a normal search term, and Adobe did not even include them anywhere on the page text, title, description, or in any metatags at all. So why does Google rank Adobe’s download page number one on that term?

The answer is external links. As a convenience to customers and site visitors, just about every web site that has a PDF file available also has a link to Adobe.com for the Acrobat download. And almost invariably, the link text is something like, “If you need Acrobat Reader, click here.”

Anchors Aweigh!

The Adobe example illustrates a key point about links: The search engines use anchor text as a huge hint as to what the target web page is really about. Anchor text, for those who need to know, is the visible link text that you click on in the browser when the page is rendered. The URL the link takes you to can be something like, “http://somewebsite.com“, whereas the anchor text can be, “Free money here”-or virtually anything the page author wants to say.

In some ways that makes our lives more difficult because we cannot control how others link to us, much less whether they link to us. There are some ways around this that I’ll touch cover in the next installment. But first a word about Page Rank.

A Salute to Those of High Rank

As mentioned in a prior installment, Page Rank is a term Google coined for how valuable or important it believes your web site to be relative to other pages on the web. Page Rank values range from 0 to 10 (which is an eleven point scale, oddly enough). The actual components of Google’s Page Rank calculation are yet another closely guarded secret, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the number of external links to your page is a huge part of it.

The importance of Page Rank is sometimes overblown since search engines must by definition care more about a page’s relevance to search queries. However, Page Rank is definitely one of the factors that will push your page higher in the crowd of equally relevant pages returned as query results. If you have virtually no competitors for your primary keywords, don’t worry about Page Rank. The rest of us need to have it on our radar.

There are precious few PR 10 web pages and at the time I’m writing this, Adobe’s Acrobat download page does indeed have that coveted PR 10 ranking. It certainly got the bulk of its rank because so many sites provide unreciprocated links to it. Another factor in Page Rank appears to be age: All things being equal, sites that have been around longer tend to have higher Page Rank values.

A hint to those still awake: The age factor as well as the Google sandbox described in part 1 of this series are both powerful arguments for getting web sites up and spidered as soon as possible, even if only as prototypes or proof-of-concepts.

If you were to survey tens of thousands of web sites, I believe you’d find that the most successful private, non-corporate web sites have a PR of 6. There are very, very few PR 7 sites, and if you’ve managed to achieve a PR 4 or 5 without professional SEO help, you’ve done pretty well.

Now we come to the slightly depressing part: One of the best ways to improve your page rank (and therefore improving the tendency to show up higher in search results) is to get an unreciprocated link to your page from a page with a higher page rank. If the Acrobat download page linked to my site, I’d be sitting pretty.

But alas, such links are very difficult to come by. Even worse, as we said in part 2, the one thing we can easily offer is a return link, but such reciprocal links have dubious value. I have anecdotal evidence that their value is rapidly declining and they are worth far less now than they were just one month ago when I wrote those words.

Here’s another tip: Reciprocal links to sites that have nothing to do with your web site in terms of content are a total waste of time. If you have a site about wedding gowns and you exchange links with a gambling site, in my opinion you’ve achieved nothing.

I’m connecting some faint dots, I admit, but I know Google in particular is investing a lot of effort in what is called “semantic analysis”. In short, they have a pretty good idea of what your web site is about, and they are highly motivated to provide the best possible search results. If a wedding site and a gambling site link to each other, the search engines are not all that interested in your contention that marriage is a gamble. That link is worth nothing.

In fact, I predict that if Google finds many reciprocal links with unrelated sites on your web page, you will actually be punished in terms of your page’s ranking. I can’t prove it yet, but as I said in part 1, if you learn to think like the spider, you’ll be able to predict what they’re going to do.

The spider likes it when you link to things that provide value to your visitors. And the spider gets angry when you trade worthless links solely for the purpose of fooling it into thinking your site is wildly popular. I predict spidey will bite you, if not today then tomorrow.

So what’s a new web site owner to do? There is no free lunch, but we’ll evaluate the items on the menu in part 4.

To learn more about SEO, please visit http://midnightmarketer.com Ross Lambert founded Midnight Marketer, a newbie-friendly community of web marketers. He is also the author of “Ross’s Guide to the Masters of Marketing” ([http://saleslettergenius.com]).

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OK, arachnids are not people, and search engine spiders are not really people, either. But what I’m driving at is that search engine spiders “think” like people. How do I know this? Because human beings wrote them. Any software that does analysis of any kind does so with the intelligence and analytical rules programmed into it by its human developers.

How Humans Comprehend

Imagine that I handed you an article to read that I had printed out. It’s about 20 pages long, but I didn’t tell you anything about it. Worse, you’re going to have to pass a test on the content. Get out your highlighter!

The best reading instructors teach their students to get the context before seriously studying a text like a chapter of a history book or an article. This is because educational research has shown that knowing the general scope of a selection helps human readers comprehend and retain more of the subject matter. By the way, this example is real, not contrived: I used to be a high school teacher and I took a good deal of post-graduate coursework in what is known as “content area reading”.

The easiest way to get the general context is to find the title. The next step is to look at section headings. The combination of the two frames the range or scope of the document or chapter. You can also pick up some hints from picture and diagram captions.

Once you know what the document is about, you can begin to dig into the actual text. As you read, you can often discern important or significant points by repetition. That is, content that is paraphrased and rephrased is often very important: The author obviously thought it worth the effort to rephrase the explanation a couple times (or more). [This paragraph contains a clever example, if I don’t say so myself: Did you see it?]

How Search Engine Spiders Comprehend

Not too surprisingly, search engine spiders take the exact same approach as humans.

Like human readers, spiders start to get a clue by looking at titles and section headings. On a web page the spiders all look for your title tag, so it certainly pays to create a title for your web page. Furthermore, it pays even more if that title contains keywords.

An Aside: What are “keywords”, anyway?

Most search engines ignore the keyword metatag in the HTML of your web pages, so why do web marketers constantly talk about keywords? The reason is that even if you do not use the keyword metatag on your page, you should select several keywords that describe the content of your page, and then make sure those keywords are sprinkled throughout the page multiple times and in a natural-sounding manner.

The places to use keywords include the title (in the h1 HTML tag), heading text (e.g. in h2 tags), alt and title tags for images, and in body text.

These keywords give the search engine spiders a stronger sense of what your page is really about.

Here’s an important observation: Ultimately, our goal is not to “trick” the search engine, but rather to help it see clearly what our content is about. Google and the other engines are getting very adept at figuring out artificial keyword sprinkling. Never string keywords or keyword phrases many times in succession. Google, in particular, sees this is a keyword spamming and will exact painful revenge.

There is also speculation that if your keyword-to-content ratio is unnaturally high, the search engines also discount that. I believe that to be quite likely, but “unnaturally high” is a closely guarded secret. The bottom line for me is that if the body text sounds funny because of all the keywords, you’ve moved into the danger zone. I’ll recommend to you the same thing I did to my Advanced Composition students years ago: Read your page aloud. If it sounds odd in any way, rewrite the odd part.

The search engine spider looks for your section heading in-surprise-the HTML heading tags, especially the h1 tag. You should use these tags on your pages, and make sure they contain keywords.

One often overlooked place to insert keywords is in the alt and title tags of images. Although not quite analogous to a caption that a human reader would examine, the spiders nevertheless figure that these tags probably give a hint as to what the image is about (and in normal circumstances, they do). The image, in turn, gives another clue as to what the page is about.

Once the spider provides a pretty good idea what your page is about, the search engine’s next job is to figure out whether your site has high quality content.

More Software and Human Similarities

If somebody claims to be an authority on a subject, it is usually prudent to check out the claim-especially if we’re going to be hiring them or our money is otherwise involved. We humans generally do this by checking references.

The search engine spiders operate in fundamentally the same fashion. They assume that a site has high quality content on a given subject if other web sites have links pointing to it. In other words, the site is likely good if the references check out.

Google, in particular, has become very sophisticated in its link analysis. For example, if you trade links, the value of the link is diminished somewhat (nobody knows how much for sure). The reason is that if you really have content that I value and I think my site visitors need, I’ll link to you without a trade. An unreciprocated link is one of the surest signs of high quality material on the referenced web site.

The search engines have also gotten very careful about paid links. If your link shows up on a link “farm” (a page or site that only exists for the purpose of creating links to fool the search engines), you may find your site banned altogether. Remember the old butter commercial where the lady says, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” and then she conjures up a storm? Well, the same is true for the search engines. Get caught trying to fool the spider and she’ll bite you.

Forgive the mixed metaphors and just remember the point.

The search engines are also known to discount run-of-site links. Let’s say you have a link to your home page on every single page of your monstrously large web site. Even though it might add up to thousands of links, it will have almost zero credibility in terms of boosting your page ranking.

The moral to the story is this: Don’t use run-of-site links to boost your ranking. If it is crucial to your site navigation, fine. Just don’t do the work creating all those links and expect them to help your page rank at all.

There is one remaining question, namely “Do internal links help? That is, does a link from page “A” of my web site to page “B” boost page B’s page rank on Google or any other search engine?

According to my sources, the answer is yes, but only just a little. External links are given a lot more credibility. Unfortunately, external links are substantially more difficult to acquire.

Next time: The importance of links and how to get them.

To learn more about SEO, please visit http://midnightmarketer.com Ross Lambert founded Midnight Marketer, a newbie-friendly community of web marketers. He is also the author of “Ross’s Guide to the Masters of Marketing” ([http://saleslettergenius.com]).

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SEPOV is an acronym for “Search Engine Point of View”; it is usually used in the context of search engine optimization (SEO) discussions. If you really want to approach SEO with confidence, you need to learn to look at your web site from the search engine spider’s perspective and consider its motivation (if you’ll forgive a little anthropomorphism).

Fortunately, search engine spiders are actually rather simple creatures.

What’s My Motivation?

There is, in fact, one simple, central, and obvious search engine truth from which everything else is derived: A search engine’s popularity is directly related to the quality of its results.

Never forget this truth. Do not minimize its importance or allow yourself to think of it as simplistic. There is much hand-wringing and money-spending by those who try to predict what Google is going to do next. The simple fact is that all the search engines will do what they’ve always done and always will do, namely try to improve the quality of their results.

Google rose to prominence because its results were the best. Their primary user interface was (and remains) ridiculously simple. Their results were just better than everyone else’s. And they still are-although Yahoo and Microsoft are gradually closing the technical gap.

The search engine spider’s motivation is therefore that of its creators: Find valuable information so that the rest of the search engine software can provide good results.

All of the major search engines apply advanced contextual analysis to return links to pages that have the greatest amount of high quality information about specific search terms. Think about that statement again for a moment, “…return links to pages that have the greatest amount of high quality information about specific search terms.”

There are profound implications to that simple statement that the vast majority of web site designers just flat-out miss.

Go Deep

For a given web page, depth is more important than breadth. A lot of information about one subject is far, far better than a little information about a lot of subjects. When the Google spider is examining one of your web pages, you have to convince it of two things:

1. Your page has a lot of information about the search terms. That is, it is relevant to the search query.

2. Your page has good information about the search terms (do you have high quality or authoritativeness)

Of those sites that are relevant and authoritative, Google makes one last value judgment: Freshness. The site with the most recently updated content wins.

Playing Favorites

Research has also proven that search engines in general and Google in particular tend to favor web sites that have one or more keywords in their URL. For example, one reason I liked the “web-marketing-advisor.com” domain name is that it contained some of my top keywords right in the name itself.

If your web site has the keyword in the URL, it also implies that depth is more important than breadth for an entire web site, too, since you’d want all the pages on the site to be highly relevant to the keywords in the title.

In other words, in my opinion, it is better to have several sites, each of which is focused on a narrowly defined subject matter than one site that has a shot-gun approach to many subjects.

Coming up in the next installment: Spiders are more human than you think!

————————————— To learn more about SEO, please visit http://midnightmarketer.com Ross Lambert founded Midnight Marketer, a newbie-friendly community of web marketers. He is also the author of “Ross’s Guide to the Masters of Marketing” ([http://saleslettergenius.com]).

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Every business needs SEO. This is because every business needs to be on the internet, to one extent or another. Unfortunately, most businesses cannot afford to do their own search engine optimization. They have to concentrate on running their business.

This isn’t a major problem, since there is an entire industry of people who’s business it is to get your business optimized for the search engines. However, when looking to hire an SEO firm, there are a few things that you need to be wary of.

1. If they won’t tell you their methods for any reason, RUN!!
2. If they claim to be a partner of Google, RUN!!
3. If EVERY one of their clients refuses to give a testimonial, RUN!!
4. If they tell you that they can SEO your site in no time flat, RUN!!
5. If they guarantee results, RUN!! (this one has a caveat)

Let’s consider these warning signs in a bit more detail.

Number one: They refuse to tell you their methods. Why is this a red flag? Because the techniques used for successful SEO are not secret. Everyone who has studied the practice for more than a day and a half will know the general methods: article marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click, and so on. If your potential SEO “specialist” tells you that their methods are proprietary, it’s a good bet that they’re doing something that the search engines would frown upon. This may work in the short-run, but will have definite negative effects in the long-run. You DO NOT want to get banned from Google.

Number two: They claim that they are a partner of Google. Why is this a red flag? Because Google does not partner with SEO’s. At best, what they mean is that they took the Google Adwords class or something of that nature. By the same logic, I am a partner of Google’s because people can find my website through their search engine. At worst, they are simply lying. And lying is not a sustainable business practice. Eventually, the truth will out.

Number three: They claim that every single one of their clients wishes to remain anonymous. Now some may make the argument that it is perfectly reasonable for a business to want a non-disclosure agreement signed, and that it is plausible that this SEO firm has only catered to these businesses. In that case, they are likely getting backroom off-the-record referrals. Otherwise, who would hire them except the unwary? In the former case, you wouldn’t have heard about them, because they don’t need to ask you for business. In the latter, you don’t want them anywhere near your business.

Number four: They tell you that they can have your website optimized for the search engines in no time flat. While highly effective, SEO cannot be done overnight. The fastest results I know of are counted in weeks. If they tell you they can offer you an instant solution, just remember TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch).

Number five: They offer you guaranteed results. Every marketer knows the power of a guarantee. But when it comes to search engine optimization, buyer beware. The only way for an SEO professional to honestly provide a guarantee would require them to know the inner workings of the search engine algorithms. These algorithms are some of the most closely guarded secrets in the world.

One possible exception would be an SEO professional or firm that offered a PPC deal. For example, they run a link building campaign for you and agree to be paid by the click. Basically they are doing what Google Adwords does.

This does not eliminate the problem. There is still the issue of a guaranteed conversion rate. perhaps they get you one million clicks but only 5 people sign up. You have just bankrupted yourself.

Conclusion: Search engine optimization is an excellent business strategy. However, it takes time and must often be outsourced. When considering whom to outsource it to, keep in mind these 5 red flags, and you should do just fine.

Jeff Miller is an SEO specialist and marketing enthusiast with experience in the retail industry. He blogs about various internet marketing topics at http://milleronmarketing.com.

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