Comprehensive link exchange information is available through our new site dedicated to the education of link developers, webmasters and site owners about link exchanges, link exchange practices and ways to get links to your site. (Read more…)

Directory submission is a basic web promotion technique that’s easy and quick. Submitting your site to online directories can help create that baseline amount of traffic to your site.

The internet has seen an growing number of directories, both free and paid. With hundreds and thousands of directories, which ones should you submit to? Which ones should you avoid? This article hopes to clear up these questions and provide more information on each directory. (Read more…)

So you have a newly developed web site, ready to receive visitors, what do you do next to get those visitors to your site?

Web site promotion is an ongoing process. It mostly involves getting links to your web site through various means.

Here is a quick list of basic web site promotion any and every web site owner. In addition, remember to optimize your pages for easier and better indexing by search engines. (Read more…)

It’s debatable whether buying text links will help or hurt your web site. I personally feel that text link buying is a just another form of advertising, like banner advertising or affiliate marketing, so I don’t believe it will hurt web sites.

As with any type of advertising, selecting your target audience is vital. I always say it’s hard, if not impossible, to sell apples to someone looking for oranges, so always advertise on web sites that are in the same theme as yours.

There’s three basic ways of buying text links.

1. Approach the web site yourself
2. Go through a brokerage
3. Get a promotion/search engine optimization company to do it for you

(Read more…)

Back in the good-old-days, search engine optimization was largely based on on-page factors, that is, the layout of your web page was the major determining factor of how well your page would rank in search engines.

Today’s search engine optimization techniques are vastly different to those of the old days. Links and linking are the major determining factors for ranking in search engines, and on-page factors rarely influences it. While on-page factors doesn’t seem to contribute much to your rankings anymore, they are still useful in creating a easy to read web page for your visitor.

So what are the on-page factors?

Here’s the quick list:

1. Title tag
2. H tags
3. Keyword:
   1. Early on the page
   2. Repetition
   3. Stemming
   4. In <b>, <strong>, <i>, <em> and <u>
4. Grammatically correct
5. Internal linking

(Read more…)

Here’s a quick set of rules to follow for search-engine-spider-friendly URL and linking structure.

1. Use absolute links rather than relative links.
2. Decide on whether you want www in front of your domain name, then keep it consistent.

1. Absolute vs Relative Links

Absolute links have a forward slash (”/”) before the URL path. This tells the web browser and search engine spider to look for the URL from the root of the domain. In essence, this means that with absolute links, it’s like specifying “http://www.yourdomain.com” before the URL path.

An example of an absolute link:

<a href="/yourpage.html">Absolute linking</a>

In the above example of absolute linking, the web browser and spider will look for the URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html, regardless of the current directory.

Relative links don’t have a forward slash before the URL path. Relative links tell the web browser or search engine spider to look for the URL from the current directory.

An example of a relative link:

<a href="yourpage.html">Relative linking</a>

In the above example of relative linking, the web browser and spider will look for the page, “yourpage.html” in the current directory. Therefore, if the relative link is located on a page in a directory, such as, http://www.yourdomain.com/directory/page1.html, the browser and spider will look for the page, “yourpage.html” in the directory called “directory” and not in the root directory.

Using absolute links tend to be a little search engine friendlier than relative links. Search engine spiders, whether it’s Google, Yahoo, MSN or some other spider, tend to get a little less confussed with absolute links than relative links.

2. www vs non-www

With search engines, it really doesn’t matter whether you use www before your domain name or not, as long as you keep it consistent! For example, if you choose http:www.yourdomain.com/ as your root page, then any requests for http://yourdomain.com should be permanently redirected to your chosen root page. This permanent redirect can be done using a .htaccess file, see this page for instructions.