Written by Super Surfer
A large part of search engine optimization - or SEO - is link building. In fact, it’s the bread-and-butter of SEO. I don’t care what else you hear: the two most important factors that will influence the value (and hence the rank) of a site in the eyes of the search engines are the following:
- The number of backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links) to a site
- The quality of backlinks to a site
The “number” means just that - the total number of links that exist that point to a specific site that have been found and indexed by a search engine (SE). The “quality”, however, is a bit more involved. By quality of backlink I mean the quality of the place giving the link, the relevancy of that site to the subject matter of the site getting the link, and what the anchor text says.
Plus, there are a couple of other things that can come into play.
Written by Super Surfer
A mini net (mini-net, mininet or however you want to spell it) is almost exactly what it sounds like: a small network. But this is a small network of websites - and this network has a very specific purpose. If you’ve done much reading on the subject of SEO, you very likely have heard the term mini-net. For the unitiated, a mininet is some usually spoken of in the context of someone building up one (or more) of their more-valuable (or hopefully soon-to-be more valuable!) websites with the goal of getting that one site highly ranked in the SEs (search engines).
Who would want to do this, you ask? All kinds of people. People who own forums. People who have an online store. People who run membership sites (porn and otherwise). People who sell product via affiliate links. People who give away free information on a website that makes money from pay-per-click ads. You name it - there are lots of reasons for someone to want their website to rank high in Google.
This is a basic SEO technique put toward “boosting” a site’s ranking. It’s been around for years. But it’s still used, and still is useful, and it’s worth learning and worth doing.
[And as a sidenote, I must digress for a moment. It might sound confusing and even contradictory, but a site can get a lot of traffic but not rank too highly in Google. In fact, a site can be effectively banned by Google (de-indexed) but still have many ways of getting a steady stream of visitors. I only bring this up to expand your mind to other possibilities. But I'll save the rest of this thought for another post...]
Written by Super Surfer
The big question, the crux of SEO, is “how do I rank high”? And ranking high means first page, if not top five in the SERPs. Usually.
We know (kinda) what must be discovered and measured, but most do-it-yourself SEOs don’t know how to get some of the vital info they need. The most coveted thing in all this would be a “perfect” keyword list. The list of the very best, most-related, and most-effective (in the eyes of Google).
So, barring any pay services out there, let’s assume you have a site for which you need keywords and you are going to set out to get the best keywords and keyword phrases for use in the following parts of your site:
- Written content, visible to visitors
- Meta keywords
- Meta description
- Alt tags
- Title attributes for links
- Category names
- File names
- Folder names
- Subcategory names