As the online market place continues to warm up to the idea of SEO, link building has become center stage as it tends to be the most time consuming and crucial part of any internet marketing strategy. Link building services are the most commonly outsourced aspect of SEO. This process involves finding qualified and thematically relevant one-way linking partners who will link back to your website. At first glance this sounds easy and there are hundreds of automated products out there that claim to add thousands of back links overnight. The truth is there are no short cuts in cultivating authoritative back links for a site. Link building companies spend many hours link building by hand in order to get the best results. Spammy automated products often don't cultivate valuable links and tend to do more harm than good. Here are a couple quick suggestions to help you get started.

Google webmaster chat:

indirect answers to direct questions

Summing up Googlers' answers to webmasters' questions, we took notice of a few things webmasters are very curious about, but they can only guess at – even the expert opinions differ a great deal. Read the answers and conclusions from the third online Webmaster Chat.

Googler: "… if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like." – We can conclude that the information Google receives through its toolbar is used in the ranking algorithm.

Googler: "I think it is fair for Google to use that [age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered] as a signal in some circumstances." – The age of domains and sites are ranking factors.

Googler: "Google uses a bunch of signals like location of the server or the TLD in order to determine which users might be interested in the sites content. "– This means the location of the server does influence the local page rankings.

Googler: "If you're moving from one URL to another (even if it's on a different domain), ranking signals can be passed via a 301 [redirect]." – Google will pass your old domain ranking information to the new domain if you make a proper redirect – 301. However, you should not use a 302 redirect.

Googler: "We work hard to make sure a site can't have a negative effect on another site." – So, a bunch of links from "bad neighborhoods cannot cause a drop in site rankings."

Googler: "We generally treat all links the same – be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites."

Googler: "PageRank is re-computed all the time (different PageRanks every day). But we update the toolbar PageRank 3-4 times/year." – The toolbar PageRank is often misleading and does not show a true picture.

5 Crucial Steps to a Successful DMOZ Submission

DMOZ provides lots of search results for most of the top search engines and directories, including the biggest of them all - Google. It’s important to understand that DMOZ is NOT a robot based crawler like Google but a large, human edited directory of the Web. There are 5 steps that need to be followed in order for your DMOZ submission to be successful:

Step 1)

You need to make sure your full contact information is displayed on your website. By this I mean your physical postal address. A website without a postal address or worst still no contact details at all would almost certainly be rejected by a DMOZ category editor.

Step 2)

Do not under any circumstances become impatient and start spamming the directory. You should only submit your site once and then you can forget it for three or four months. DMOZ recommend that you submit your site to only one category - the most relevant one to your site. In certain cases how to write a press release seen big sites that cover multiple topics listed in multiple categories but these are in a minority. Submit your site only to the most important category

Step 3)

The DMOZ editors are looking for sites that are information rich and offer good and original content. If your site does not have an abundance of decent content. I suggest product launch press release you work on that first before submitting your site at all. After all the reason the search engines values DMOZ so highly is that it is a concentrated collection of quality websites. They didn't get their excellent reputation by listing just any websites!

Step 4)

Select the most appropriate category for your DMOZ submission. Another reason the search engines love directories is that they arrange links to websites by their theme and associated keywords. For example, press release publicity have a web design business based in Doncaster, UK then make sure you submit your website to the category that lists Doncaster based web design companies not simply the first web design category that you come to. It really is worth the extra effort of finding the proper category. After all, you’re going to have to wait long enough for a response anyway.

Step 5)

Submit your site. At this crucial stage you must take every care to enter the most accurate information about your website possible. Make sure to read the editorial guidelines and adhere to them at all times. Anything less will mean that your website will not be accepted into the directory. aerobic septic system you have submitted make sure to store the URL of the category that you have submitted your site to - put it in your favorites. This will make it very easy for you to periodically check if your site has been listed.

Conclusion:

Getting listed in the DMOZ directory is tough. Some people believe it is an actual impossibility. By following the advice in this article you can give yourself the best possible change of being accepted into the directory and gaining the backing of this search engine giant!

Why Page Rank Is Important

Ever since the Florida Update SEO and SEM firms have been speculating on what Google did and why they did it. We developed our own theory in which we believe Google used some of the Applied Semantics technology to build one of the world’s largest ontological databases. In other words Google has been attempting to infer meaning on pages, and returning results matching or similar to that meaning.

 

While others dispute this and say the results are because of other algorithms, like the “Hilltop” algorithm (which has many of the same parts of the ontological algorithms built into the Applied Semantics package) none dispute the fact that November 2003 was a turning point for Google.

 

It was also shortly after this happened that many began to realize that PageRank was playing less of a role in the overall rankings. Who would have thunk that Google was now saying “regardless of the PageRank sites that more closely match the query would be returned in the results?”

 

This led many to speculate that PageRank was dead and that we no longer need to focus on PageRank as it has little to no effect on final rankings. However, I’m here today to tell you that this isn’t entirely true. And the reason I think this has to do with how Google, the physical system, works.

 

If you don’t already know, Google is comprised of clusters of servers which store and serve the index. Other clusters filter and sort and present the results, but it is this storage aspect I am going to focus on now.

 

In order to maintain its integrity Google splits the index into 64 Megabyte sections. Then these sections are replicated across multiple clusters. This maintains the integrity because many clusters can fail and the index will still render correctly.

 

But this isn’t the focus of this article. What I want to focus on is just one of those clusters.

 

If the index is split into 64 Mb sections, then each cluster will obviously store multiple, disjointed sections. So while a cluster may not have one entire index from beginning to end it may have a percentage. It is on these individual clusters where the initial sorting happens.

 

When a request is made (via the search box on Google) the clusters receive the request and sorts through what they have stored and return the top results. And wouldn’t you know it? One of the most important factors the clusters use at this level is PageRank.

 

In other words, when the cluster receives a request, it determines if a result matches and then orders matches in PageRank order. Of course I am over simplifying it here, but essentially this is what happens.

 

So let’s say that in the 64 Mb section where your site is stored, there are also 5 of your competitors. The cluster receives a request which says “send the top 3 sites matching this query.” You can imagine what happens next – there are 6 sites matching the query, but only 3 can be sent. What is the cluster to do?

 

You guessed it – order by PageRank and send the top 3 sites.

 

So what if your PageRank is 4 but three of your competitors are 5 and higher? Chances are that your site won’t be sent for this request or any others which match your site as well as theirs.

 

This is why I think PageRank is still important, because obviously if you don’t pass this initial screening process you won’t show up in any results.

 

Of course we already know that having a high PageRank doesn’t guarantee you a top spot in the final search results – this is where the upstream process happen – applying the semantic/hilltop algorithms and so on – before the results are served to the end user.

 

You see, I think PageRank obviously still has some weight, but it’s applied earlier in the ranking process. However it can be an effective filter. This way the upstream algorithms don’t have to process as many sites. This reduces load times and helps improve the speed in which search results are returned. Because rather than returning 1 million results, the clusters combined may only return 750,000. That means there are 250,000 which do exist in the index, but which the upstream algorithms don’t need to be applied to.

 

What else this tells me is that as the index grows, higher PageRank values may become more important, because there will be more sites competing for that top spot, so they can move onto the next round of filtering.

 

Let’s go back to that original example – a request is now made for four sites in your cluster. If the same three competitors have a higher PageRank, then your site will match the request and be sent the next round of filtering. And it is at these upper levels where the engine may determine that your site is in fact the best match. Therefore it could become the top listed site, even though the PageRank is lower than others.

 

So while PageRank definitely isn’t as important as it once was, I think it should not be totally neglected. Therefore finding quality links is still as important as ever.

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