Almost on a daily basis, I am amazed that there are still businesses in the Greenville area (or any area, for that matter) that do not have a web site. Read more…
As any knowledgeable internet marketer knows, incoming links are a very important part of your site promotion strategy. Be aware, however, that just as spammers have proliferated in an attempt to manipulate the search engines, unethical “link partners” are popping up all over the web to take advantage of unsuspecting webmasters and their eagerness to acquire incoming links at all costs.
It starts innocently enough: you are contacted by a webmaster for a site that wants to trade links with you. You do your due diligence and check the site out, and everything seems to be in order. You agree to place a link on your site in exchange for a link back. One fairly common scam occurs when the requesting webmaster links back to your site, but only long enough to get your link. At some point in the future, the webmaster removes your link without notifying you, and suddenly your link exchange has become a one-way link in his favor. Such unethical tactics require you to either periodically perform a time-consuming audit of your link partners or utilize one of the many automated software packages or online services that specialize in keeping tabs on such things.
Recently, however, I was almost victimized by a more devious strategy. I received a link exchange request from the webmaster of a site that seemed of good quality and related to my site. I replied that I would be glad to post a link back to him as soon as my link was up on his end. Within a few hours I received a confirmation email notifying me that my link was ready. I clicked on the URL, and, sure enough, there was my link. It wasn’t until I hovered my mouse over the link that I discovered that the link actually linked back to his site, not mine. In every other way, the link looked just like the html code I had provided him. The only way to know it was different was to look at the source code itself.
In short, when manually verifying the presence of a link on another site, be sure to look at the source code, not just the displayed text. It’s too easy to fake a link to your site.
Internet Marketing - The term “internet marketing” encompasses all areas of marketing or promoting your business or service via the internet or World Wide Web, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertisement, email marketing, and any other online method.
Keyword Analysis - The process of collecting keywords/keyphrases related to your site and researching as many as possible to determine which are the most economically attractive in terms of demand and competition. Demand represents the number of searches on a particular keyword/keyphrase over a given period of time, while competition represents the number of websites competing for those keywords. For best results, a website should target keywords that are high demand (lots of searches) and low competition.
Keyword/Keyphrase - A word or phrase that describes a product or service that your business offers.
Link Campaign - A coordinated effort to increase the number of links from other sites to your site.
Link Popularity - the number of links from other sites to your site. Very popular sites have many links to them from other sites. Link Popularity is a major factor considered by search engines in their rankings.
META Tags - Code placed in the hidden heading section of a web page. Common META tags are the keywords tag and the description tag. META tags were once used by search engines to determine a site’s ranking, but were so abused that they are now largely ignored when ranking a site.
Organic Search Results - The normal, non-paid results (as opposed to Sponsored Listings - see below) returned by a search engine in response to a search request. These are the results considered most relevant by that particular search engine.
Pagerank - A proprietary value Google assigns to each website it indexes. The exact algorithm used to determine Pagerank is a proprietary secret, but sites with higher Pagerank are generally considered much more important than sites with lower Pagerank.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - A form of advertising in which the advertiser pays a certain amount each time his advertisement is clicked by a visitor.
Reciprocal Link - A common link-building strategy in which two sites link to each other. Reciprocal links hold much less value to search engines than one-way links in determining your site’s ranking.
Search Engine - a program that is used to find websites related to a particular keyword or keyphrase and rank them in order of relevance. Examples are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The process of tweaking a web page to make it as search-engine friendly as possible for a particular keyword or keyphrase.
Search Marketing - Similar to Internet Marketing, but differs in scope. While Internet Marketing refers to any form of marketing which utilizes the internet (email, for example), search marketing refers specifically to marketing through search engine results including both organic and pay-per-click marketing.
Spamming - the process of using unethical techniques to attempt to manipulate search engine results in your site’s favor. Many forms of spamming (such as stuffing your site full of keywords and little else) have long ago been made obsolete by new search engine algorithms, and such techniques will get your site ignored at best and banned from the search results altogether at worst.
Sponsored Listings - The advertisements usually listed above or to the right of organic results in response to a search request. These listings are paid for and used by advertisers to get more exposure than they might if they relied on organic (non-paid) results alone.
