I enjoy Webmarketing123’s free Webinars on Internet marketing. I always learn a lot from them, and I try to apply what I learn. I’ve discussed several Webinars in the eHarbor Blog, most recently in my blog entry, “Experts are wrong: Twitter and Facebook help SEO.” In that post, I said I didn’t agree with one of their ideas about social media, but most of the time I appreciate their insights.
Today, I’ll talk about what I learned at their August 5, 2009 Webinar, “Advanced SEO Webinar: Linking Best Practices.”
The five things a website needs to get ranked on the first page of Google results are:
1. Keywords – These are the search terms you want people to type into a search engine in order to find your Web page.
2. Site Content – You need to use your chosen keywords in your website’s text to show search engines your site is relevant to those topics.
3. Meta Content – You don’t usually see this content, but it must be there in the backend of your site and in your Web page titles for your site to be fully optimized.
4. URLs – Include important keywords in your URLs. For instance, it is much better to have a URL like www.eharborinc.com/blog/2009/07/17/is-twitter-overhyped, which includes the date and headline keywords, than something like www.eharborinc.com/blog/post-81. The second URL gives no clue as to what it contains, while the first one gives a much better idea of the page’s subject matter.
5. Inbound Links – These are links (or votes) from other websites to your site. Search engines look at both the number and quality of the links you receive from other sites.
This Webinar focused on the importance of inbound links and how to improve their quality and impact on your search-engine rankings. After you have created an excellent site, with top-notch content on a well-defined subject, you can start working on getting links from relevant websites and forums.
Three important principles to remember in your links are:
1. Make sure the anchor text, or the text that is hyperlinked, describes the page it is linking to.
2. Provide supporting material near the anchor text to further describe what the linked page contains.
3. Be as specific as possible where you send links to. Avoid sending links to homepages unless you have a good reason for doing so.
This blog entry is getting long, so I think I’ll have to cut it short and finish it in a second part. Stay tuned to the Submit Solution SEO Blog for more updates on how to use search engines in your Internet marketing strategy.
This is a complete version of the blog entry on the eHarbor Blog: “I link, therefore I am… on top of Google.” The photo of the confusing keyboard arrows is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of jeremyfoo.
