Web Traffic: SEO and Links

You want people to visit your website, and one of the important ways to get these visits is from the search engines. By some counts, around 70% of all website visitors come from search engines. So obviously getting help from the search engines can make a big difference to the success or failure of your site.

Question 1: To score well with the search engines you need to impress them that your site is worth visiting. OK, so how do you do that?

Answer: You have to convince them that your site is an important and helpful resource for specific search terms.

Question 2: How do the search engines determine what is an important and helpful resource for a specific search terms?

Answer: They evaluate each and every web page in terms of its "quality".

Question 3: How do the search engines determine quality?

Answer: There are two important factors: on-page content, and inbound links.

Question 4: What do you mean by "on-page conent"?

Answer: The text on every web page is analyzed to determine what that page is about. The search engines look for "keywords". They assume when specific keywords are mentioned in a page then that is what the page is about.

Question 5: How is the "quality" of a page's content determined?

Answer: This gets a bit trickier. There are many factors considered by the search engines, but the most basic are the amount of text on the page that focuses on specific keywords, and the presence of specific keywords in critical places that the search engines assume are important places (e.g., the title tag, the main headline, the first bit of text on the page, etc.)

Question 6: How else is the "quality" of a page's content determined?

Answer: In-bound links. When the search engines see a link pointing from an outside site to a page on your site, they assume that means your page is important enough to be considered a resource worth looking at. The more links you have pointing at your page, the more important your page is considered and the higher it will rank when people search for the type of content your page is about.

Question 7: So links help the search engines determine the quality of websites?

Answer: Yes. In the eyes of the search engines - especially Google - links are like "votes". When someone links to your site the search engines assume that is like saying "this is a worthwhile resource worth looking at." The more "votes" like this you get, the more likely the search engines are to consider your site a worthwhile resource.

Question 8: So is that the whole story on links?

Answer: No. Not all links are given the same weight by the search engines. And some links never get discovered because they are on pages that are never visited by the search engines. So you don't get credit for those links.

I'll say more about linking strategies in the next post.

Resources:

Getting Traffic: Two Types of Traffic

Step By Step SEO - Building a Neighborhood

The problem is this: you have access to a number of blogs - either ones you have created yourself, or others you are allowed to post to - and you need an efficient way of posting to them. Normally this involves actually going to the blog, logging in, posting, and then logging out.

But what if you want to post to 25 or 50 different blogs, as is the case with the Link Builder Network? This becomes a very time consuming process. Is there a way to create blog posts and just "send" them to the blog?

Yes, there are several programs that will do this, and I've mentioned 4 of them in the previous post. The one we created for our own set of blogs is called "Blogging Central", and you can have access to it by joining the Link Builder Network.

Windows Live Writer - This is a slick program from Microsoft that interfaces with many different blogging platforms including Wordpress and b2Evolution - the two I am most interested in. I haven't actually tested it with other platforms such as blogger.com, but I am assuming it will work. For better or worse it lets you create complex posts that include tables and css elements. As with some others, this program requires you to individually configure each blog account you want to access. When you are dealing with more than 50 accounts, as in the case of the Link Builder Network, this can be a royal pain.

Scribfire for Firefox - Scribefire is a Firefox plugin. In other words, it only works with the Firefox browser. Scribefire is a very slick way to interface with many different types of blogs - including Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type, and a few others - but not b2evolution. It lets you create relatively complicated post layouts using tables and images, and it even lets you edit previously created posts. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to setup your logins. You will have to manually enter more than 50 blog logins for the Link Builder Network. And you will have to do that for each computer you want to use it with.

w.Bloggar - This is another free program that has been around for a while and has gone through a number of versions. It is currently in version 4.03, so you can be sure it is fairly stable. This program will interface with all our Wordpress and b2evolution blogs. It takes a bit of getting used to, and you must set it up for each of the blogs, but once set up it is quite efficient. We have used w.Bloggar for approximately 12 months to make posts for clients, so we know it is reliable. It is a bit more restricted on the formatting side - no tables, for instance - but this is probably a good thing. You can also load all your account logins and passwords by entering them into am .xml file and loading them all at once - a major time saver to be sure.

There are other programs like these, but I am not familiar with them.

The advantage of Blogging Central is that it is a dedicated system designed especially for posting to the Link Builder Network Wordpress blogs. Once in the system there is no need to login to each blog, and you can send the same post to as many as 4 blogs at once.

I will have a Blogging Central video up very soon.