Showing posts with label inbound links. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inbound links. Show all posts

Monday, December 29, 2008

Edu Text Links Still Work

By Steve Prylon

Search engines value the links pointing to your site as votes . This is how they determine what your site is about, and the importance and relevance of your site in relation to those words. Links from high PageRank sites are considered bigger votes. And votes from trusted and authority sites are also considered more valuable. Links from a .gov or .edu are trusted sites, and will be considered a stronger vote by the search engines.

Most in the SEO industry will agree that .edu links have a higher value with the search engines, but there are always a few who disagree. In fact, it is just not true that .edu links are rated the same as other links by the search engines. A simple test will determine this: choose 2 sites, add standard links to one and .edu links to the other. Check your rankings and then run the same test several times. You'll see that .edu text links do make a difference in site placement.

More evidence that .edu or .gov links are not treated the same by the search engines is the fact that they're often ranked in the top 10, even when those sites are outdated or irrelevant. The fact is that .edu repeatedly ranks higher than standard links.

When you think about .edu links and what makes them rank higher, the answer is clear. If a new university were to open tomorrow, links from that site likely wouldn't have much weight or value. But most of the .edu sites are very mature, huge, trusted sites that are full of information. And they have tens of thousands of inbound links and high PR. This is why the search engines are placing a weightier value on these links.

As with anything, there's no way to get everybody to agree, so the naysayers who disagree about .edu links may just need to agree to disagree with the rest of the pack. Most SEO providers are seeing positive results as are we. And as long as our clients rankings are climbing to the top using quality content links, then we won't likely abandon something that works.

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Saturday, December 27, 2008

There Is No One Right Way In SEO

By Julie Johnson

The term SEO, or search engine optimization, is still an unknown to virtually everyone who doesn't work in that field. Most people have never even heard of the term nor know what it refers to. But the more interesting part is that even within the SEO industry, not everyone agrees on how best to approach the problems SEO sets out to solve.

Most everyone does agree on basic guidelines though. Guidelines like high site content, receiving and giving inbound and outbound links, proper meta tags and strong organization of the site. The problem is that there is no one formula that dictates the ratio or value of each of those things, so by its nature, SEO continues to be more of an art form than a scientific method. A good SEO provider is constantly juggling and balancing between all the factors as they carefully watch the movement of the website in the rankings.

Ask 10 SEO companies s to perform a site analysis, and you;ll get 10 different reports. Luckily most of them will have quite a bit of overlap. And luckier still, provided they are bona fide SEOs , most will not have any outright conflicting advice. But still, the finesse and attention to detail that a good SEO agent possesses will be evident in the varied responses you would see in these 10 reports.

The industry is an exciting one for SEO providers. Because there's no clear cut right or wrong way, much of their work is based on inherent knowledge, experience, and a whole lot of intuitiveness. Nobody has a secret plan that will work 100% every time, and every website is different in its needs and goals. Building traffic and improving rankings are the only way a SEO provider gets a "report card". And because SEO work takes time before the effects are seen, there's almost a magical excitement present that the suspense of not knowing brings.

For an individual to perform successful SEO work on their own website is nearly impossible because of all the nuances involved these days. And things change regularly, in fact so rapidly that only an experienced SEO provider with an extensive performance history is likely to be able to keep up with them. The best way to assure success is to check out providers and look at their track record.

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