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Getting your first links on a new site can seem like a daunting task if you have never built any links before. If you have built links before this post will not be much use to you.

W3 Sites is a directory of web designers, I would expect your web designer to have a page there. This page is a portfolio is the websites he/she has designed - of course they should take the time to add your site to their portfolio. If they don’t you can go along there and create your own account, just follow the link, the whole exercise will take less than ten minutes.

Next free and easy link I would expect would be a clean link from your web designer. I would expect any web designer to link to their clients sites as part of his portfolio from his own site. Unfortunately this happens more often the other way around…

And last for today I need to mention aboutus.org again. As I stated previously you should have your own site listed here and I do have mine listed there, but whatever happened that day I wrote almost nothing when entering my site. After my last post on about us I received an email from one of their staff reminding me that I could have done so much more on my own page there, adding contact details, adding images, address, you get the idea.

It all helps one little bit at a time. The problem with search engine marketing is that no one move gets the job done, it is a combination of many hundreds of little ones together. Therefore if you are doing this for your own company site do some work on it every day or at least once a week, and don’t expect to see the results quickly, SEO takes time.

Following on from the last post - What is a Link? - no-follows need to be explained.

I stated previously that search engines see links and follow them to the page they are pointing at, and take note of the anchor text - well here is the caveat.

Google will not follow or take note of anchor text on a link that has an additional little bit of htm code telling the search engine “nofollow”  - this cod...

I was asked this question last week.  I stuttered and said - “a link.”  They stared at me blankly, I hadn’t even answered as a question.

Okay, my mind raced, how would I get back to there - there being the beginning of the internet.

What is a link?  This is a link http://www.deadflyseo.com   when you click on this it takes you to another web page.  The last part is important, a link takes you to another web page - now that web page may be on another web site, however the link always points at a web page, not a whole web site.

The word link, in this usage, is the shortened version of hyperlink.  A link uses HTML code and is essentually made up of two parts.

Firstly there is the web address where the link is pointing to - this is the http://www.mysite.com - this tell the broswer the adress to bring up on the screen when this link is clicked.

The second part of the link is the text.  For example here is another link Glendalough -  here the text is Glendalough, this text can say anything that you want.  This text is called the anchor text - it is very important, very.

When you have put both these parts together inside the html on a page you have now given direction to the broswer to go to that page when it is clicked.  Simple?

Search engines, like Google, read these links and take note of what the anchor text is.  By placing the anchor text on a web page you are telling the search engine what you think this web page is about.  Therein lies the simplicity of SEO.  Everytime a web page has a link pointing towards it, generally the search engines take this as a vote of confidence in this web page - generally.   But of course there are a few other variable - the current guess is about 200 or so…

Building links to your web site is vital. Without links you will not be indexed, and without enough relevant links you will never show in the search engine results pages. So where to start?

One of the easy ways is go to aboutus.org and add you site. If you follow this link you will notice how I have added extra information, the information added automatically by aboutus is not comprehensive, t...

I think I must have a bit of the crazy about me.

This url is fairly new, I bought it as an idea for branding my own SEO services as I hated and hate the url I have been using. My current site gets about 1000 visitors per month, not a lot but enough in the Irish market to keep me going.

But still that url… It hurt me every time I write anything for the site, also my focus has changed. I offered ...

The web design industry is experiencing a growth rate of huge proportions, due partly to the numerous companies that have appeared as a result of continued Internet expansion. The business world’s appetite for websites and ecommerce solutions show no signs of abating in the near future, and organisations and individuals who want to commission the services of a web design company are faced with a d...

Content, content, content.

If you have very little content on your site it is almost impossible to pick up natural links, so deal with it. I just finished re-writing and re-designing a client site in December. The first result that we see from this re-design is that visitors now instead of of only viewing 1.2 pages per visit are viewing 3.4 pages per visit and are staying on the site for more ...

Matt Cutts is one of the Google’s main faces, perhaps the main one when dealing with webmasters. Here he is talking about dynamic urls or static. He is worth paying attention to, this video is from 2006, but still relevant. The video lasts for about 4 minutes.

What use is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book?

I would say at least two uses and may three.

If you are going to employ a company to market your web site you should have at least a bit of knowledge of what they are going to do. I don’t expect anyone in this category to do the SEO work themselves - they have a business to run. But too many SEO experts make the work look more complicated than it is. SEO is es...

Is there such a thing as great anchor text?

Yes and no. Using Google tools you can see a comparison of your anchor text and the text on your page. But first what is anchor text? It is the text that is on someone else’s website that hyper links to your site, i.e. the part that changes color, not the description if there is one. So for my little site on the Camino because the main search term I ...

I feel the need to write here fairly often, however I am so busy I do miss posting for some time. Therefore I was thinking of something easy for myself and something easy if you are just starting out on SEO.

1. Go to


and sign up. I am not telling you to spend any money. Inside adwords there is a tab at the top labeled Analytics go here and register your website. Once that is done get the ...

You would think that I have nothing better to do, I am avoiding real work and browsing Irish Webmasters Forum, and read a topic on web directories. So here just for the hell of it is a list of Irish web directories. There are bound to be more web directories in Ireland, so if you know of any drop me a line and I will add it.

All of these directories are hosted in Ireland, there are others that a...

Google Webmaster Tools is a good place to start understanding how Google sees your site. Go here and have a look around.

Firstly you have to create a login to set up tools for your website, any email address will do for this, but bear in mind you may want to have this information long term so an email address that you intend to keep and not a throw away.

The first thing of importance in tools is...

Yes for a change - how not to build links to your web site. I get emails like this all day long - does anyone think that it will work?

Dear Sir/Madem - Get the spelling right - my name is on the site try that!

I wanna link on your site at this link page:- I wanna link - is he taking the piss. It’s my web site, and he can’t even ask in a reasonable way - oh he has driven me nuts already

( http://www.caminodesantiago.me.uk/links.html )

In this Category:- ” Links ”

And hear is my site information:-

URL:- http://www.flyrusts.com

Title:- Alaska Flightseeing Tours with Rust’s Flying Service

Desc:- Just Alaska flight seeing? Try fly fishing trips in Alaska with Rust’s.
It’s the only way to experience Alaska fly in fishing. Anchorage sightseeing tours
are also a great way to witness the Alaska Experience. Alaska bear viewing is also a specialty
of ours to round out your alaska wildlife viewing experience! See Alaska from above!

Best Regards,
Raj Kumar

“Linking Expert”
raj@climbtraffic.com

This is out-sourced search engine optimisation to a non-native English speaker in India. Nothing wrong with that, some of them are good - but this is the proverbial sh*t against a wall and hope some of it sticks.

Now I went and had a look at Rust site, it is interesting and it is a good looking site - but he is NEVER going to get a link from me because he is hiring people like this who are spamming my inbox.

Irish Webmasters Forum is a good place to start if you are looking for information on building your own web site or you have decided to learn search engine optimisation.

The forum is targeted at all web designers and SEO’ers, however most who use the forum are working in the Irish market. There are great professional designers who will give helpful advice, and (IMHO) the best SEO’ers in the Iris...

Well the big update has happened and all the web designers and SEO’ers in the forums can stop screaming and moaning about the long awaited update. Now many can complain loudly about their drop in pagerank, quite funny really, if you like irony as I do.

Google normally update pagerank every 3/4 months, however it has been much longer this time around and many have been questioning why, the why is likely the many popular sites that have taken a drop in pagerank.

So why is pagerank important?

SEO’ers like to have links from sites with good pagerank, it show some sort of trust by Google. Many sites though just get PR just by being there long enough - often PR it has nothing to with how trusted or popular (busy traffic wise) these site are.

But yes when I go looking for links it is one of the things I consider. But please note just one of the things. Is the web site in the same area? Does the page return for any keywords that I want? These are, in my humble opinion, much more important.

It is possible to have high PR and not list for much, possible but unlikely.

Many websites live on advertising and this is where pagerank and traffic play a large part in their price structure. Text link ads work out advertising costs using PR as one of the variables, so a drop in PR is important for some sites.

Really in the whole scheme too much emphases is put on PR. Too many webmaster spend too much time looking at results and stats when they would be better off writing another post - designing another site, or putting up another page, or building more links - keep an eye on the money, that is the way forward.

I have read a lot recently about SEO in Ireland, most of it written by other SEO’ers. There seems to be two main complaints from them.

Knowledge about SEO seems to something that most web users are ignorant of, and really why should they know about SEO? SEO only really com...

Before starting any search engine optimisation I like to get a base line, i.e. where is that site now - think of it as a balance sheet, (oh, a previous life). How many visitors is the web site getting just now, what key words or phrases are customers using to find you, and what ones do you want to be found for.

A great free tool for this base line is Google sitemaps. It is free, just go here and...

Google has become the Ultimate Librarian. What am I talking about?

Well at uni money was tight so I used the library more - free books. The internet is the same tonnes of free information, some good and some is utterly crap and dangerous. Enter the big Goo…

Getting books out of the library was always easy - turn up, find the book and head away to read what was needed. Simple. Well not quite. ...

If you are new to search engine optimization it can seem a bit daunting in the beginning. Once you get started and learn how to build links on your own you will have loads of idea - many of which you will find are already being used - that’s life.

Here is a great link for any site. aboutus.com - go here and add your site details. Getting the search engines to find your site then index it is you...