ReeHart – Blogging from the Heart

Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimisation’

Online Newspapers are Eco Friendly

Newspapers themselves are a dying breed. I have long thought about why I have so many ‘free’ newspapers posted through my door every week. All of these free publications serve no use at all and are littered with an old form of advertising that we know to be worthless. Think about it, what is the point of wasting trees and other natural resources to create newspapers when the same content will soon be able to be delivered via my iPhone or better still iPad? There is none.

Rich Link Sources

The other interesting aspect to this is links. We are all well aware that links from newspaper sites such as The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mirror all carry a hefty amount of weight. It remains to be seen whether all content will be locked away from un-subscribed eyes. It is though completely feasible that links from newspapers will soon be null and void, after all if Google cannot access the content where a link to your site may exist then your inbound power will be lost.

Interesting Times

The whole newspaper industry is going to be watching this test case very closely. It is anticipated that News Internationals online publications will lose thousands of readers, especially as there will be plenty of other sources that are offering similar content as well as information. I don’t happen to agree with that. If you buy The Times in the physical world, why would you not want to buy The Times in the virtual world?

In fact if you do, you will be doing much more than keeping a journalist in a job, you will actively be helping to save the planet. It stands to reason that is something the newspaper industry in general will want and all those who buy newspapers.

So if you need Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation services for your newspaper, choose wisely as competition is going to be fierce

Implementing a positive strategy for marketing that maintains a consistant flow of web traffic to your site is by no means impossible. To get this web traffic to your site you need a significant search engine presence, and to achieve this, you need to main things, a quality website that is easy for Google to read and a series of links linking to your site from authority sites all over the web.

This is not as difficult as it sounds as there are many systems in place to make this happen for you. First though, you need to understand that not all links are equal. Google uses a Page Rank system to value each page of each site that it knows about. Ranked from 0 ” 10 with 10 being the best, most popular and valuable sites, and 0 being sites it knows about but thinks very little of. Below 0 is a grey bar graphic in the Google toolbar which indicates that either Google doesnt know that the site exists or worse than that, that the site has been blacklisted by Google and should be avoided.

In an ideal world we would all get links from the home pages of PR 10 websites. The problem with that strategy is that there are only about 10 PR 10 sites world wide, and unsurprisingly they are mostly unwilling to give links to anyone bold enough to ask. This means that we have to find our links from lower PR sites. Even finding PR 7 and 8 sites that will give us links is difficult, they themselves are very popular authority websites and as such they as choosy as to who they link to and who they dont.

The goal is to get lots of websites with some PR or the potential to get some PR reasonably soon to link to you. So what that means is, identifying a site as new (hasn’t been online long) and has no PR, but that is building links in order to get some PR. Identifying these type of sites is a good long-term method to adopt as you never know what sites are going to be the next PR-8s, 9s or even 10s in a few years time. The PR you will be given when Google review it (around every 6 months) will be based on the amount and the quality of the link juice you squeeze out of all the sites that link to you. The higher PR sites you get links from, the higher your PR will be.

So how does one go about getting these links together? Well, that is just the question. You can hunt down sites online that seem to link to other sites. There are quite a few sites about that provide reciprocal linking. The flaw with these is that reciprocal links aren’t really worth a great deal any more (although they are woth something as sometimes two-way links are natural eg.customer & supplier etc.they’re just not worth much). This is because the major search engines have cottoned on to the arrangement being made between sites with this type of link, they have therefore begun to downgrade their worth.

Easily the quickest and most effective way to reach the top of search engine result is by getting one way links, ie, getting sites to put a link to your site on theirs without linking back. This can however be quite hard because people tend to want something in return.

You may have problems achieving these one way links if you only have one website. There are a few answers to this issue, but one way link management is the clear way to go.

Effectively, your site is entered into a triangular arrangment where your site (site A) links to site B, which then links to site C, which then links back to site A (your site) this is beneficial to each site to the value of one one-way link. The big search engines cannot trace these links and so they reward you with a big push up the results rankings.