Social media sites are a great place to plant links to increase the search engine optimization of your websites. Not only am I hoping you follow this link to sign up as one of our affiliate marketing partners, but by creating this type of link the liklihood that someone will find my landing page closer to the top of the search results while searching for information on affiliate marketing increases. What do I mean?
The purpose of search engine optimization (“SEO”) is to ensure, as far as is possible, that a particular website (actually, each of its individual web pages) ranks well in the organic (as opposed to the paid) results that appear when people search the web utilizing specific search terms.
The benefit of well-optimized pages is that the website receives free traffic from consumers specifically searching for the goods or services the webpage is promoting.
The 3 principal search engines used by searchers (in order of search traffic generated) are Google, Yahoo and MSN.
How SEO Works:
Each search engine (“SE”) has ‘spiders’ which scour the internet’s web pages and ‘index’ the pages they find – generally, the spiders locate web pages via links from other web pages. Once indexed, the SE’s have established their own algorithms which, when a searcher submits a search request using a particular word or phrase, determine which of the hundreds of millions of indexed pages has the most relevant content in relation to the term searched. Those search results are then displayed to the searcher, ranked according to the algorithm’s criteria for relevancy.
There are two basic factors looked at by the SE’s when ranking the indexed pages for relevancy to a particular word or phrase searched:
· On-page factors
· Intra-site and off-page factors
By far the most important on-page factor is the ‘title’ displayed on the page (i.e. the text that appears at the very top of the viewer’s browser, in the blue bar). Secondary factors include how often the searched phrase appears on the page (it should appear early and often), where on the page it is shown and whether it is highlighted (in an H1 or H2 tag, in bold, etc.). Overall, on-page factors are thought by some to account for perhaps 20% of the algorithms’ weight.
Accounting for most of the other 80% of what the algorithms look for in ranking a page are intra-site and off-page linking. Intra-site linking means links from one page of a website to other pages within that same site. Off-page linking involves links from pages on other websites that link to the page in question.
The SE algorithms view links to a webpage as “votes” from other web pages – generally (at least with Yahoo and MSN) the more links to a page the better.
Google’s algorithm uses an additional criterion, known as PageRank (“PR”). Every page that Google indexes is assigned a PR, from 0 to 10. PR is determined (or so it is thought, as the algorithms of the SEs are highly guarded) not just by counting the number of incoming links to the particular webpage, but examining each of the pages that those links are flowing from and seeing how popular those pages are (i.e. what pages are linking to them). PR is logarithmic - it is thought that a PR2 is 8 to 16 times better than a PR1. So a link from a PR4 page may be worth the same as 64 to 256 links from PR2 pages.
In addition to the number of links (and with Google, the PR of the page providing the link), the other very important aspect of linking is what “anchor text” is written in the link. By anchor text we mean the words written into the hyperlink – e.g. in this sentence, if the underlined words this is an apple were a hyperlink linking to www.yoursite.com, those underlined words comprise the anchor text of the link. The SE’s use the words in the anchor text to help determine what the page being linked to is all about. In the above example, this would be a bad use of anchor text, as the SE’s would conclude that the yoursite.com home page being linked to is about ‘apples’ – anchor text with related words would perform much better.
Google supposedly has over 100 factors it employs in grading web pages for relevancy to a searched phrase. Some of the other factors include the age of the web page’s domain, the number of years the domain is registered for, the length of time the page has been indexed, duplicate content between pages, number of words of content on a page, etc.
Ultimately, search engine optimization aims to address a web page’s on-page structure and off-page factors to make them as SE spider-friendly and algorithm-friendly as possible.
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