I’ve seen a lot of sites, especially blogs, lately, that use a form of link exchange to try to enhance their search engine ranking. After reading this article by Lorelle on Wordpress, I’ve decided that she has written a good piece (most of her writing is good stuff anyways) about how to get your site on the search engine and ranked well. The secret is to do what the search engines help documents tell you to do. I won’t rewrite Lorelle’s article, as she does an excellent job herself. Go read it. You’ll change your mind about how you’re currently doing things.
The short story is that “Webrings” don’t work. Once you’ve gotten through the spin campaign, there’s no substance. Who’s gonna want to come back to that? The secret is to not look like a spammer. Write good stuff, consistantly. Stick around. Keep doing it. You’ll climb. If you’re participating in a link exchange scheme, be sure that you’re doing it for referrals of visitors from the link you exchanged with and not necessarily from search engines later. This behaviour usually scores you lower with them.
Gimicks don’t work. Write good stuff, consistantly. We’ll come back.
I agree wholeheartedly. Blog like tomorrow’s your last day on Earth and the rest will take care of itself.
The OTA has worked very well for me.
But that’s just like she said. The links change constantly.
There are other things that also affect your “rep”, so to speak,a s well, like the frequency of linking to the same site/page. You may notice that in earlier posts, I linked to the same site more than once in a article more often than I do now. I think that it was a piece in Scoble’s blog (I may check and link back to it. LOL) that mentioned that it was better to not link as often. Once a week was enough and more often would detract from what you want to achieve, if its search engine rank.
Thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad my article helped you. There is so much mythology about SEO out there – I read the other day an article on top SEO tips and number one was “Looks count”. Huh? Looks mean nothing to a search engine. Number two was “Colorful Counts”. Search engines don’t care about colors, either.
I’ve been doing this a long time, and trust me, looks don’t count, but good solid search engine loving code and solid keywords count more than anything else.
Ah, the link obsession is a new one and people are also going overboard with that. Link appropriately and reasonably, and make your links count, and everything else will fall into place.
Let’s put the focus back on content and leave the SEO fussing alone. Good, audience building content will win every time.
I think repeat traffic boosts your ranking faster than any kind of linking you might do on your own site. People link to you once they’ve been to your site once or twice and decide they might want to come back again.
What I do not think I agree with that at all honestly.
You’re obviously a complete idiot, then. If you disagree with RT, you’ve been living under a rock somewhere.