The secrets of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Lesson 1.1

I decided to start a series of article about improving your website ranking in search engines (particularly Google). Off course you could always read The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and work on your own. Or you could just follow some very simple tips I will try to teach you. These are proven advices and you’ll see the results in a few days. I’ll try to focus only on the important aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Lesson 1.1 : Get backlinks 1/2

Step 1: Find websites with related content. To do so, just type “related:www.yourwebsite.com” in Google. Here is an example with the online game website miniclip.com.

You can also look for websites using keywords related to your website content.

Step 2: Choose one website (e.g. games.com) then type “site:www.games.com” in Google. Now you know how many pages of the website are indexed by Google by looking a the top right corner of the page. If the number is lower than 100, try another website until you find one with a really big figure (>100). Then go to step 3.

In our example, “games.com” has only 10 pages in Google but “addictinggames.com” is fine:

Step 3: Visit the website. Check if it has an equivalent content than yours and if the website has an alexa rank and pagerank values close to yours. This helps the for the next step success. If this is not the case go back to step 2. If it’s ok then go to next step.

Step 4: Try to find a way to contact the owner of the website. In your message propose to build a partnership with this person. You have to be very kind and personal. You have to show that you know and really appreciate his work. Propose to a link exchange. Ask him to add the following code to its website:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/” title=”optimized keywords for your website“>
optimized keywords for your website</a>

For the anchor and title text, use keywords that are the ones for which you would like to appear first in google.

Tell him that you will do the same on yours with it’s code. Depending on the popularity of the two websites you need to adjust your speech.

The best would be to have your link on all of its website pages (even if it’s a tiny little link in the footer). To able to obtain that you’ll need to trade. As in any negotiation, starts very low.

Be realistic, if your pagerank is lower than his, you can propose to put his link on your homepage if he puts yours on its “links” page (deeper page). If he disagree then say that you will put his link on all of your pages if he just put yours on its homepage or another relevant page.

Off course if your pagerank is higher then discuss it the opposite way.

The best is to discuss with an equal popularity website (same pagerank) because you could then both put your reciprocal links on all of your pages. This is good for the SEO of both websites.

When finished go back to step1 or step2 and find other partners until you’re fed up. The more links you will get, the better your rank will be on Google (especially for the keywords of your link anchor text).

Coming Soon –> Lesson 1.2: Get backlinks 2/2

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