eBlox e-commerce blog

Continued from the previous post. This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

PageRank is critical to understand (or at least know how to find) because it affects the quality judgment of inbound links. If a site with a very high PageRank links to yours, it can have a positive effect on your ranking; PageRank is “passed on”, to a degree, to the site that receives the inbound link. Conversely, a site with very low PageRank offers little value to your ranking. This is why trading links with your buddy’s nifty new website won’t accomplish much (most such “link-swapping” tactics are completely ineffective); you’re both passing on nothing of much value to each other. So, the goal in building inbound links is to get those links from sites with higher PageRank than your own.
Even this can be problematic, because Google is on the lookout for anything that might pass PageRank inappropriately – that is, without actually reflecting quality. That means that a lot of sites that you might consider as possible venues for building inbound links will actually not help you. For instance, advertisements, blog comments and many other commonly used tactics for building inbound links no longer pass PageRank to the target site. Google has even removed many common directories from its page ranking algorithm.
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This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

If there is anything approaching a “secret sauce” to search engine success, most experts would probably agree that it is the inbound link. An inbound link is simply a link from some other site to your site. On the surface, it would seem simple to acquire these – trade links with friends, get a link on your brother’s blog, get listed in a local directory, etc. And it is superficially simple to build inbound links to your site (and even simpler, though often expensive, to pay someone to build them for you).

Building and acquiring good inbound links – that is, ones that actually benefit your search engine rankings – is an entirely more difficult proposition. There are a number of reasons for this, but first, let’s review what we’re trying to accomplish in the first place.

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This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

Once you’ve filled your site with appropriate keywords, there’s still one other place you can build relevant content that will help your site’s search performance: a blog. Blogs (short for web logs) are simple, personal publishing platforms that allow you to post daily updates or information about your business. They’re easy to set up; just go to blogger.com, typepad.com or a host of other providers and you can set up your own company blog for free.

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This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

So, you’ve done the “uniqueness” exercise and you’ve got your site built with appropriate keywords, but you’re still not getting much search traffic. What’s going wrong? Well, beyond the sheer volume of competition that’s likely fighting for those words, you may be simply using ineffective keywords. Sometimes it’s difficult to predict what real users are actually searching for, and it could be that your words – as meaningful as they may be to your business – are not particularly effective for searches.

Thankfully, Google provides a free tool to help you generate keywords. Available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, Google’s Keyword Tool can take your basic keywords and show you alternatives, along with their potential search traffic. The tool is built primarily for pay-per-click advertisers looking to generate keyword lists for their advertising campaigns, but it’s also an effective way to see what users are searching for. The Keyword Tool is one of a list of many free tools I’ll discuss in the coming months to assist you in your search engine optimization.

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