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Five Tips to
Help Your Site's Rankings in the Search Engines
1.
Avoid excessive reciprocal links. What is excessive?
Well, I suspect from experience that not having any reciprocal
links doesn't seem to hurt a site at all, and having all
reciprocal links probably isn't a good thing, especially
in the more competitive areas. So the safe amount of reciprocal
links is most likely somewhere in between. Also, this percent
may change between search engines and may change for a given
search engine over time. How many reciprocal links is safe
is anybody's guess, but I think the safest thing is to not
have any at all except those that happen by chance.
2.
Don't link out to spammy neighborhoods. Be sure and
check all of your outbound links occasionally. You can link
out from your Japanese flower arranging site today to ten
on topic, relevant sites and in five years time easily half
of those sites might have gone bad. If you check those links
again in a few years usually a few links will be broken
and lead to nonexistent sites, a few will be to parked domains
and a few will be to something like gambling or prescription
drugs. You can use software to check for broken links, but
I'm not aware of any software than can check for off topic
links, so your best bet is to do a manual check every so
often. If you don't have time to do this yourself, this
can be a great task for a neighborhood teen or a stay at
home mom who could use s little extra income.
3.
If you do decide to exchange links with other sites, make
sure the sites are on the same or similar topic as your
site. You don't want to have a site on Japanese flower
arranging trading links with a site for Las Vegas real estate.
The best sites to exchange links with are authority sites
within the same general topic area as your site.
4.
The people who seem to do the best long term on the Internet
are the ones who look towards the future, at a time when
links may no longer be king. Right now links still seem
to be all important for rankings, but in five years the
search engines may have moved on to something else. Despite
all of the sophisticated programming by the search engines,
the bottom line is that links are still pretty easy to manipulate
by web site owners, especially in lucrative fields. So as
soon as the search engines can find a better way either
to replace or decrease the importance of link popularity
for ranking sites, I think they will do it.
The
best insurance you can have to stay around for the long
term is to have interesting and unique content that gets
book marked, discussed in forums, linked to from blogs,
gets return visitors, would get good reviews from human
quality raters, etc.
5.
Keep your site updated regularly. While by having
some great links it is possible for sites that don't get
updated to still rank well, in my experience this is most
likely not the norm. Updating your content is like watering
your plants. You have to do it regularly to keep things
fresh and alive. Go through your site(s) on a regular basis
and prune those dead links, add some fresh links to recent,
news articles, and add some new content now and then. Delete
or rewrite any pages that are out of date.
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