Archive for category Training
Reciprocal Linking
Is reciprocal linking bad? This is the practice where you place a link on your site, in exchange for someone else doing the same back to you from theirs. I think the answer to this question depends on your site, how well known it is already. Because if you have a new website with few or no backlinks coming to it, then getting reciprocal links can help you to get started, to help you create your ‘web presence’.
On the other hand if you have an older established website that is already decently ranked by the search engines, then reciprocal linking can be bad. By linking to other sites, you lend your good credibility to them and can thus dilute what you have. So as your site moves up the ranking ladder, you don’t want to be linking to sites of lesser or questionable value.
And if you do create a link page on your site, here are a few rules to follow:
- Give it a good name like “Partners” or “Sites We Recommend”. Don’t call it your backlink page.
- Place links on the page that really will be helpful to your website visitors.
- The links should be helpful to your customers, relevant to your industry, and be quality sites
- Include not only sites that are linking to you – also link to sites that don’t. Magazine sites about your industry, trade groups, and any other sites people might consider ‘helpful’ to them.
Having nothing but a bunch of links to bogus sites is bad, it identifies your site as nothing but a spammer site engaged in a linking scheme. Google says this about it:
“some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites… and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results”
Sitemaps for Your Website
Posted by Joe in Maintenance, SEO, Training on October 22nd, 2009
Sitemaps are very important for larger websites. If you own a website that has many webpages, say over 50, then it becomes increasingly important to have a site map. If you create a new webpage, you don’t submit it to the search engines – you just need to add it to your sitemap.
There are basically two types of sitemap:
- Site maps to help your website visitors, and
- Site maps to help the search engines
Sitemaps for your website visitors are meant to help website visitors find stuff on your site. Usually a link is placed at the bottom of the page saying “sitemap”, and it is a HTML page that you create that basically organizes your site into categories, kinda like a Table of Contents in a book. The HTML sitemap page shouldn’t have every page in your site listed – it should just have all the important pages, or the ones people tend to look for or that might be hard to find.
Sitemaps for search engines are meant to help a robot spider your website. The spider can just scroll down the list of pages you have made showing it every page you want indexed.
The sitemap file for Google is an XML file called “sitemap.xml”, and is placed at the root directory of your site like this: www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml. There are lots of sites that will make the file for you, the best I’ve found is XML Sitemaps. This particular service, which is free, also generates a second file called “urllist.txt” which is the file that the Yahoo spider looks for. You just run the service on your site, download the two files, then upload them to your root directory, it is that simple. (you double check the files first, of course)