Five simple tasks are required to ensure your website is on top.
Here are the steps:
- Your links must be managed first. This includes making sure none of your existing links are dead and checking if you are being linked to any sites you don’t know. If you have many links to your site, make sure they don’t get out of control. You can also remove any irrelevant links. You should also ensure that the links you link to are clearly labelled.
- Your links should be rearranged so the best ones appear first. If you have lots of links, it is a good idea to group them into categories. It’s a good idea if your links page has 25+ links to be made into a directory. This will help you gain more links to the site by offering backlinks in exchange for links in the directory. Make sure to check the websites that you link with and verify that the backlinks that were due to you are still there.
- Answer link request emails. React quickly when you get a request for a linking exchange. Every mail you receive may not be of high quality. If you do get one, you should check it thoroughly. Tell the webmaster why you’re declining a link request. It could be that you have an incite that they don’t. They may be able to help you fix some problems and become excellent link partners. It is customary to inform the webmaster within two to three working days of receiving a request if you are interested in exchanging links. Your webmasters will be impressed even more if your personalized message includes information about approval or disapproval regarding the exchange. It is important to keep your Search Engine Optimization efforts consistent for your site to show up first on search engines and search results
- Check link exchange forums. This is similar to the one above but it is much more difficult to keep track of if there are people who might request links from your site. These sites can be spammed, but there are also many other useless and horrible websites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behaviour in a suitable manner. Keep these forums clean, or search engines could consider them a link farm rather than an exchange site.
- Finally, ensure you are checking each feature of your website regularly to ensure it’s working properly. Your website will likely contain dynamic content at some point. It must be properly delivered. It is not a good idea to generate messages in a hurry. There is a difference between a good dynamic site and one that is poorly designed. A quality dynamic site has content that is timely and is well planned. Be patient with your website. You need to take the time to make it as beautiful and functional as possible. Keep updating your site with any new information you find. Search engines will return to your site more often if you keep it up-to-date. Updates are essential.If you can follow these guidelines of quality and precision you will likely be able to discover other ways that you could insure satisfaction with your visitors and increase your search engine listings, link count, traffic and clicks. It is a bad idea to offer to link to someone else’s website without first asking them for it in exchange. If they don’t pay you, then you need to think again. You must make sure that all of your incoming and outgoing hyperlinks are related to the content on your site in order to rank highly in search engines. Basic Link Checks should be included in your Search Engine Optimization strategy. In the false belief that outbound hyperlinks will count against them, robots.txt can be used to block search engines indexing certain sites’ links pages.
To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a webpage that has the URL for their links page but says “Disallow”, then it’s not being allowed to be indexed by spiders. Do not exchange links. You can also check if the website appears to be ‘cloaked.’ If so, report it to the search engines. This is not something you want to do. It is better to have these people removed from the internet. Is there PageRank on the site that offers you a hyperlink? If they do have PageRank, you need to look at the drop between the links page and the front page. Keep in mind that ranking new pages takes some time. PR0 does NOT necessarily indicate a site that has no PageRank.
You should look at how many pages have links already. The site should have no more than 20 linking pages. If it breaks this rule you shouldn’t even consider it for your Search Engine Optimization strategy for your site. While many webmasters believe that collecting links will increase their ranking, in reality, they can just make sites look like link farm websites. Many of them don’t even link to spam industries such as casinos or adult material. A link to a site that only accepts links is not an option and shouldn’t be included on your site.