You have a website with a page rank of 4 for your home page. Note that it is not your whole site that gets a Google PageRank, as it is properly written, but each individual page in your site is individually ranked. When you come across a website with a PR of 4 or even 8, it is the page you are looking at that has that PageRank. That will generally be the home page, and when you agree to a reciprocal link, guess what! Your link will be placed on a a€?links pagea€? in that site with a PR of zero. Thata€?s right, a Google PageRank of zilch: and thata€?s the benefit you will get. Zilch! A robots.txt file is a good thing; it tells the directory spiders whether or not to crawl a particular page. That can be important if you have certain content set up to be seen by subscribers only. But if your robots.txt file is set up wrong, the spiders could be avoiding web pages you actually want them to see, thus preventing the pages from being indexed. Likewise, a directory spider can’t follow a broken link on your site. Neither can a human visitor. Make sure all of your links work perfectly. If you place their link on your home page, or any other page with a PR of greater than zero, you lose out. Even if your page has a Google PageRank of only 1, THEN YOU LOSE OUT!! They get a share of your PR of 1, and you get a share of their PR of zero! Link farming is another SEO technique that always ends up being abused. This involves a group of websites utilizing hyperlinks on their pages, all pointing back to every other site page within the group, with the goal of engendering more traffic and increased rankings in search engines. While these may work in the beginning, the long-term consequences of this strategy will be anything but beneficial for the websites. Basic SEO Troubleshooting - Being Seen If you keep in mind how directory spiders work, all of the things I’m listing to check in this section will seem obvious. But they can also be missed inadvertently, which is why it’s always good to check them. Think of it as part of good site maintenance, or even "site hygiene," to coin a phrase. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, and then tell me I dona€?t know what I am talking about as many have. Some of these many are so-called internet gurus and SEO experts that fleece you by promising you a Google Page 1 position for your site, Once you’ve done that, a lot of the things you need to check fall under proper site maintenance and making sure that Google can see everything you want them to see. This won't solve all your problems, you understand, but enough items can be accounted for in this way that it’s worth going down the list. when they cana€?t even get one for themselves. If a site offers you a top 10 position, check out their position by using their URL. If they were so good, wouldna€?t they be in the top 10 for their URL? I would have though so! But NO. The first check he can perform, of course, is to make sure that his site is set up in accordance with Google’s own guidelines. The directory just recently updated these guidelines to be clearer and include more information. Take your time with these to make sure you fully understand the guidelines. So, do what you can to understand what directory Optimization is. What it really is a€“ not what some would want you to believe what it is. Whatever strategy you use, however, make sure that you fully understand it and that you are using it as it should be used. There are links and links a€“ some better than others. Some can give you positive results, and some of your links can be very bad for you. It was inspired by a thread in our own SEO Chat forums. The original poster mentioned that he maintained a site that had less than half of its pages listed in the main index of Google. He made some major changes to its internal linking structure to fix some mistakes he’d made earlier; Google also isn’t listing his internal links correctly now. He’s looking for some kind of checklist so he doesn’t feel like he’s just stabbing in the dark. Do you know how to tell the difference? Most cana€?t, and so are led by what they read online. The problem is that since a€?most cana€?ta€?, most of what is written online is garbage. It is difficult to spot the truth from the opinion. It is truth that gets you a good Google or Yahoo listing, not opinion. The problem is that more people believe opinion than truth since they dona€?t know what truth is, and most of what they read is false opinion. Okay, I mentioned putting key words in an internal link that goes from the page you’re optimizing to another page on the site. Make sure you also have key words in an internal link that goes TO the page from another page on the site (preferably from the home page). Every SEO seems to confront this frustrating situation sooner or later. Fortunately, there are forums devoted to SEO. Many heads with lots of experience, often with very different kinds of sites, can come up with things to check that one person beating his or her head against a bunch of pixels might not have considered. Developers call the practice of trying to figure out why a particular program isn’t working the way it should “troubleshooting.” This article will cover some of the things you’ll want to consider when troubleshooting your web site’s SEO. 12.Basic SEO Troubleshooting There are a number of good SEO checklists you can use when you start to optimize your web site for the search engines. They’ll help you make sure you don’t miss anything as you climb to the top of the directory results pages (SERPs). But what do you do if you’ve done everything you can think of and your site doesn’t seem to be going anywhere? The best advice you can have is to check out the websites that have succeeded and copy what they do. However, that is not as easy as you think since the off-site linking strategy that you cannot see is as important as the on-site SEO that you can see. Starting a brand new web site can be a daunting challenge. But it isn’t hopeless. It takes a good bit of work and patience, but you can eventually build the traffic and sales figures of your dreams. 39.Does Your directory Optimization Company Understand Your Marketing Strategy? However, any directory optimization company worth its salt can achieve high rankings of some sort. The true question is whether those directory rankings are for targeted phrases that are in line with your overall marketing strategy. In order for your directory optimization campaign to be truly successful, a directory optimization company must understand your business, products and services enough that it can accurately promote them on the Internet. Unique Differentiators And you don’t have to bookmark just your home page; as you build content that you think others might be interested in, you can bookmark those pages as well. Every company has them. Every directory optimization company should be interested in knowing what they are. These vital components of your marketing strategy can be a huge determinant in the keyphrases that are targeted in your optimization campaign. Social bookmarking sites are another place for you to consider. Post a link to your site and tag it with relevant keywords. Google and other major directories visit social bookmarking sites regularly, so this is another way to help your site get indexed. Don’t be rude about it though, or the community will brand you a spammer and act accordingly. For example, do you provide customized solutions in an otherwise highly-commoditized industry? Modifiers like "specialty" and "customized" added to your keyphrases will help you to obtain the types of visitors most likely to be looking for exactly what you offer. This is only one example - a typical marketing plan will detail several points that effectively differentiate the company from its competition, and a good directory optimization firm will take the time to understand what these are. By knowing and understanding these points of differentiation, an optimization company will be able to get the most out of your campaign. Staying focused on the blogging theme, if you’re in a professional field you probably frequent web sites related to that field; they might even have their own blogs and/or forums. If not, there are plenty of blog directories you can use. Michael D. Jensen of Solo SEO recommends finding five fairly popular blogs that are relevant to your site and have been updated within the last couple of days. Then you should read the post and make a comment that contributes to the discussion. Most of the time, comments to blogs offer a field for a URL; that’s where you put the URL for your web site. It will give you and the site some exposure in context, and if you’ve written something intelligent, blog readers will be predisposed to favor your web site (because you’ve just shown you know what you’re talking about).
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