Dominate Google Rankings

The reason Google is the most successful search engine in the world is because they provide the best search results; pages ranked by tangible value. That tangible value is a combination  of content and links, with links being the more important factor (they assume any pages linking  in will only link to good content or risk their own ranking.)

Here are a few tips that will help you take full advantage of Google's love of linking...

1.) Link Deep and with Relevance
So why is deeper better and what's this about relevance? Google figured out that a link to a homepage is only good if that homepage has the information the visitor needs. If a person clicks a link for "amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe" and ends up on the home page, which has nothing of the sort, Google discounts it as a wasted link. On the other hand, if the link leads to the page containing info on the "Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe," even five levels deep, the link has huge value to the visitor and to Google.

Want some proof? You already have it if you've ever used Google's AdWords pay per click service. They will not even accept PAID links to pages that are not the most relevant for their visitors, regardless of what you are willing to pay per click. Now that's saying something!

2.) Use Absolute Links Internally
It sounds complicated but it's not. Absolute links are those with a fixed full URL. There's another kind, called "relative" links that skip the first part of the domain and remain "relative" to the file structure. Let's take a look at the difference...

Here's the absolute link to the Google Ads page from Google's homepage: "http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/"

Here's what it might look like as a relative link: "./intl/en/ads/"

Long story short; absolute links help your SEO efforts and relative links don't.

3.) Use Keywords in Anchor Text
Use relevant keywords in your link anchor text (that is the text within the hyperlink.) Forget about "Click Here" like you see on so many sites. Not only does that not help your ranking, it actually lowers the relevancy of your real keywords because Google believes that if a word is important enough it will likely be used as part of a link to get the visitor where they want to go.

4.) Follow the 1% Solution
Make no more than 1% of your page text into links (both outbound and internal.) That is, if you have 500 words on the page there should be no more than 5 text links total. And don't overuse the same keyword text for the links. So if you have three mentions each of three different keywords, try to use each just once in a link. Then use similar text for any remaining links.

Example: If "chocolate chip cookies" is your main keyword phrase you might use "chocolate chip cookies" as the anchor text for one link and then "my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe" for another link.

It's also a good idea to use 10 Links Max per page whether you have 1,000 words or 10,000 words on that page.

5.) Add a Link Failsafe
This is really simple and almost nobody does it. Links get broken more often than we like. Sometimes it's because we moved a page and sometimes it has nothing to do with anything we consciously did (especially with blogs.) The solution is to create a custom 404 page (Page Not Found) that looks just like any other page on your site and has a simple note like "We're sorry we cannot find the page you are looking for. However, if you love cookies of all kinds we think you'll find exactly what you want by clicking on one of the following links..."
Then of course you have a navigation system for them to follow.

6.) Get the Best Links Possible
This is extremely important yet often overlooked because it can be such a difficult and time consuming job. If you take nothing else away from this article, please take this... Finding the best possible inbound links is the single most important thing you can do to make the number one spot on Google.

Here are three tips to help minimize your time and effort while giving you results SEO experts charge an arm and a leg for.

A.) Get listed in directories.
Submit your site to the top directories like Jayde.com and DMOZ.org. Once they link to your site you will have great relevant inbound links and some instant credibility with Google.

Here are some great free directories in order of value, starting with the best... dmoz.org, jayde.com, webworldindex.com, turnpike.net, and directoryvault.com. Yahoo is important but charges $299 for commercial site inclusion.

B.) Use "Special Commands" to do the legwork for you.
The best linked sites can easily be found with a simple search command called "allinanchor:" Here's how to use it. Go to Google and type in "allinanchor:keyword goes here" (no quotes and no space after the colon.) Now hit Enter and you'll see the sites that have the highest relevancy for keywords used in anchor text. Look for any that you know are competitors and outrank your site.

Now take the URL for any of these and use this command "link:www.theirdomain.extension" (again with no quotes and no space after the colon.) This will show you all the sites linking in as well as internal pages linking back in.

In short, these two special commands give you an inside look at exactly how the competition does what it does with the results they get. This is huge!

C.) Use good SEO software whenever possible.
If you can afford to spend one or two hundred dollars to save huge amounts of time and get professional results, it's well worth it. Like many SEO professionals whose livelihood depends on results, I've been using SEO software to get top search engine placement for years. The best ones not only help you identify great link partners but will even help you contact them and make sure they don't cheat you in any way.

If possible, get a tool that also does rank checking and reporting. Once you begin you'll want to check rankings every so often and an automated tool will save you a ton of time. Oddly enough I bought SEO Elite primarily for rank checking then discovered it was worth its weight in gold as linking tool as well. So whatever tool you use, get as much out of it as you can.

About Author:
Mike Small is the founder of the free SEO (search engine optimization) site SEOpartner.com and author of numerous search engine optimization books and whitepapers including the SEO Notebook.

Improve your Search Engine Position with Sitemaps

A sitemap is a little-known secret to enhancing your Web site's position in the search engine listings. No, it's not a killer secret that will draw in thousands of new visitors overnight, but it is an important addition to your toolset, and not hard to implement. This article will tell you why you need a sitemap, and how to create one and submit it to the search engines.

The term "sitemap" can refer to two different things. Many large, complex Web sites provide a visual sitemap that visitors can use for quick navigation, if they already know roughly where they want to go. If your site is large or complex, you should provide one of these sitemaps for your visitors.

But this article is about the other kind of sitemap: The kind that is made for the search engines, like Google, to use in indexing your site. There are several forms that these sitemaps can take, but we'll get to that a little later.

First of all, let's consider why you even need a sitemap. Google and the other search engines will index your site even if you don't have a sitemap. However, there are four main advantages to having a sitemap:

1. If your site uses non-HTML links, such as Macromedia Flash menus or JavaScript menus, the search engines will not be able to follow these links, and so they will not find all of your pages. A code-driven site must use a sitemap.

2. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are more important, and which are less important. This prevents the less important pages from competing with your own pages in the listings.

3. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are updated more frequently than others. This enables the search engines to ignore your static pages, increasing the likelihood that they will have the most current data on your most dynamic pages.

4. A sitemap enables you to tell the search engines when you have added or updated your site's content. To some extent, this puts you in control of making the search engines aware of your latest content. Of course, it doesn't force the search engines to do your bidding, but it tends to make it easier for users to find your new pages more quickly.

So, what is a sitemap?
As mentioned above, there are many possible forms of sitemaps, but we'll concentrate on the most useful kind, the XML sitemap format created and promulgated by sitemaps.org. This protocol, currently known as "Sitemap 0.90," is maintained and endorsed jointly by Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask, so you know it is pretty much a universal standard.

An XML sitemap consists of a list of pages on your Web site, and standard information about each page. Here is an example:

< url >

< loc >http://www.freelancesubmit.com/Index.htm< /loc >

< lastmod >2008-04-07< /lastmod >

< changefreq >never

< priority >0.3

< /url >

...

< url >

< loc >http://www.freelancesubmit.com/Services.htm< /loc >

< lastmod >2008-04-07

< changefreq >weekly

< priority >0.8

< /url >

...

Don't worry about the technical details of formatting the XML. We'll talk about tools that will create this for you in a moment.

There are three things to notice about each entry:

1. LastMod. Tell the search engines the last date (and time) you changed this page. That will tell them which ones they ought to index right away, and which ones they can ignore.

2. ChangeFreq. In case you're not updating your sitemap all the time, this will give the search engines a clue as to how often they ought to check each page.

3. Priority. This tells the search engines the relative importance of this page, compared to all the other pages in your site.

In assigning a value for "Priority," on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0, determine which pages are most important and which are least important within your site. We're not telling the search engines that this "Services" page is in the 80th percentile of all pages on the Web, but it is far more important than the "Index" page within this site. That's where we want our visitors to end up.

It's easy to identify pages within your site which are lowest priority. Some examples:

- Privacy Policy - "Contact us" - "About us"

Please don't misunderstand this. It's not that your "Privacy Policy" page is unimportant and so you might as well not have one. It's that your "Privacy Policy" is important enough to take for granted: Your visitors will find it when they need it. But for search engine purposes, you'd rather direct them to the pages where you actually do your business.


So, how do you create a sitemap?
There are a number of software tools that will create a sitemap by reading your site's content. You will have to adjust the results, especially the "Priority" settings, but most of these do a pretty good job. Search the Web for "sitemap generator," or for any of the following specific free tools:

- SitemapDoc - XML-Sitemaps - AuditMyPC Google Sitemap Generator

And once you have your sitemap, what do you do with it?

There are three things to do, in sequence:
1. Place the sitemap file into the root directory of your Web server, alongside your main "index" file. And each time you update it, place the new copy there.

2. Notify the major search engines of your new sitemap file each time you update it. For Google, this means to submit it from within "Webmaster Tools." For other major search engines, search on that search engine for "submit sitemap," and you'll probably find where to enter the URL of your sitemap file.

3. Place a reference to the sitemap file in your robots.txt file, as "Sitemap: http://www.freelancesubmit.com/sitemap.xml". This will make sure that any search engine will find it, even those that you did not submit it to directly. You only need to do this once, unless you change the name or location of your sitemap file.

Once you have your sitemap created and submitted, don't forget to maintain it. Each time you add a page to your Web site, add it to your sitemap. Each time you update a page on your Web site, update its "lastmod" setting in your sitemap. Try adjusting the "priority" of your pages from time to time to see if it improves the performance of that particular page. And each time you modify your sitemap, resubmit it to the major search engines.

About the Author: Charles J. Bonner is the founder and principal project manager of www.FreeLanceSubmit.com. For a complete list of resources for creating and using sitemaps, visit http://www.FreeLanceSubmit.com/ArticleBuildASitemap.htm.