Here’s an email message that I received today, quite similar to email messages I receive at least a half-dozen times each day:
I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in real life debt because it looks like it’s relevant to a site for which I am seeking links.
Not too bad, so far. But read on…
I admit it, a few years ago I was of the mindset that sitemaps were for Web sites that weren’t well designed: after all, I reasoned, if the information layout made sense and the content was organized in a coherent and thoughtful way, you’d never need to visit a sitemap because you’d always be able to find what you were seeking directly through the site navigation.
Most of the time on my weblog Free Web Money I talk about proactive things you can do to improve your search engine findability, your site’s relevance for a specific key word or key phrase. For example, keyword density and page titles have both been explored in depth in previous entries.
Instead, this time I thought it would be useful to talk about a couple of things that you really shouldn’t be doing, things that will actually lower your Google pagerank and, quite likely, your relevance score for the other top search engines too.
One question that comes up again and again with online entrepreneurs is whether it’s worthwhile to register new domain names for different projects, and if it is, how the heck do you find good domain names!?
First off, keyword-relevant domain names can be a nice boost to your relevance and page rank (as discussed in How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank.) because if it includes the key word or phrase you’re using, it further reinforces that your Web site is relevant to that topic. That’s why this Web site is called free-web-money.com not “daves-guide-to-adding-neat-stuff-to-your-site.com” or “spliffo.info” or similar.
A core question for anyone on the Web, and certainly a question you should be asking if you’re trying to monetize your Web site, is how the heck does Google figure out what sites are more relevant to a given search than others?
To get the answer, let’s go back in time a little bit and look at the research papers from a Stanford University project called “BackRub”. You should certainly recognize the authors…
There are at least a million different ways to increase traffic to your Web site, but one of the most useful to the Internet community is to volunteer to be a category editor at DMOZ, an open source, public Web directory similar to how Yahoo! was in the early days before it became a media giant.
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