Do You Need A Robots.txt File?

Here is an article I have written, called "Do You Need A Robots.txt File?" Sometimes people, I included, when they are not sure how to do something, have a tendency to justify why they should not do it, use it or have it. But I guess, that is when you have to dig in and trudge through the learning process, see how far you can get and then look for help. Needless to say, I have done the trudging and the research to understand better what a robots.txt file is and if it would be of benefit to my website. And in my opinion a robots.txt can be very helpful.

A Robots.txt file can help you in many ways. Just to name a couple: getting more traffic thru giving independent bots that follow protocol an invite, and to also help you to restrict the bad bots as well. The following article is pretty straight forward, and hopefully informative so that you can create your own Robots.txt file if you do not have one already.

Do you need a Robots.txt file?

By Vickie J. Scanlon

Do you need a Robots.txt file? When you have a small site, you are probably under the false assumption that you really don't need a robots.txt file. In fact, you may be saying to yourself, "I don't need a robots.txt file because, my site is, small, it's simple for the search engines to find, and since I want all pages indexed anyway, why bother." That was my thoughts in the beginning, as well as, not being aware of what a robots.txt file is/was or what it could do for my site. Thus, I'll try to give you a little insight as to what a robots.txt is, how to use them, why you need them and some basic instructions on creating a robots.txt file.

Define Robot.txt File

To begin we need to know what a web robot is, and is not. Thus, a Web robot is sometimes called spiders or web crawlers. These should not be confused with your normal web browser, for a web browser is not a web robot because a human being manually maneuvers it.

The main use of a robots.txt file is to give robots instructions to what they can crawl and what they should not crawl. This gives you a little more control over the robots. And since this gives you a little more control over the robots, which means you can issue indexing instructions to specific search engines.

Do you really need a Robots.txt file?

Do you really need a robots.txt even if you're not excluding any robots? It's a good idea. Why? First and foremost, it’s an invite to the search engines. In addition, some of the good bots may step away from your website if you do not have a robots.txt created in the top level of your website.

Sometimes you may want to exclude some pages from the search engine's eye. What type of pages?

1. Pages that are still under construction

2. Directories that you would prefer not to have indexed

3. Or you may want to exclude those search engines whose sole purpose is to collect email addresses or who you do not what to have your website appear in.

What does a Robots.txt file look like?

The robots.txt file is a simple text file, which can be created in Notepad. It needs to be saved to the root directory of your site-that is the directory where your home page or index page is located.

To create a simple robots.txt file to allow all robots to spider your site you can create the following info:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

That's it. This will allow all robots to index all your pages.

If you don't want a specific robot to have access to any of your pages, you can do the following:

User-agent: specificbadbot

Disallow: /

Here you would have to name the robot or specific substring. And you will need the "/" because that means "all directories".

For example, let say you do not want the Googlebot to index a page called "donotenter: and your directory is "nogoprivate". In the disallow section you would put:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /nogoprivate/donotenter.html

Now if it's a complete directory you do not want indexed you would put:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /nogoprivate/

By putting the forward slashing at the beginning and at the end, you tell the search engine not to include any of the directories.

Getting Your Code Right

If your Robots.txt file is a more complex piece of code, than it's always wise to do a quick check on the syntax. There are some nice online Robots.txt checks that are free, that you can use to check your syntax. One such free checker is called Robots Text Tester which is free to use through Search Engine Promotion or go to ClockWatchers and they can help you create a robots.txt file, as well as, give you info how to create a file to eliminate bad bots.

To conclude, a Robots.txt file can help you to increase the number of search engines that spider your site, which means increased traffic and better indexing. In fact, this small file also helps you to control what is and is not indexed by search engines. and which search engines can spider your site. So, let me ask you now- is a robots.txt file an important asset to have for your website? I'm sure you have to admit, that yes it is important, even for the small website.

About the Author:

Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for free tools, how to info of affiliate marketing/internet marketing, tech accessories, software and computers for the online business.

For a ready guide/additional info on Robots.txt and .htaccess go to Website Protection on myaffiliateplace.biz

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What Is PageRank

What is PageRank? Well to start with, it is a trademark of Google, *snort* who else?

A PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support.

The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

If you'd really like to read the algorithm particulars, go HERE

The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases

The only way to increase the maximum is to add more inbound links and/or increase the number of pages in the site.

While I recommend creating and adding new pages to increase a site's total PageRank so that it can be channeled to specific pages, there are certain types of pages that should not be added. These are pages that are all identical or very nearly identical and are known as cookie-cutters. Google considers them to be spam and they can trigger an alarm that causes the pages, and possibly the entire site, to be penalized. Pages full of good content are a must.

Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are reciprocated. Because of the PageRank of the pages at each end of an external link, and the number of links out from those pages, reciprocal links can gain or lose PageRank. You need to take care when choosing where to exchange links.

To a spider, www.domain.com/, domain.com/, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html are different urls and, therefore, different pages. Surfers arrive at the site's home page whichever of the urls are used, but spiders see them as individual urls, and it makes a difference when working out the PageRank. It is better to standardize the url you use for the site's home page. Otherwise each url can end up with a different PageRank, whereas all of it should have gone to just one url.

And after all of that info has crossed your eyes, you can check your site's PageRank HERE. And you can even grab Google's handy code to put the PageRank live on your site!
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Putting Voice or Music On Your Blog

I don't understand the lure of wanting music on your blog. That's probably because I'm on dial-up and sites that use music take forever to load, and I get three second snippets of music every fifteen seconds until the whole thing has loaded.

And music always takes up a lot of bandwidth, which can make the connection timeout on you...but with all that said, if you still want music...

If you would like to make digital voice clips, go here to Gabcast.

To upload music from like an iPod or MP3 player:

First you need to host your music somewhere. I'm a Google nut, so the first place I'd say would be Google Pages. You have to make a GMail account to use the pages and if you don't already have one...BEWARE! Because creating a GMail account will override your email account that has Blogger.

If you don't want a GMail account, create a Google Group *snort*...you can be a group of one, but it will give you a whopping 100MB of file space where you could upload all of your music, for free!

So you've opened a group, uploaded your music file. Now copy down the URL for the file.

Then go Dashboard >>> Layout >>> When the Page element page opens, click on "Add a Page Element. Choose a HTML/JavaScript element.

Copy this code into the Page element:


<embed src="URL of your audio or video file" loop="false" width="400" height="300" autostart="false" type="video/x-ms-asf"></embed >

The parts of this code are:

The URL of your music at the freehost of your choice.

Loop can be set to false, so the piece doesn't continually repeat. Set it to true if you want a particular sound like waves to keep repeating.

The height and width which you can change to fit your particular sidebar.

Autostart set at false lets your visitor start the music themselves...they will love you for this!

And the last part, type...tells you what kind of file it is. For example:

An MP3 file would be: type="audio/x-ms-mp3"
A AVI file would be: type="audio/x-ms-avi"
A MPEG file would be: type="video/x-ms-mpg" (or what ever they call it)

You can also put a Player on your blog, by going to Google Gadgets. They have 12 players from MP3's to YouTube and Podcasts.

UPDATE: You can have your MP3 Links:
<a href="my_file.mp">Link</a>

Automatically turn into a little simple player by adding this code into your HTML:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://googlepage.googlepages.com/player.js"></script>



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Google Spiders Everywhere

by Bonnie Calhoun

We've already discussed how to sign up for the search engines, including Google. See the post about Search Engines or click on the Label that I made for it.

Today I'm going to go through what it takes to make sure that your site is being crawled correctly by the spiders...LOL...That sounds cool, doesn't it?

One of the first things you need to be aware of is Google Blog Search Ping Service. You can ping your blog here to get Google to crawl it.

Then after you ping your blog, go and check for it to register on Google Blog Search. Now if it doesn't show up right away, don't worry!

Go sign yourself up with Google Alerts. When you sign up for this put the URL (address of your blog) in the top box, where it says search terms. The when your blog updates, you can tell how long it takes the spiders to crawl your blog, because Google will send you an email, every time you update!

Next thing...and I've addressed this in the Search Engine post is your site map. You can set this up with Google WebMaster Central. Now I can't say enogh good stuff about these tools on this site. You can set up your site map, you can find out if your site is being indexed by Google, a Help Center, and multiple other tools!

I gave you instructions before on how to setup your site map, but make sure that when your done you get the little (1) on the column that says site map. After you've set up your site map, check the crawl rate.

Click on the tool for setting up a site map. This will be the page where you get the little (1) under the site map column. Click on the title of your blog and it takes you to the Diagnostics page that tells you all about your crawl rate, the errors, and tools.

Your crawl rate should be set to normal because it will tell you that at the slower rate: "A slower crawl will reduce Googlebot's traffic on your server, but we may not be able to crawl your site as often."
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Creating a Logo For Your Business

For people who are wanting to create a logo, and wanting to do it the right way, maybe this article by Steve Douglas can help you. I know that anyone can create a logo, but doing it the right way, which includes a logo that is gimmick free or "trendy". He states, and if you have seen many logos, you need a viable logo that can be put on stationary, letters, newsletter, etc, and yet, identify your company immediately to your customer. Translated, you can't slap any old logo up there and expect people to identify it with you. This is a good article to review if you are looking to create a logo, or a new logo for your business.


Some 'Golden Rules' of logo design

While the variables are infinite (that's a good thing - it means that every logo can be unique) there are certain benchmarks (I hesitate to call them rules) that if you follow, will pretty well insure that you'll end up with a decent and workable logo. While whether or not a logo is 'good' remains completely subjective, following these pointers will give you a logo that's usable, practical and promising a long shelf life.

1) Uniqueness
Your logo should be able to stand out as completely 'yours'. It's surprising how many times we get asked to 'copy' logos - we've even had clients request a 'version' of my brand. Not a good idea. On top of the potential legal complications nothing screams 'unprofessional' like a logo that's looks even remotely like someone else's. Do not copy. I'll say it again. Do. Not. Copy.

2) Timeless
Every few years there's a trend, or fad, that new logos seems to embrace. A few years ago it was the 'swoosh' - made logos all hi-tech and 'internety'. Trouble is, everybody jumped on that bandwagon and the treatment rapidly became hackneyed and trite. Few years hence, and we've got lots of people stuck with out of date designs. The latest design logo trend is so-called 2.0, a technique that (like a lot of design trends) can be traced back to Apple Computers. Take your logo, add a 'gel' treatment, give it glassy reflection at the bottom and you're all set. (hey - the 3D version of our house could qualify). Web 2.0 is still going strong, but I'll go out on a limb and say it will be yesterday's news by end of summer.

3) Gimmick Free
Special FX and filters are usually applied, by inexperienced designers, to logos that are 'missing something'. Trouble is, what the logo is generally missing is any design integrity, and adding bevels, lens flares and drop shadows is the logo design version of 'putting lipstick on a pig'. While it certainly shows how cool the latest design software is, it doesn't do much for the professionalism of your mark. Such treatments are fine for glamour shots (used as display pieces on brochures and the like) but are only going to cause grief down the road, especially when it comes to application of your new logo on standard business material. Your logo should be as technically simple as possible for adaptability, which just happened to be number 4 on our list...

4) Adaptability
Over the life of your company, you'll want to plaster your logo over everything you send out. That's the point of having a logo in the first place. In order to do this, you'll need a logo that's adaptable to every occasion and while they may look 'pretty' , the design gimmicks we just talked about render your logo impractical for many of these uses. Some of these uses - checks, FAXes, embroidery, newspaper ads, invoices, letterheads, etc. Your new logo has to work on all of them. You'll also need a quality black and white version that can reproduce as a halftone grayscale, or in the cases of low-resolution BW reproduction, a linear version.

5) Scalability
When using your logo, you'll need to be able to use it small. Real small. Postage stamp size. Classic example of this - over the years, I've designed a load of sports event posters that feature logos from dozens of event sponsors. Space only permits the logos to be featured as very small images and it's always the simpler logos that stand out when viewed from a distance. The cluttered logos aren't recognizable to any great degree and the sponsors are probably wasting their money, especially if inclusion on the poster is the only benefit of their sponsorship. When it comes to scalability, the text portion of the logo is the most important, as that's the piece you want people to remember. Scrawny, sickly text doesn't read very well at half an inch high.

6) Color is Secondary
Colors are extremely important. Using consistent corporate colors will become part of your brand - that's understood. However, when it comes to the design of your logo, color must always be secondary. A logo that requires color to 'hold' the design together is fine when reproduction is optimal - websites, 4 color process printing and what have you - but even then only if the size is appropriate as well. Logos that rely too much on color tend to blend together when used small (see above) and unless the contrast between the two colors is pronounced, will be a grey mess if used in black and white. As for low-resolution reproduction (FAXES, checks, etc) you can forget about readability completely - logos that use color as a design cornerstone usually come out as black blotches on a FAX transmission and with all their money, banks still haven't figured out how to print a decent check.

7) Appropriate Aspect Ratio & Footprint
The aspect ratio of a logo is the relationship between a logo's height and it's width. Bottom line, you don't want a logo that's too tall, or too wide. Square'ish' is always best as this allows the maximum adaptability of a logo, especially when it's being used in conjunction with other artwork. The 'footprint' of a logo refers to the amount of physical space that's required to place a logo on any page. If the footprint is 'wonky' - trailing design elements 'poke' outside the footprint - it can greatly affect the size that the design can be used at, as well as the visual impact of same.

Like most 'rules' of design, not all of these will apply in every situation, and in many cases, we'll toss them out completely. However, they should give you a road map that will help you navigate the sometimes frustrating creative process to design your new logo.

About the Author:

Steve Douglas is the CEO, founder and Creative Director of Thelogofactory.com an internet based logo design studio specializing in logos and corporate identity for small to mid-sized companies. With a history in the graphic design industry spanning 25 years, Douglas has had extensive experience as an agency and magazine art director before founding TLF in 1996.

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Don't Lose The Widgets

You've taken a deep breath and you picked out a new Beta template from one of the cool sites, like the ones in my right sidebar over there. And you're all excited about having a new blogskin. You upload the template.

Now mind you, you've been using New Blogger for several months, and you labored over learning how to make widgets, and had a ball dragging and dropping them all over the place. Now you've previewed the new skin....Auhhh, that's sweet! You hit the Save Template button.

WIDGETS ARE ABOUT TO BE DELETED pops up on the screen!

Your brain locks up, your eyes bug out, and you start blubbering like a baby....LOL...believe me I empathize...it happened to me!

Hit the CANCEL button and stop shaking! There is a way to save the day!

Start by saving a copy of your present template on your own computer.

Go Dashboard >>> Layout >>> Edit HTML >>> Your template is in the Edit Template window

Whatever you do...Do not use the Download Full Template button, and DO NOT CHECK the box to Expand Widget Templates.

Copy the code from the Edit Template box by Right clicking, Selecting All, then Copy. You will open a NotePad file on your computer and copy the template there. Do not use a wordprocessor program like Word or Works. They don't always behave with plain text files. Save it as a .txt file. For example: NewSkin.txt

Now, I'm going to assume that you already have a copy of the new template saved on your computer as a NotePad .txt file. Why am I assuming that? Because I've told you before, always save a clean copy of your template on your own hard drive...in case!

Okay, open the new template file and look for the place to put your existing widgets. I doesn't matter which sidebar you put them in in the new template because they have the drag and drop function in the template.

Your pristine template will look something like this:

<!-- start right sidebar -->
<div id='rightbar_wrap'>
<div class='side'>
<b:section class='sidebar' id='righttbar' preferred='yes'>
<b:widget id='Profile1' locked='false' title='About Me' type='Profile'/>
<b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Labels' type='Label'/>
<b:widget id='BlogArchive1' locked='false' title='Blog Archive' type='BlogArchive'/>
</b:section>
</div>
</div>
<!-- end right sidebar -->


This is how that same section will be changed after you get rid of some widgets that you don't use and put in others that you were using in your old template.


<!-- start right sidebar -->
<div id='rightbar_wrap'>
<div class='side'>
<b:section class='sidebar' id='righttbar' preferred='yes'>
<b:widget id='HTML11' locked='false' title='' type='HTML'/>
<b:widget id='HTML10' locked='false' title='' type='HTML'/>
<b:widget id='HTML2' locked='false' title='' type='HTML'/>
<b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Labels' type='Label'/>
<b:widget id='HTML6' locked='false' title='BLOGGING TOOLS' type='HTML'/>
<b:widget id='HTML5' locked='false' title='' type='HTML'/>
<b:widget id='Image1' locked='false' title='' type='Image'/>
<b:widget id='BlogArchive1' locked='false' title='Blog Archive' type='BlogArchive'/>
</b:section>
</div>
</div>
<!-- end right sidebar -->


Be sure to keep the widgets closed (unexpanded) when you save a copy of your old template, because it's too hard when they are expanded to grab allthat extra code. The Blogger computers store this information by just those single lines of data that are connnected with your blog account.

Once you have all the widgets placed in the new template and save it.

Yo install the new template go Dashboard >>> Template >>> Edit HTML >>> Upload a template from a file on your hard drive >>> Browse >>> Upload!

And if you added all of your widgets, you wont get that heart stopping message!
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Monetizing With AdSense

So your showing an interest in monetizing your blog. Monetizing???? That means you want to make money with blogging. Hey why not? You spend mindless amounts of time on the internet, you aughta' get something out of it. I'm doing a Monetizing Your Blog series over on my personal blog Bonnie Writes and I am tying all of the posts, both here and there, about making money, together. So check them all out!

You've seen the ads on other sites, heard about the money other people are making, and now you have an interest in AdSense. Its a relatively straight forward program. There are three kinds of ads.

Ads For Content - they display advertisements based on the content of your blog. They can be text and graphics, just text, or just graphics, and they can lay horizontal or vertical. You can have three of these on your blog page.

AdSense For Search - You earn revenue from ads relevant to your visitors search terms when they use web search. You can have two of these on your blog page.

And lastly, Referrals - there are four products and services that you could carry ad boxes for, and each referral turns into money for you. I've got an AdSense one at the bottom of the page. An AdWords on on the top of the right sidebar, and a Firefox one in the middle of the left sidebar. You can have four of these on your blog page.

The best placement for Ads are "above the fold". That area is defined as the area of your blog that a viewer first sees when your page opens up...without scrolling. to place the code in your sidebars, use Page Elements. To place a long bar in your header, see this post: Adding a Page Element to Your Header.

Or you can add a narrower long bar at the top of your posts. See this post: Adding a Page Element Above Your Posts

Okay, they got to you...you know that you can do this. Now, let me add an observation. This is going to be a job, like any other job. It takes work. It takes studying. IT takes learning from other people, so that entails reading other blogs about Monetizing. Several good places to start are:

Problogger. This whole blog is dedicated to Monetizing and has been that way for several years.

John Chow and this particularly compelling article about his last six months of Monetizing.

And then my dear dear friend Paula Neal Mooney!!! This is the gal who turned me onto the money making aspect of blogging. She rocks as a newcomer!

So now that I have you intrigued, at the head of any of my Google ads, click where is says "Ads by Goooogle. That will take you to the page where you can get started.
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Google/Blogger and Picasa

Google/Blogger and Picasa have a cool joint undertaking that benefits all of the picture taking lovers in the Blogger community!

Picasa Web Albums will now be hosting all Blogger pictures to the tune of 1GB of free space! You'll be able to order prints, email pictures, and embed the album anywhere you want to!

Go check it out!
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Sitemaps-Do You Need One

Sitemaps. I did know how important a sitemap was but not the benefits until I put my sitemap up on my site. Yes, I've seen an increase in traffic, but also it has made my site more accessible to the search engines and visitors. Why did it take so long? I was site map challenged, so to speak. I didn't know what the requirements for the different search engines were, and if you looked at Google -- though thorough, it's rather techie friendly. But...

I've written an article that may help those who are sitemap challenged, as I was, and help you to get a sitemap up quickly and painlessly. Yes, you will be able to please Google, Yahoo, and the Independent Search Engines, as well as, your visitors.


Site Maps-Are They Important?
By Vickie J. Scanlon


Site maps, are they important? Do you really need one? These were several questions that I often asked but was hesitate to ponder to closely because of the technical aspects involved. But as the number of pages began to add up, I had to seriously consider the relevancy of a site map to that of SEO, the search engines, as well as, accessibility to my visitors.


SEO, visitors and your site map

A site map is important and should be utilized when, or if you are expecting your site to continue to grow. With that being said -- a site map should be as simple as possible for the search engines and your visitors.


If you construct your sitemap correctly, it should provide:

1. the search engines with a ready source to better understanding the structure of your site, which in turns, helps them to better categorize and index your pages into their database. The more pages that are indexed by the search engines, the better the chances that more visitors will find your website.

2. those that visit your website with a ready resource for searching your site, if they are wanting to do a quick search or find your navigation to be a little confusing or misdirected.


When to Use it

A site map is a necessity if you have a website greater than 100 pages. If it's a one page mini-page, you would definitely have no need to supply your visitors with a sitemap.

However, if you know your website is going to grow to greater than 100 pages you should construct an organized sitemap that will burrow down to all levels of your website. Again, if it does nothing else, it does help the search engine spiders to better find all your pages.

Many say that if your site is going to be under 100 pages you can be more liberal in your sitemap organization. However, my thought is simple: why do it twice, start with organization and stay focused, as your site grows.


Updating your site maps

When you add another page or you make changes to your web pages than your sitemaps should be updated and uploaded to your servers for the search engines to pick up. As you may have noticed in my last statement, I said "sitemaps". There is more than just the html or visual sitemap that we are accustomed to seeing; There is also the "behind the scenes" sitemaps that you present to all the search engines to further help them with indexing your site.


Different sitemaps for different search engines and the human eye.

The behind the scenes sitemaps is yet another important step that will help you to get the search engines to notice your site. But, as with everything, there are different sitemap protocols that you need to conform to--and that which the search engines will accept. Here is the breakdown:

Google -- requires the xml format, and prefers that you gz-zip before uploading to your site and to their site.

Yahoo -- uses a text sitemap -- which is a text file. You submit it once to Yahoo and then they will periodically check your sitemap for updates.

Independent search engines -- ROR sitemap -- is an independent sitemap that is used by any independent search engine.

Html Sitemap -- Yes, the search engines uses the html sitemap as well. But this is helpful to your visitors.

I know that you are probably saying, this is alot of work. Or, I don't have this type of knowledge to get the job done. What can I do? These were the same questions that I had. The answer is simple. Go to XML-Sitemaps and they will create all the sitemaps you need, to the specifications of Yahoo, Google, the independent search engines, and an html sitemap for your visitors. How much does it cost? It's free. How long does it take -- just a manner of seconds. All you do is put in your index page, and they will crawl your site. The only limitation is that your website has to have 500 or less pages, if it is more you will have to buy and download the standalone.

To conclude, sitemaps are important for your visitors and the search engines and most definitely your site. Remember a sitemap can increase your traffic do in part to better indexing opportunities you have given the search engines to finding you.

About The Author:
Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: myaffiliateplace.biz for tools, books, how to info on affiliate marketing/internet marketing, tech accessories, software and computers .















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Link Popularity -- Not So Easy

Link Popularity is an important factor when you are working on your search engine optimization process, but it is also one of the hardest to achieve.

It is the websites that are linking to you that will help to determine your link popularity score. For example, if you have a website about shoes, and another website links to you -- who sell custom shoe laces, and shoe accessories -- the relevancy is matched. But if a website links to you about say dogs -- not much relevancy. Granted Google will count it toward your popularity, but will not give it a high relevancy score within their algorithm.

Jim Pretin, gives you an idea of what link popularity is, how to create links, and what to avoid. As I have said, be careful to avoid Link Farms, you can tell them rather quickly, if the link page you are going to be added to, has no relevancy to your website, and the other links are hodgepodge selections of links. Google doesn't really take kindly to link farms anymore, and you are awarded accordingly. With new rules being added by Google link farms and FFA pages can cause you more harm then good -- and possible banning by Google.

Jim Pretin article "How Google Measures Link Popularity" does supply you with some good information, and for that know about link popularity, it's always good to review. Also, take note of what he suggest about keywords.

How Google Measures Link Popularity
By Jim Pretin

Link popularity is by far the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how Google measures your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top of Google, you will rise to the top of all the other search engines as well). But, before we talk about how Google measures linking, we need to cover some basics.

Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.

It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.

If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.

Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. Google uses a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will be ranked in the search listings.

One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that has more links.

The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link would help your score much more if it were from a website whose subject matter is the same as yours.

Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For example, if your site is about jewelry, and another jewelry website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewelry is being written or discussed.

Also, Google gives an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn about it.

Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.

It is difficult to increase your link popularity, but now that you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a link to your site. As long as you are persistent and tailor your strategy towards Google, you will do fine.

About the Author:
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com , a service that helps programmers create a free web form with the code to email the web form responses.
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What is Content?

Content -- sometimes it's hard to know what is good content and what is bad content. There are times you think you are doing the right thing --and find that it was wrong. Recovery then takes time -- which means lost revenue and major frustration on your part. It takes time to write quality content or find quality content for the search engines. Even though content is one part of the mix for an online website -- it still is important. There is so much that goes into the content of a page, that for me, it is still a "learning while doing process".

Thus, here is a quick read -- to understanding content--and how or where to get it.

Content Explained
By Vickie J. Scanlon

What is content? Simple question. Right? But when you’re not sure if you have the right type of content the search engines are looking for – it’s a perplexing question to say the least. So what is content and how do you get it?

Content Defined

First and foremost, content is the lifeblood of any website. Without it, your site would probably not see many visitors or search engine traffic-unless you are one of the lucky few who has the midas touch. But if you are like most, you need to build it the old fashion way—through hard work. So let’s begin by giving the definition to the word “content” from a visitor and a search engine perspective.

Content defined from a search engine slant: quality writing that weaves information around keyword and key phrases that is relevant to a web page description and theme; and which (keywords and keyword phases) are important enough for someone to do a keyword or keyword phase search through the search engines. (If the search engines can find you, people will too!)

Content defined from a visitor’s perspective: content is information that will answer a question, solve a problem or inform.

So with content defined from a search engine and visitor perspective – how do you get the info?

Getting Quality Content
There are different ways to get content. As always, there is a right way and a wrong way. The right way includes:

1) Writing original articles -- you can write original articles and submit them to the different free-reprint directories to get your tag line out to the masses. With original copy, you will be feeding the search engines and visitors with quality information. And let me add, the original copy should be directed toward your target market. For example, if your website is about shoes and you write an article about dogs, you may have missed your target market.

Granted, I know that will probably create duplicate content, you are still getting your tag line out to the masses. You will be gaining exposure and bringing targeted visitors to your website, as well as, creating a one-way link, which is important in the marketing of your website.


2) Write original content that is not submitted to the free directories, but remain on your site for people to view. This information is your true original copy that you share with no one else. The search engines will love you.

3) Original content that is contributed freely by your visitors--through say, a message boards or forum.

4) You can search for quality articles from article directories – again, be aware of the ratio of original to duplicate copy you have on your site. Need to keep a healthy balance.


What to avoid

Too much duplicate content. If you have no original content, only free reprint articles, you will not see a very high ranking for your site, in fact, you might even see a fluctuation in page rank.

With that being said, remember, search engines are gobbling monsters for original content; give it too them, and you will be rewarded.

Content and Updating

If you want the search engines to come visit your site, you need to update your content on a regular basis. At the least -- on a monthly basis. Not only does it encourage search engine visits, but possible new and return visitors.

To conclude, don't take your content for granted. Your content is, like I said in the beginning, your life-blood to success or failure on the Internet.

Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for free tools, articles,ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories,software and computers for the online business. Or check her blog – My Affiliate Place Blog .
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