The Links

If your site is heavily content-focused then your ranking may well benefit from the portal effect. Some search engines treat sites with a lot of varied outgoing links, as central hubs of information, or portals. These sites are assumed to be more relevant and subsequently their ranking increases.

I would suggest this is only a suitable strategy for sites that are genuine portals, otherwise you may be directing users straight off your site and onto someone else’s, which is probably not so good for your business or the aim of the site! Genuinely useful and relevant links to associate sites can be useful, though, and will help you achieve the next step.

Linking To You

This is very important. You should try to encourage as many links to your site as possible, as the more links to your site the more likely it is the search engines will find you, and many search engines attach importance to who links to you. Links are also useful as the other site is referring some of its visitors to you, thereby increasing the number of visitors you receive which is, after all, the whole point.

It is important to consider how they link to you. A “click here” is not as useful as a “guide to bed and breakfast” link if you are trying to get a good ranking for “bed and breakfast”.

Ideally, provide the code for the link you would like people to use on your site, and make it as easy as possible for them to link to you, using your chosen keywords.

Not all links are good, though. Don’t get too excited about sites that claim to be able to offer you hundreds of inward links. They will have little effect, and may even harm you.

Designing For Search Engine Spiders

As well as ensuring the content is suitable for the search engine to spider, you also need to ensure the content is accessible. Spiders can only crawl HTML links, and parse text. This is a good reason to keep the majority of your site HTML based, and avoid the excessive use of graphics, flash, AJAX or other cutting-edge technologies. At very least provide a HTML alternative or supply an XML Sitemap .

If you design the site to use images in place of HTML text then the spider will be unable to read it. If you must use images then ensure the alt tag in every image is set to contain the text of the image. This is useful for both search engines and those using a text only browser (or the sight-impaired).

Spiders are also very poor at navigating dynamic sites, or sites with non-HTML navigation systems, so consider carefully the use of these, or provide alternate search engine friendly links.

Frames can also cause problems for a search engine. Even those that do try and index frames, may not truly appreciate your site, as what appears to you to be one page, will appear as multiple unrelated pages to the spider. Try to avoid their use. Alternatively, if you must use them ensure you provide either a version of the site without frames or provide a summary of the site in the noframes tag.

The other articles in this series are:

• Part One – Choosing Keywords
• Part Two – On Page Factors

This post is part of my Internet business opportunities series.

Free updates:
If you enjoyed this post and would like to be kept updated on future posts, then please click here to get updates by Email. Alternately you can follow the updates the Business Opportunities And Ideas Facebook page or follow me on Twitter.