I know, the title is a little dramatic, but with so many opinions and speculation surrounding SEO I couldn’t resist. I’m going to discuss a few things that I’ve found to be consistent and true in search engine optimization. Hopefully these ideas will dispell some of the myths, speculation and hearsay rampant in all the forums. I’m going to leave this post open to comments as there may be some that have found evidence to the contrary. If such is the case, I welcome your knowledge.

Here are a few things that I have found to be true.

1.For ranking well in Google’s SERPs (Search Enging Ranking Pages) you should link with sites that are relevent to your theme.

Ok, I know that sounds obvious, but what I have found is more important to most link traders is PR (Page Rank). There are more than a few link traders out there that are bent on linking with sites with big PR regardless of whether their linking to a relevant site or page. They’ll even want their link placed on a page with higher PR, when in the same directory I have a totally relevant page for their link to be placed on.

I have a site that has almost 600 reciprocal links. I’ve learned some good lessons. When it comes to moving up in the rankings it is all about theme relevant links. It wasn’t until I took linking to theme relevant pages seriously that I saw some dramatic increase in my rankings in Google. So, if you’re just after PR go ahead and link to tons of sites you’ll get it, but you won’t get too far in Google’s search rankings. (Notice I said Googles rankings, MSN and Yahoo seem to be more rewarding to any backlinks).

2. Paying to submit to search engines is a waste of money

Why should I dish out hard cash when all I need to do to get indexed in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other major search engines is to trade links with a site that is already indexed. How does this work? Well, the sites that are already indexed get spidered periodically by the major search engines. If my link is on their site the spider will follow that link to my site and index my site too. There’s too many SEO companies taking advantage of those that don’t know any better. Hopefully a few internet novices will find this information.

3. If you’re going to start trading links, do yourself a big favor and create a directory with category pages. This will get you better link partners.

I currently turn down 90% of the trade requests that I get. No, it’s not because I’m an arrogant web snob, it’s because I don’t and won’t place my link on a page with a bunch of links on it that have nothing to do with the keyword phrase I’m going after. I would trade with all these sites, regardless of PR if they would just create a category page that was at least somewhat relevant to my keyword phrase. And it’s not just me doing this, you’ll find that link traders that know better create directories with categories. I guarantee that if you do this you will get more quality sites wanting to trade links with you.

Again, I welcome any comments to the contrary. If you’ve had a different experience and you think I’m just plain wrong please let me know. I’ll address Part II soon.

• Link Trading and Link Pages
• SEO Forums Not Much Help
• How to Find the Keywords that Sell Better Than A Used Car Salesman by David C. Chase

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 4th, 2005 at 8:12 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.