How do I get inbound links?

[flowerpatchnj]

I think you all bring up pretty interesting points regarding page rankings and SEO methods.

But it's also good to keep in mind that everything that you do including getting inbound links and SEO your websites is a good thing. Whatever you can do to get your name out there is (for the most part) a good thing.

Especially since there are multiple search engines all with different methods of finding your site. What might be valued at one search engine might not be as valued at another.

But one important thing that I think has been lost in this conversation might be submitting your website to Google & Yahoo's local business listing sites. Making sure that your contact information is correct and your website is listed there.

To further that one step, getting customers to review your website on these is a great thing as well. I know that personally, I value what comes up in the Google local business listings when I am looking for restaurants, stores, and other services close to my house.

 

[theRKF]

This is certainly good advice, and CHR (amongst others) has really covered the Local Search advice well in other threads. There is so much that is involved in proper SEO/SEM that it's hard to develop a comprehensive list.

Certainly, getting listed locally, getting reviews, and telling Google what area you are targeting is essential to good placement on local searches.

It's true that there are other search engines, but we have to be realistic, too. While survey companies like comScore put Googles reach at 50-60% of all searches, both myself and other SEOs will testify that most sites we manage receive about 80-90% of their traffic from Google. (Note the difference between searches and traffic!)

The other SEs are typically one step behind Google, and imitating what Google does. MSN is still on a quest for relevance. Yahoo's Panama is a pretty decent AdWords clone. ASK is promoting an algorithm (that's so 2002 Google ). The rest really don't matter because they are fed by the big 3-4.

Ryan

 

[RJD]

But this leaves unanswered the earlier question. Since we florists are CONSTANTLY updating our sites for holidays, how can we be sure that site revisions are found by search engines BEFORE the holiday is over?!

My blog posts are indexed by Google in a couple of hours, and typically show up within a day. Google crawls sites in response to the frequency of how they're updated. Update it, and they will come. But you have to commit to updates, even if it's only changing the specials on the home page and tweaking a small amount of text.

Finally, a question that I am definitely NOT qualified to answer: WHERE in a site should the links appear? Sprinkled throughout the site? On a links page? On the HOME page?

The links I'm talking about should be on other sites. But, you should also use an XML sitemap file if possible, or at least a page (linked from your homepage) with links on it to guide the searchbots to the pages on your site.

my site recently dropped from a PR 4 to a PR3

It's not you, it'e everyone. Google changed the published PR. Reasons known only to them, but speculation is that they're pretty tired of people using the PR in their toolbar to try and game the search results.

 

[theRKF]

Bill,

I've been watching your site, and Google seems to index it every few days. Considering the turn-around on spidering from "submissions" is 3 weeks to never, I'd say you can save yourself some time and quit the submitting.

JB,

RJD gave a good answer on the PR issue. I'll expand a little more.

PageRank is a complicated element that is calculated on the domain and page levels (and by some speculation on the keyword level). It's a factor in rankings, but not nearly as much as it used to be. Once, a higher PR meant you would always outrank a site with lower PR. Now, it's not uncommon to see low PR sites outrank higher PR sites.

Essentially - PR is meaningless. Especially toolbar PR, which is updated every 3 months (with the exception of the recent reign of terror by Google). The only reason for Google not to removing the PR from the toolbar is that it gives them leverage against any practice that they deem to be in competition with them. Real PageRank is calculated every day throughout the day - but that's not what is shown in the toolbar isn't current.

PageRank is a fluid thing that flows across the millions of sites on the web. Think of it like draining 6 feet off one lake in a chain of lakes and rivers. Even though your site may not even have any issues that caused the drop, your PageRank is determined in large part by the PR of the sites linking to you. The sudden drop of a site a dozen links removed could impact your site. Since PageRank is actually a scale of 0-100 you may have moved from a 41 to a 39.

There is also speculation that with the number of sites on the web increasing so much PageRank had to be reduced overall to better fit the scale.

Ryan