The philosophy of a search engine is to deliver relevant web pages in response to a search query which will contain one or many keywords. This is not an easy task as there are literally millions of web pages in existence. The early search engines suffered from the problem of returning too much dross - the classic example was a search for 'Bill Clinton' returning a web site with one page saying 'Bill Clinton joke of the day'. This happened because of KEYWORD DENSITY - this particular web page had the relevant keywords accounting for 40% of all the keywords on the webpage, which the search engines relied upon to decide which webpages to display first.

The founders of GOOGLE managed to go a long way to solve this problem (and become incredibly successful) by using the idea of page rank. They designed their search engine to ascribe a page rank to every webpage, based on web links from other web pages. This offered a 'democratic' and easily automated way of establishing the relative importance of websites, and hence prioritise which websites would be shown first in a google search. They also take note of the text used in the web links (hyperlinks), so for example, if a website had a link 'food and drink' pointing to www.harvest-fayre.co.uk then a google search for 'food and drink' would be more likely to return this website.

The internet has now developed into a major commercial sales channel for business and we find there is a constant battle between search engine optimisers (the web masters who try to improve their search engines ranking) and the programmers within the search engine companies. Webmasters have tried new tricks such as embedding hidden keywords in websites (e.g. white text on white background) and artificial 'link farms' where thousands of websites are made to link to each other. Search engine 'alogorithms' (the programming of the search engines) had been modified to detect these tricks and 'black list' such sites. However, some webmasters are trying new tricks to fool the search engines, but risk losing all by being blacklisted.

Factors influencing your position in search engines returns can be broken down as follows

Internal factors (which you can control by updating your website)

Number and placement of keywords within the website including the title
Number of web pages
How your web pages link to each other
Frequency of updates
Alt tags (text descriptions of images)
Not using any 'tricks' to fool search engines such as white text on a white background etc.
Does the web site offer a coherent 'theme', i.e. does not have 'artificial' and irrelevant text added.

External factors

Which web sites link to you?
What text is on their links to you?
The 'theme' of the website linking to you.

It is the external factors that will get to the top of the search engines!

Find out about the 3 stages of increasing your web traffic

Put in your desired keywords into a search and find out who is currently coming top of the list (suppose it is www.topsite.com). Then type in 'link:www.topsite.com' into the google search box. You will get a list of websites linking into www.topsite.com (suppose the first one in the list is www.interestingsite.com). Find the contact details of each website. You can then do one of two things:

Create an extra links page (perhaps call it 'useful links') in your existing website. On this page add a link to www.interestingsite.com. You will need the services of a webmaster to do this, or you will need appropriate software and/or have knowledge of HTML.

Open up your email program and write a request for a link to your website in exchange for you linking to their website.

It is a good idea to build an outbound link first and then ask them to reciprocate.

Repeat this process for all the other websites in the list. You will need to keep updating your 'useful links' webpage to add outbound links. This is time consuming but will pay dividends. It is the only way to get a good ranking.
You will need to keep manual track of who you have contacted and when, webmasters will not appreciate being pestered too much!

OR BETTER STILL...

Go to www.crossslink-builder and register your website.

In the control panel, click on 'add a new outbound link from my website'.
Fill in the details on 'add a new outbound link'
Back at the control panel, click on 'create an email'
Fill in the details on 'Create and send an email'. A template text will be filled in for you, which you can then modify before clicking on 'Send email now'

Crosslink builder will automatically store the email message and date sent, so that you can keep track of all emails sent to prospective website partners. You can also record telephone messages, ordinary post or any other notes in a 'Contacts page'.

Not only that, but crosslink-builder can provide you with the HTML code necessary to build a 'useful links' page. This only has to be done once. If you add more outbound links from your website, no further work need be done on your own website. Extra links are automatically added into your webpage every time you use 'add a new outbound link' in crosslink-builder.

You can also switch your outbound links on and off whenever you like, and you can set an automatic 'expiry date' for your links in case you do not get a response from your erstwhile website partner.

register your website for search engine optimisation.

Back to Crosslink Builder home page