Everybody wants their website to rank as high as possible on search engines result pages (SERPs) for obvious reasons. There are several methods available to make that happen – some free and some paid – but today we’ll concentrate on backlinks.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is an incoming link to your site received from another website. Backlinks help your site rank higher in SERPs because they increase the credibility of your site for a certain topic: surely if people are linking to you and sharing your content it means it must be valuable. For this reason, search engines think that websites with a lot of incoming links share good content and reward you by ranking your site higher.

In more details…

Link Credibility

However, things aren’t so simple. Search engines also take into account who links to your site and whether they are quality sites or not. The more influent the website is, the more credibility its backlinks will bring you.

Anchor Text

Another thing to take into account is how search engines interpret the link. The text that accompanies the link, known as the anchor text, needs to help understand what the link is about. For example the following link links to our blog’s homepage: Matmon’s blog

In this example “Matmon’s blog” is the anchor text and http://www.matmon.com/resource-blog/ is the actual link. The anchor text needs to give relevant details about the content so that search engines know what search queries will benefit from seeing the link. As a result, try and have the anchor text be a short description such as “Matmon’s website design & marketing blog“.

Sometimes people link to your site by saying something like “Matmon, a web design company in Little Rock, AR has a great blog on website design, it gives interesting tips on online marketing and website development, go read it here.” While a very helpful comment for humans, search engines mainly see the “here” attached to your link.

While anchor text is the most important factor, there are two more things you can do to help the quality of your link.

Anchor Title

The anchor title is an html tag that can be included in the link. For Internet users, this is the text in the tooltip you see when you place your cursor on a link. Just like the anchor text, it should explain what the link is about.

Page Context

Finally, the context of the page where the incoming link is placed also has its importance. A backlink coming from an article on website design would benefit Matmon more than a backlink placed on a recipe site. The text surrounding the link and the title of the page the link is on are how search engines determine the context of the page.

HTML A Tag Title

In reference to one of Matmon’s blog backlinks, to create the yellow drop down “hover box” or “tool tip,” you use the title attribute within your HTML <a>tag syntax as follows.

<a title=”Website Design Company in Little Rock, Arkansas” href=”http://www.matmon.com/resource-blog/” target=”_blank”>Matmon’s website design &amp; marketing blog</a>

Not all search engines give the same importance to these factors, but remember that the quality of a link is more important than it’s quantity. Do not accept incoming link from spam sites as they will greatly reduce your credibility and have the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve. If you manage to receive a good number of backlinks from good sources, Google and other search engines should reward you in their rankings.

Building a new website can be expensive so making sure it was worth the investment is important. You want your website to bring value. Value can mean different things according to who you are, what your business is and what you want to accomplish. Therefore, the first step is to determine what value you want your website to bring to users.

What goals do you want your website to achieve?

We suggest you have three main goals. Goals usually fall in two categories; they bring revenue or they engage your customer. Examples of goals that bring revenue are to increase online sales, recruit new customers, or drive customer to your store. Examples of goal that engage the customers are to get users to register for a free trial, to display your catalog of product or to get customers to read your blog.

How do you measure your results?

Use a tool such as Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics or Bing Webmaster tool. Google Analytics is probably the most commonly used of all of them.

1. Is the number of qualified visitors increasing?

   Qualified visitors are visitors that are not yet customers but have the potential to be. Visitors that use direct traffic (type in the address) are not the most valuable customers, as they already know about your site. Qualified visitors come from two ways: unpaid searches, or referring sites.
   Unpaid searches: Traffic from unpaid searches results from users doing research on a search engine and clicking on your site. You can monitor which keywords visitors use to reach your site and group them by product or services.
   Referring sites: Traffic from referring sites result from visitors of other sites clicking on a link going to your site. Logically, referring sites link to your content because it is valuable. Hence, the page that is the most linked to probably has the most valuable content. Use this to know what visitors are interested in on your site.

   If the numbers or visits in both of these categories are increasing, your website is creating value and achieving your user goals.

2. Are visitors returning?

   Visitors return to your page because they get value out of it. You can track what percentage of visits are new visits or returning visits. Ideally, you want a mix of both, showing that users come back to your site but that you also get new visitors. Track which pages returning visitors consult, it will tell you which pages are the most valuable to them. Make sure they are pages that will fulfill your engagement goals; review your content if it isn’t the case.

3. Do visitors get value out of your site?

   Engagement goals are measured by the value visitors get out of your site. If they are interested in buying your products, then visiting your online store will bring them value. But most of them will probably just want to learn more about your products, services, or pricing.

   Sales: Track how many customers place an order by setting up a goal on Google Analytics. The goal would be achieved when users reach the order confirmation page. Now using what you did in step 1, check how visitors achieving your goals came to your site and analyze what type of customers are most valuable for you. It may be that visitors looking to buy “porcelain sink” tend to place more orders than visitors looking for “bathroom sink”. Advise your advertising and content strategy according to your goal tracking.

   Engagement: Set a goal on Analytics for visitors to stay on your blog for at least one minute, or to read at least two pages. These two goals would prove that visitors find your site interesting enough to read its content and look for more information. Once again, cross-reference the users completing a goal with the keywords and sites they used to reach your page; update your content accordingly.

   The opposite of how long visitors stayed on your page is the bounce rate: how many visitors leave the site as soon as they load it because they can’t find what they’re looking for. This will tell you what type of customers you could create value for, or what type of customers not to target.

Google Analytics offers custom reporting options so that you can really measure what is right for your website. Being able to master your analytics is important in order to effectively manage your website and advertising strategy.

Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines index your website, so it will pull up in search results when content on your site corresponds to a users search query. For this reason, you want as many of your web pages as possible to be indexed on the search engines. If only your website’s homepage is indexed, a search query corresponding to content on your sub pages will not appear in the results.

It’s really simple to check how many of your site’s pages are stored in Google, Yahoo or Bing.

1. Go to Google and type the following in the search bar: site:yourdomain.com Try both with and without “www.”, and be careful to not include a space between “site:” and your domain name.
2. Right under the search bar you will see “About X results” This is the number of pages from your sites that are indexed on Google.
   
3. Go to Yahoo and Bing and repeat the same process.

Together, these three search engines represent more than 95% of the searches conducted in North America and should give you a good idea of how many pages you have indexed.

The point of this exercise is to make sure that your website is being fully used. If you notice that you have more pages than what you see returned in the search engines, look for your important pages, web pages you want your potential customers to find. For testing these important pages, just enter the entire URL into the search box and it will be the first result returned if it is indexed.

If some important pages are not indexed and your website is still new it’s probably just a matter of time before they begin to index. If your website is well established (over a year for a 300 + pages website, less for a smaller one), here’s a few things you can do:

• Make sure they do not have the “noindex” tag which will prevent Google from indexing them.
• Update your websites content with relevant copy, as seen here.
• Make sure internal links from your website are pointing to theses pages.

Having a pretty website is important, but what makes users want to stick around and read your site is content. Good, rich, valuable content.

Why is writing quality content so important?

You want users to engage with your site. If visitors like reading your blog posts, are interested in the industry news you publish or come to your site for product information; more than likely they will take action. They might click on an ad, buy your product or look up your store address.

Another reason you want good content is to rank higher on search engines result pages. Since early 2011, Google’s new algorithm called Panda has aimed to make the web a better place for content. Panda hates duplicate or irrelevant content, redundant articles, too many ads, old websites and automated content. If you are guilty of any of these, Google will be ranking your site lower, making it harder for visitors to find you.

How do you write good content?

• Original: Your content has to be unique. You cannot reproduce content without being flagged by Google. It may seem obvious, but a lot of content on the web is duplicated. For example, if you have an online store, you likely copied the product description directly from the original catalog. It may seem logical but this will get you ranked lower in search engines. Instead, try to bring value by crafting descriptions your users want to read. Make sure you source anything that you have not written.
• Unique: The original content rule is valid from one site to another (do not steal content from another site), but also don’t copy content within your own website. Do not write your “About Us” on both the About Us page and the Contact Us, even if you content is original, it will not be unique. You also should not have several pages describing the same service; if it is the same it needs to be on one unique page.
• Recent: Both customers and search engines like sites that are frequently updated. Share your company news, update your product list, post customers testimonials or write a blog. Visitors will like to have something new to read and to be kept informed and search engines will like to see you are still producing original content.
• Lengthy: This one is more important to search engines than to us humans. Panda likes a lot of original content; one hundred words won’t cut it. Ideally, any page should have more than 300 words of original content.

Websites that have not been following these rules have seen their ranking drop dramatically, as well as their visits. It may seem like a lot of trouble, but your site will only be better and your users will thank you for it.

Google is the dominant search engine for more than 65 percent of web users. Yahoo and Bing are splitting the rest of the market share. It seems like the world of search engines would stop there but there are other options out there. The most successful Web professionals know to look elsewhere for more diverse, accurate or relevant search results. Here is a list of search engines to use to expand your results.

• Blekko: Blekko is a user-driven website that uses slashtags. A Slashtag is a tool to filter search results. Rather than search the entire web, a Slashtag allows you to search just the sites you want searched. Blekko users create, update and maintain the slashtags.
  What should you use Blekko for? If you want to narrow broad searches, search within your favorite sites, or to access recent material and web data. It will provide more relevant and accurate results.
• DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo is the master of instant search. Definitions, local search results, Wikipedia entries all appear within the search engine so that you can get answers without clicking on the link. DuckDuckGo also allows you to search by meaning so you can look for information on apple the fruit, without seeing results from Apple the company.
  What should you use DuckDuckGo for?  If you want a definition or an address quickly. If what you are looking for has several different meanings.
• Greplin: For Greplin to work you have to open an account and authorize it to search through your social media sites, email or web apps. It then looks through messages, tweets, facebook posts, dropbox documents or any other place you authorize Greplin to go.
  What should I use Greplin for? If you are all over the web and are the cluttered type, Greplin will help you find your personal data.
• Wajam:  Wajam is also a socially driven search tool but it is different from Greplin. Wajam works on the principle that “great minds search alike”. It makes searching more personal by adding results from your friends to Google or Bing. Wajam helps you recover links shared by your friends or follower directly in your search engines. Just add the Wajam extension to your browser and you will start seeing the results.
  What should you use Wajam for? If you are active on many social media platform and have interesting friends or followers.
• Quora: Simply put, Quora is a question-and-answer site. Users can ask questions, provide answers and add information to any question. The website will become a reference for topical information.
  What should you use Quora for? If you want a person’s opinion and expertise in a well-organized manner.