mitchmatch | blog

@mitchmatch Tomorrow Today

What is a link farm?

On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services.

A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine or spamdexing. Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

How to avoid linking to a link farm?

Evaluate the websites that are requesting to link to you, or you want to linked to. And if you find out that there are many links on the page where you wish your link to be added, and all links are irrelevant to each other and hasn’t been categorized for sure it’s a link farm.

Is creating a directory page consider as creating a link farm?

Directory is a site containing links to other sites which are organized into various categories – such as, Shopping, Business, Arts, Internet, Medical, etc.

So, if a link farm post large amount of unrelated links on their site. Link farm sites and the links that the site provides are pretty much useless and not worth adding links to. (aka FFA - Free for All), there’s a big possibilities that the directory is considered as a link farm. However, since the directory is organized into various categories, for example: Shopping category has links that are related to online shopping, shopping stores, and another category is Surgery has links related to surgeon, cosmetic surgery, Maryland facelift, Beverly Hills liposuction, eyelid surgery in Cary, and more.

I think it would not be consider as link farm anymore, and sometimes we forget the value of information because of aiming for the highest ranking and not giving much attention on the information that is being spread out. Let’s focus on what the user is looking for, the benefits they can get not just for the search engines ranking.

War against spam…

The majority of us get spam every day. Some of us get a slight, and some of us get a bunch, but if you have an e-mail account it is always there. An example, just today here’s one came to my Gmail inbox:

Subject line: Monday trade notice

Keep Your Eyes Open Monday For News From SREA
SCORE ONE (SREA.OB)
Current: $0.10

This one always climbs after big news. Beat the news to the market, grab
SREA at open on Monday.

Evidently this is spam, however it made through the spam filters and I opened it because the subject line made it unknowable whether it was spam or not.

What is spam?

Spamming is defined as an abuse of electronic messaging systems to haphazardly send unsolicited bulk messages. Most of the recognized form of spam is an e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send — most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

How to filter spam?

Spam filtering software is somewhat like Beverly Hills liposuction, the process of filtering or removing unwanted email from specific area of your email account, only that liposuction is a surgical process and removes unwanted fat not unwanted emails. (big grin)

Spam filter software is currently available to stop spam is spam filtering software. The simplest filters use keywords such as “Viagra”, “porn stars”, “sex”, etc., as the subject to try to identify and remove spam. These easy filters are simple to avoid by spelling. “Spam” as “s-p-a-m”. And mostly, it blocks the real email that you want to receive. For instance, your friend send a copy of the movie reviews, “sex in the city”, the filter blocks the email for the reason of the word “sex”.

And more advanced filters, attempt to take this simple approach to a certain extent to statistically identify spam based on word patterns or word frequency; however there are still ways to get around them, by using short messages.

One message received! Check your inbox, if it’s a spam…delete it!…that’s the best thing to do for now.

Two factors you need to consider.

There are two factors in optimizing a website; on page and off page optimization. Most likely, the on page optimization focuses on the overall structure of a website, the internal links, content and the Meta tags. It is very important that a website has specific topic or theme to discuss. For instance, your target audience is of those interested to surgery and the target location, either locally or globally. Those is for your content, and to make sure that it would be indexed faster in the search engine, add some keywords to your Meta keywords that are visible in your content. For example, in your content you mentioned about surgery in Maryland, so it would be much better if you include on the Meta tags, keywords such as Maryland, Maryland surgery, Maryland facelift, (should be related to the topic that being discussed) but of course you have to consider that there’s limitation in using a Meta tags keyword, it’s up to 250 characters, the Meta description is also 250 characters and the title tag is 80 characters.

And for the off page optimization, it focuses on the endorsement of the website includes, link building, press releases, blogging, search engine and directory submissions. You have also to take note that search engines give much more value on the quality and quantity of the links pointing to a website, that’s the basis in their computation for search engine ranking position and visibility.

Monitoring your results would be the next step you have to consider, there you can determine the results of the work you’d done. You can install a tool that monitors the number of visitors, number of hits, and the most viewed page of your website and more, Google Analytics has it all. And take note, it’s for Free!

It’s not for FREE!

The term paid placement is generally used by most search engines to describe ads that guarantee placement. Similar terms include – “paid search ads”, “pay for placements”, “sponsored listings, “pay for placements”, “PPC listings” (pay per click) and the “CPC listings” (cost per click).

The PPC (pay per click) and CPC (cost per click) are paid listings that sell on a basis where advertisers only pay for every click on their ad. The following services listed below generally sell pay-per-click or cost-per-click basis.

The Google AdWords is an online advertising product that offers pay-per-click or cost-per-click basis for both text and banner ads; for example this keyword: cosmetic surgery – The advertiser pays only when internet users click on their ad. The ads appear on the right side area, or at the top of the search engine results, in relation to your selected keywords or key phrases.

The AdWords program target the local, national, and international distribution that helps a business reach potential customers when they are searching for information about services/ products online.

The right tool for you!

Monitoring the position or the ranking position of your selected keywords may take most of your precious time. That’s the reason why some tools are created to help us in dealing with our task. I came across to a site that provides a free tool for checking the ranking position of your keywords in the search engine.

For instance, you would like to find out the ranking position of these key terms or keywords: yoga poses for men, and then enter the url of the site. It has also a feature that allows you to select regional domain in Google and the number of searches can be set up to 1000 results. Cool isn’t?

The Google Position Checker tool that we have developed will automatically query Google’s search engines. It checks if your URL appears in the first 1000 results for your chosen keywords. If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies.

Search Engine Optimization: The META Tags

Meta tags are important and unbeaten tools for search engine marketing. The Meta tags are HTML tags that facilitate and explain the document they are located in. Search Engines focus on these three primary tags – Title, Description and the Keyword tags to help them (Search Engine crawlers, spiders, bots) verify the relevance of a website for a particular phrase.

The Title tag describes exactly what the document contains, and is one of the most important tags for a search engine. It is the first one to appear in the search engine results, and it should contain keywords (no repetitions) that you would like to be found, with a maximum number of 80 characters including spaces.

Example:

<title> BHI Pro IT Solutions Provider | Web Design and Development | SEO services < /title >

The Title tags of the web pages can frequently generate rapid and substantial differences to its ranking and because the words in the title tags are what appear in the clickable link on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Strategically altering them may result in more click throughs.

The  maximum number characters for the Meta Description tag is 250. This describes the content of a website. This description is not displayed on the page itself, but is largely intended to help the search engines index the page correctly.

Read more about this article, visit here 

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social Media Optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a "Digg This" button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos. Social media optimization is a form of search engine marketing.

Rohit Bhargava was credited with inventing the term SMO. His original five rules for conducting Social Media Optimization are:

1.    Increase your linkability
2.    Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3.    Reward inbound links
4.    Help your content travel
5.    Encourage the mashup

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogsphere and special blog search engines such as Technorati.

Related topics: Social Bookmarking: Save, organize and share!