Good SEO that makes sense.
As a first post, I'd like to offer some additional things that I have found make a huge difference:
1) Watch where you agree to reciprocate links with. Some are bad neighborhoods (link farms) and if you link to them, you could be in trouble.
2) Get links only from directories or relevant sites. It is pointless to get a link to a bridal page from a site about IT services. Relevance however can be defined by other links that are on that page. So looking at something like About, you can find many topics... choose the right topic.
3) Don't bother so much with links from sites where even the home page has got a lousy GPR. It is generally accepted that a
PR of under 4 will not do much good... at least with Google. Don't necessarily discount pages that don't have
PR yet though because it might be new and G has been very reluctant lately to update
PR. Look at the page pointing to it and if it is 4 or higher, you will probably be inheiriting some
PR at the next update.
4) Look at the number of links from any page you want a link on. It isn't always best to be amongs the masses. If a page has a PR5 and gives off 150 links, that
PR will be divided amongst those links. It would be better to take the link on a PR4 page where there are only 3 other links.
5) Develop a site map, especially if your site is large. Link to the site map from the home page so that the SE bots can hit that page and virtually explode in links. If you bury your pages deep, the SE will be less likely to index them.
6) Change your pages regularly, even if it's nothing more than adding a period or a comma somewhere. It is then recognized as an updated page and the assumption is that the page is more relevant than one that is a couple of years old. Plus, the more often you change your site, the more often the bots will come back and index you. I have G bots hitting every day or more. Others I know don't see it but once every couple of weeks.
7) Keep JS off the page as much as possible. Write it off page and then call it. Bots avoid JS and if there is too much of it, they can get lost or just give up. This also applies to JS or Flash hyperlinks. If you must use these to create your links for some visual effect, then at least create text hyperlinks down at the bottom.
If you hear of some cool new secret to bump your site up the index, be careful that it isn't considered spam. Check it out with SEO boards and you will very likely determine that it is a no-no. Cloaking, hiding text, creating many sites only for the purpose of cross linking, etc will all get you into trouble.
9) Don't reciprocate links with every tweedledum that comes along. First, it should be relevant.
Second, if you get one of those form emails that tries to look like they are not ("I visited your site <link> and found it to be a wonderful resources..."). These are shortcut people, will probably post thousands of irrelevant links that are created by some program and never have much for
PR. I've even found that many of these show you the links page but it's not connected to anything anywhere. Getting link here is useless because consumers and the SE will never find them. It's a sham to effectively get a one way link to their site by tricking you into believing that they are giving you something in return.
Top article, helps very much to be sharper in SEO, thanks John.
Useless!
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