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SEM Controlling & Building Link Popularity

Now that you have submitted your site to the search engines, you can get on with other things. Quite important, and for some search engines a criteria to be met before becoming indexed, is for your home page to have some incoming links. Google for example likes to see at least 2-3 pages that link to your site before it will index your own. Your next step is to make sure you are in as many major directories as possible. Particularly the open directory project (DMOZ), Yahoo, About.com and Looksmart directories. You should then concentrate on as many secondary, regional and theme related directories as you can find in an effort to obtain as many incoming links as possible.

Once you have that taken care of that, it is time to get links from other webmasters with preferably similarly related Websites.

First of all compile a list of competitors websites or similarly related websites, and using the various backlink query tools available (see online tools) establish who is linking to your competitors and store them in a spread sheet. Add two additional columns, one for the email address and one for a contact ful name (webmasters/marketing managers).

You will soon have a large list of webmasters to which you can ask for a link exchange or simply request a link. Very important here is to realise that if you don't ask, you don't get. What do you have to lose by asking?

If you own other sites be sure you add a link to your newly submitted site, preferably a text link using a keyword in the link text.

I will be writing an in-depth article on link popularity and how to obtain links in an upcoming Newsletter issue, be sure to subscribe to the ABAKUS free SEM now (top right).

So now we need to know if the search engines are coming. If you have chosen the Inktomi pay for inclusion or the Altavista express submission, this is easy enough as you will be notified per email when your site is indexed (lots more on pay for inclusion in the search engines section). If however you have chosen not to go this route, or would like to know when other search engines spiders have visited, you will need to be able to analyse your log files or you will need some form of tracking script on your home page which will log visiting user-agents and IP numbers. There are free tracking services available which for the sake of normally a button link on your page you can get basic tracking statistics. This is the easiest method but it is also the most unprofessional. Business sites should most definitely avoid free online statistics, which allow the public to view your websites traffic in detail. Even a simple hit counter is considered unprofessional. You can however pay in many cases for tracking that is password protected and does not require any form of button or banner. This is an excellent option if you have the budget. One downside is that you normally are required to place search engine unfriendly javascript on your page for the logging to take place. You will see on examining the source code of this page that I have packed the webtrendslive javascript to an external file.

Many web hosts include their own web tracking as part of their hosting package. It is wise to check with your host if it is possible to view your statistics online.

Another option which provides more flexibility is to purchase or download try & buy versions of log file analysis software. The software does not come cheap. There are however some free / shareware log file analysers which for basic log file analysis purposes are fine. What these log file analysers are particularly good for is checking for establishing if a search engine spider has visited.

You do however need to know what the search engine spider uses as an IP address or user-agent. There is a good list of search engine user agents and ip addresses to be found here. Beware however that some ip numbers/agents may be out of date from this list.