Quick Way to Make Extensive Link Partner Lists

Oct 30, 2007 SEO

Getting people to link to your site is the most important thing you can do in terms of SEO. Creating quality content, and a site people will want to visit are the first steps to getting those links, but sometimes you may also need to ask the webmasters for them.

The difficulty here is who? and how?

There are several techniques to asking for links. You could trade content for links, reciprocate links, or engage in three way linking, but for our purposes we will just say that we are going to straight up beg for them.

After you have figured out how you will look to attain these links the process begins of choosing who you will ask, and how you will get in touch with them. Simply skimming the search engine results pages for your key terms is one way to go, but the process will be exhausting. If you figure on average you will only get about 5% of the people you contact to link to you you would need 1,000’s of names to make this process affective.

In comes Arelis. This software and IBP are among a search marketers best friends. Among there invaluable uses is grabbing website, and website information, including contact info, through keyword searches. Arelis also allows you to find the information of sites already linking to you and linking to your competitors. Once you have found the sites using Arelis you can export whatever information you choose to keep via excel sheets. This makes quick work of creating mass email lists.

By using Arelis you can create email lists with thousands of possible link contacts. By using creative linking ideas you can turn these lists into linking gold. The power is in the numbers.

For those that don’t have Arelis a demo version, with limited features, is available at http://www.axandra.com/

Tags: link building

The Importance of Outbound Links

Oct 24, 2007 SEO

Often when websites are created their owners want people to come to their sites and never leave. This mentality leads to website owners often leaving outbound links off their pages. This type of strategy can seriously hinder your rankings in major search engines.

Google’s algorithm is heavily based on the linking structure of the web. It is an accepted fact that inbound links add value to a site. Why is it then left to the wayside that a lack of outbound links could be detrimental?

According to e factory:

Since PageRank is based on the linking structure of the whole web, it is inescapable that if the inbound links of a page influence its PageRank, its outbound links do also have some impact.

So how can we build quality outbound links to benefit our needs?

First do some research as to the sites most relevant for your main keywords. Link to these sites using in-text links with keyword rich anchors. As a personal preference I usually assign the links to open in a new window to keep my visitors from leaving my site.

When building outbound links I like to put 1 link out for every 20 pages of content. You could also build your outbound links according your inbound link count.

Tags: outbound links

Page Design Basics

Oct 8, 2007 Page Layout

Page design can be much easier if you apply these 4 basic principals: proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast.

Proximity:
The principal of proximity tells you to put related items close together. Things that aren’t related should be farther apart. The amount of separation between items or groups tells your reader how the material is organized.

Alignment:
The principal of alignment tells us one thing: Each item on the page should align with another item. The alignment of items creates organization and stability. How you align things can also draw attention to different parts of the page.

Repetition:
Repetition, or consistency, means you should repeat aspects of the design throughout the project. Good repetition ties your work together. I consider this principal to be my secret weapon. Establish good design elements and then reuse them - it not only speeds up the process it is what separates good design from bad design.

Contrast:
Contrast is the best way to add impact to your page. Create contrast by using type headings, photography, textures, or color. Figure out what the focus of the page is then use contrast to exploit that focus.

These principals represent the foundation of good design. When applied correctly, you’ll be surprised at how they not only improve your page but also increase your productivity.

What’s Your Monitor’s Resolution?

Oct 8, 2007 Web Design Trends

Just 10 years ago the average monitor size was somewhere between 600 x 400 pixels to 800 x 600 pixels. Gasp! Imagine designing a site for either one of those two sizes today and you can see the designers run for the hills in horror.

As a design firm, the monitor resolution issue comes up quite frequently during the planning and designing phases of a project. Often, clients get upset when a design doesn’t fit “their monitor” size or looks off size because the planning wasn’t well thought out in the beginning.

So what is the average monitor resolution? What other resolutions should you take into consideration when designing a site and what sizes are falling by the wayside and should be discarded all together?

Screen Resolutions

As you can clearly see the 1024 x 768 monitor resolution is used by almost half of the web community. Surprisinginly the number two resolution is 1280 x 1024 at a little over 17% just above the 9.5% 1280 x 800 users. The lowly 800 x 600 still holds an 8% grasp on user resolution but I predict a steady decline of this monitor size over the next year as new monitors begin to replace old tube monitors on home computers across the world.

The remaining six resolutions are all above even the moderate 1024 x 768 resolution.

So what’s this mean to you?
Basically to design for a smaller monitor resolution (800 x 600) is an exercise in futility. Why cater to the 8% when the next step up covers over 90% of browser users? The 800 x 600 monitor is dead and should no longer even be considered useable, especially when planning and designing a website. The current web standard of 1024 x 768 is more than sufficient for almost all resolutions.

Tags: monitor resolution