Internet Marketing Commerce

When it comes to SEO and direct traffic to your website inbound links are among the most important. Over the years there have been many different methods talked about among marketers and SEO “experts”, on acquiring links. Some of these methods are good and some of them are not. You really have to be careful because if you do it wrong it can completely ruin your domain name for good. After all that work you may end up with rankings that are less than what they would’ve been without acquiring links.

The best way to acquire links for a website it to not. You may be thinking why would I not want any links? You want links you just want the natural one way links that don’t require exchanges. The best way to get these links, which are what search engines love the most, is to have good content. If you’re website and your websites content is above the rest it will naturally get linked to. Start with the business side of things; create good content beyond just products that’s worth linking to. This will build your websites content, generate one way links and in return increase traffic and sales. This will also allow your website to age and acquire links in the most “natural” manor possible. Once you’ve let this happen for about a year, you can start to acquire links manually if your rankings are not where you would like them.

In one of Google’s previous patents they talk about the length of domain name registrations and how it could be used to create a score. In other words Google calculates a portion of your websites search engine score based on how long your domain name is registered for. There is no way to prove that Google did anything more than talk about the use of it, but better safe than sorry. You have to remember that Google works in logical ways and this is definitely a logical idea when you look at it closely.

For instance if a spammer registers a domain for spamming purposes their most likely only going to register it on a month to month basis. They know eventually once the domain is discovered as spam they will have to discard it. So they do not want to spend the money to register it for 10 years or even 1 year.

If you’re a legitimate business that plans on staying around for years to come a $100 investment for 1 year or $1000 for 10 years is not that big of an investment, especially when that website will produce thousands, millions or billions.

All in all when it comes to SEO you want to try and do as many things as you can do right. So, when you register a domain make sure it’s for at least 1 year and if you can, take it out for 10 years.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are now supporting a Canonical URL tag to help manage duplicate content issues. Duplicate content can occur when a product is listed under multiple categories, each with its own URL. Another instance could be when a search engine crawls a printer friendly version of a page.

There are several issues that exist with duplicate content. When multiple copies of a page exist search engines want to choose one version to show and filter out the rest. This could end up with the search engine showing your printer friendly page and almost completely defeating the purpose of your organic results. Your PageRank may also suffer in this case due to the fact that it’s being spread across pages you don’t want ranked well.

Before Canonical URL tags the best way to let search engines know which pages to crawl was to add rel=”nofollow” to the links you didn’t wanted crawled. Now you can use rel=”canonical” to let search engines know which page is the original version. This may not work correctly every time because search engines aren’t perfect, but it will surely help you achieve better results.