Archive for October 17th, 2008

Link building and Page rank

There are all types of schemes and arguments for link building and page rank. I am not going to get into them here but will impart a little bit of our professional philosophy regarding the two.

Link building (aka backlinks) is when you get other websites to link to yours. Page rank is a number from 0 to 10 Google attaches to every page on the Internet that it indexes. Page rank is like a vote for your site. It is extremely difficult to rank much higher than about 7 unless you are a huge corporation then you should rank that higher or higher. (Although I run across many that aren’t doing there job well because they don’t).

If you are a small business having a page rank of 4, 5, 6 or 7 is excellent. Basically, the higher the page rank the more authority Google is saying your page has according to them and the better chance of you ranking more highly. Page ranking is mathematically configured for your page based upon, amongst other factors, how many sites link to your page. So, theoretically, the more sites you can get to link to the page, the higher your page rank will be. And if some or many of those sites have a higher page rank than your page, the greater chance your page rank will move up accordingly.

However, we have shown and argued time and again that page rank is not really all that important. This is because we have frequently taken a page with a 0 page rank to the top of Google right over the top of high page rank pages. This proves that page rank is not all that important, all the time.

What is most important is relevant content. Content is king when it comes to getting to the top of search engines. Knowing how to write and optimize content that gets to the top of search engines is critical. And this is where a search engine professional comes in because a true professional knows how to achieve this.

Don’t get me wrong, having good quality backlinks is important too and a site should devote some of its efforts and time in slowly building up the backlinks. And it is important that they have a good mix of relevant content known as “anchor text”. The information in the link leading to the page should have a few of the relevant keywords or a phrase related to what the page is about and this should be mixed up a little bit so not every backlink says the same thing.

If you do employ a backlink campaign be certain you use a true professional and be careful as too much could actually harm your site more than help it.

Adtastic Hosting Arrives to Blog

Figured it was about time for Adtastic Hosting to have its own blog. I’ve
had a couple of blogs over the years but tend to stay so busy never really
seemed to have the time to keep them updated. They are still floating around
on the Internet here and there and the few posts on them are pretty
informative I think because my primary interest in having a blog is really
to try and help teach people about how to be successful on the Internet and
explain all the technicalities of that. So I think that must have some value
somewhere.
But, as mentioned I usually stay so busy around here its hard to give it
much attention. And hard to trust that process with anyone else, after all
the chief cook and bottle washer should have that task and that would be me.
So, why will this blog be any different. Well, for one, it has its own home
under a root top level domain. And that is pretty important I think, gives
it more of a reason to want to stay alive and maybe me more of a reason to
support it.
But the biggest reason this blog might tend to develop is I have it set up
to automatically post my writings directly from sending an email right to
it. Considering I spend so much time in the email anyways I figured that
might help me to keep it updated more easily. Such a nifty feature being
able to just write a quick email, jot down your thoughts or musings or
ponderings of the moment and 15 minutes later it’s posted to your blog.
So hopefully, this time around we might actually fill this blog house up
with something someone somewhere might be interested in.