Promote your website

You will finally know what it is you really need to do and what you need to do to develop a strategy to promote your website.

Let us first look at what it is that gets pages ranked in the top of the search engines. Search engines each have their own secret methods and algorithms for ranking websites with the overall mission to get the most relevant content in front of someone searching for particular keywords. There is an endless battle going on between the search engines to bring us the most relevant content and SEO experts trying to find loopholes to get their clients to the top. Although black hat strategies can work for a period of time the clever guys at Google will soon find out what you are up to tighten the loophole and ban you from the search engine. This is known as being Google slapped and can take a long time to recover from.

You need to have keyword rich, quality themed content. This does not mean a load of gobble packed with keywords. Quality means keyword rich content with well worded phrases and paragraphs linked to those keywords. The search engines are getting a lot better at reading pages and they are no longer looking for just keywords but entire meaningful content related to the keywords. Links to your site from other web pages. It is important to have links pointing to your website from other relevant websites. They will have no effect from non-related web pages. Although you will not lose marks for having bad quality links from link farms and other non related websites it will not aid your quest for SEO. Authority sites are the best form of links to have; sites that already rank high in the search engines containing your link will throw a lot of weight. Older sites will tend to rank higher because of the experience and durability factor, as long as they are active sites and updated they will rise in time. Remember that search engines want to deliver the most up-to-date relevant information so keeping it current is important.

A search engine optimization expert cannot assure you of a first page ranking, unless of course he works for the search engines and has control to put you there. All he can promise is his efforts in trying to get you on the first page. Don't believe that an SEO expert can get you 100 Page 5 links for $100. A single link from a site this high up will probably cost you $50 a month. The higher the ranking website you want to link from, the more costly it will be.

First up is the Site Explorer, which takes your URL and returns tons of information: Summary, Top Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Top Pages. Each section is represented on the results page, but you can click on the tabs and get more in-depth info if you like. You can choose the Fresh Index or the Historic Index and run the report on either the domain, the subdomain, or the page itself.

My favorite tool, the Backlink History, also shows up here in the results page but not in its own tab. Now, a note on the Fresh vs. Historic Index: the Fresh index gives you information from a rolling 30 day period and is more, um, fresh, while the Historic index gives you everything in Majestic’s history for a site.

The Domain Information gives you your Referring Domains and External Backlinks, so you can quickly tell if you have a lot of sitewides (if you have 10k backlinks and 10 referring domains, yes, you have a lot of sitewides.)

Your backlinks and referring domains are broken down into educational and governmental and the following information is displayed: Referring IP Addresses, Class C Subnets, Indexed URLs, Images, Nofollow Links, Redirects, Frames, and Deleted Links. You’ll also see a number called the Majestic Million which is a list of the top one million domains as rated by Majestic SEO.

The Backlink History shows your 2 charts: 1 is your external backlinks discovery over the past 12 months and the other is your referring domains discovery over the past 12 months. You can click on these two charts in order to go directly to the Backlink History tool and get more information.

The Top Backlinks area shows the Source URL, Anchor Text, Target URL, and Last Crawl Date.

For competitive analysis, this information can easily be used to see where you stand compared to others in your niche.

For potential link partners, use this data to identify the top pages on a site and go after a link on that page. With so much information, there are truly countless ways of using this data to help better your link building efforts.

Note: I’d love to include a screenshot here but the information you get takes up a large amount of space and I don’t think I can do it justice. Since you can see the Site Explorer for free, even if you can’t get all the detailed data, I’d suggest checking it out for yourself.

Next up is the Backlink History, which has been something I have relied upon many times (especially when clients are trying to convince me that they know their competitors aren’t matching/beating their own link building efforts.) You can again use either the fresh or historic index here and you can compare up to five domains. Currently, subdomains are ignored.