High in the Rankings

Power in High-Quality Links

How well your site ranks in searches is also a function of how many other sites link to it. Google and Yahoo give considerable weight not just to the quantity of inbound links but to their quality—how popular they are and how relevant to your site’s content. Thus a link to a publishing company from Amazon lifts its Web site higher in the rankings than one from the site of the publisher’s newest author.

Search engines don’t look kindly on the “mutual admiration societies” that some companies create in attempts to buoy their rankings. These are reciprocal links arranged with partners, friends, or other otherwise unrelated Web sites to help boost link numbers. When seeking to exchange links with other Web sites relevant to yours, most consultants recommend that those sites carry a page rank of at least 4 on Google’s 1-to-10 ranking scale, with 10 used for the highest-valued sites. The page-rank scale is different from the ranking of search results; it weighs the quality of incoming links only. Companies can check their link popularity and Google page rank by downloading the Google toolbar.

To bolster the number of links to 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment’s Web site, Odden researched a large number of sites that maintain lists of exercise- and health-related vendors, then followed up by asking vendors with some of the best page ranks if they would link to the 2nd Wind site.

To further boost its clients’ Web presence, TopRank optimizes online press releases in the same way it might a Web site. When 2nd Wind was opening a new store in Wisconsin, for example, TopRank sent out a press release via e-mail about the launch that included embedded Web site links. “What happens is, bloggers and Web site owners subscribe   to press release distribution services to acquire new content, and those with some tie-in to exercise equipment—or who were in the same geographic area—published the new release, as is, on their Web sites,” Odden says. Interested readers clicked on the embedded link to 2nd Wind, and the tactic generated 240,000 page views in two months, he says.

The Pay-Per-Click Option

For those who want to go beyond optimizing sites for searches, pay-per-click advertising options are proving increasingly attractive. Companies bid on the use of words or phrases. Then, each time their advertisement pops up on searches and customers click on it, the company pays a fee to the search engine. Fees range from 10 cents up to about $30 per click, depending on the keyword’s popularity.

Pay-per-click can make sense for companies selling higher-ticket items that are looking to drive a lot of targeted traffic to their sites in the short run. "You might buy the keyword phrase ‘German dictionaries’ on GoogleAdwords, and within five minutes you’ll start showing up on lists of featured links," Larson says. "Whereas with natural or grassroots optimization, it might take a few months or more before you see the kind of results you want."