Don’t be caught in a web of deceit.

Yesterday, an article by New York Times writer David Segal appeared in many newspapers around the country. The article was remarkable because, for one thing, it made the topic of “black hat” or deceitful search engine practices front page reading for the general population—most of which not only don’t know what search engine optimization is, but don’t care how Google determines what results they see, because they’re not involved in the search or ecommerce industries.

But the other remarkable factor was that it documented how the website of one of the United States’s largest and most successful retailers, JC Penney, dominated the search results for months, via ways which Google says was unethical. Now, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, says Google will “take strong corrective” action, which essentially means that JCPenney.com is “demoted” in the search engine rankings.

What Google claims JC Penney did—and which JC Penney claims they did not authorize—was paying for links into the site. Paid links by the thousands came to JCPenney.com from questionable sites. The links inflated JC Penney’s “authority” with Google, as their search algorithm highly values incoming links, and led to JCPenney.com dominating the unpaid search engine results page for several months for just about every shopping related term you could think of, such as “dresses,” “home décor,” “tablecloths,” “luggage,” “furniture,” “skinny jeans” . . . the list goes on and on.

The article says that some of the 2,015 pages that linked to JCPenney.com were site-related, in other words, they related at least nominally to clothing, but most did not. The links to JCPenney.com came from sites that the writer describes as “hovels”: sites about “diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists,” among many others. The article describes this practice as “black hat” optimization: “the dark art of raising the profile of a website with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.”

The lesson from all this for the average business owner is that incoming links do matter. In fact, they matter a lot. But think twice before you succumb to the pressure of the sites that advertise hundreds of links for the low low price of . . . whatever. In most cases, even with companies that appear to be the most reputable, you will end up with spammy links to your site just like JC Penney did, and eventually, your site will get dinged, just like JC Penney did. It may take a while for Google’s spam team to find your site and discover what you’re doing, and you may even enjoy some benefits from the increased exposure if you do fall for these “link schemes,” but when the search engines do find out, your company gets the equivalent of concrete shoes and you sink in Google’s search results, perhaps never to rise again.

Take some action now. Find out what links your site already has by using Yahoo Site Explorer or Open Explorer (both free tools) find links to your site. The Yahoo Site Explorer linking tools is one instance in which the Yahoo product is actually more informative than the Google product. You can search using the Google search tool link:www.yourURL.com. This search returns only a sampling of sites that are linking to yours, and in particular only the higher PageRank sites, but it’s still useful information. (Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page URL.)

So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links? Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general. Use the external links tool on Webmaster Tools to learn about other sites interested in your site. Cultivate interest from other sites that relate to yours in some way. This process takes time and effort, but when you approach link building in this manner, you know you won’t be the next JCPenney.com!

Next year we will be celebrating two decades since Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN implemented the first HTTP system and gave birth to the World Wide Web.

All of THIS has happened in 20 years.

Although the sophistication of the Social-2.0-Ecommerce-Flash-2Way-mediaRich-databaseDriven-AJAXenhanced web scarcely resembles the text based clients of the early days, the  foundation has not shifted. It is all about the LINK.

That’s right. The hypertext link is what online empires depend on. From the success of the Ecommerce giants, to the buzz of the social media superstars, to the corporate jousting of Murd0ch v. Google, the link remains center stage.

We crave those links and scrutinize their quality. Our revenue depends on them. And we are beholden to almighty possessor of link authority: Google.

Is this the web of humanity that TBL envisioned? I cannot say. But the web is a fascinating, ever-expanding Escher-like puzzle. As it evolves – complex and wondrous, the hypertext link remains the connective tissue that defines the web and gives it form. I pay tribute to the link: so simple and elegant an invention on which our new universe has been built.

If you are a student of SEO, you know the importance of building incoming links from high-trust sites.

In addition to obtaining links you also want your incoming links to reinforce the relevance of your site. Two key ways to improve the quality of your incoming links are to be specific about the link text relevancy and target page selection.

1. Link Text Relevancy. The actual link text used to link to your site is an important factor in the value of a link. If you are selling Chlorine-Free Pool Chemicals, it would be much better for a link from another site to read:

Check out the huge selection of Chlorine-Free Pool Chemicals

than something like this:

Check out pool chemicals from JoeysHiQualityPools.com

The ideal scenario is for the link text to include your keyword phrase. If all of your incoming links simply include your domain name, the search engines will not reward you for your relevancy for specific keywords (unless, of course, those keywords are in your domain name).

2. Target Page Selection. It is hard to be too picky about incoming links, but the optimal situation is if incoming links go directly to the interior pages of your site. Ths is called deep linking. If you have a page on your site about chlorine-free pool chemicals you will want incoming links with with that link text to go directly to a page on your site about chlorine free-chemicals.

If every link into your site goes to the home page, the search engines will likely not value your site as highly as if you have a range of links going to content-specific pages on your site.

So how do you obtain links that are structured the way you want? You ask! Use every opportunity to make it easy for others to link to you.

Here is an example of a link request page you can put on your site:

Sample Link Request Page

You can similarly email the link text to others that you would want them to use when they link to your site. Let the recipient know they can just copy and paste the snippet you have provided for them.

Whenever you create an inbound link to your site from another website, be sure you are using best practices, such as those described in this post.

If you are curious what your current incoming link text looks like in Google’s eyes, Google Webmaster Tools has such a report for doing a quick scan of incoming link text at:

Your site on the web -> Links to your site -> Anchor Text

Don’t sell yourself short by settling for generic incoming links. At every opportunity, request for those links to be built in a way that will give you the greatest SEO boost.

Anyone who has read my Web Development Team bio knows that when I’m not busy keeping hundreds of websites running smoothly behind the scenes, I’m on the quest for rock stardom. This endeavor recently led me to research purchasing a microphone for my makeshift home studio. Of course, this meant some sleuthing on the Internet to find what was right for my needs.

After a bit of research, I narrowed my possible options and began looking for people’s opinions on what would end up being my final decision. Like any good consumer, I popped over to my favorite search engine and started searching for reviews of this mic.

I clicked on one of the first results that popped up, and began reading the reviews. I read at least one before I realized something: This wasn’t just a site for music gear enthusiasts, it was an online store selling the mic I was researching! Well played, music gear website.

This website was successfully using what is becoming ever more necessary in an increasingly crowded marketplace: useful, relevant content! What’s more, they didn’t even have to expend the time and energy to produce it themselves. Passionate consumers were willing to take their time to express their experiences with the product, and share it for free with this company, which was then kind enough to share it with me. Providing a mechanism for submitting reviews got them content, which in turn got their site near the top of Google, without any cost or effort beyond the initial setup!

There are steps you can take to achieve the same goals. Think about what you offer, and what your target audience would likely be interested to read about. If you sell art supplies, provide some craft ideas (or elicit your visitors to send some in!). Sell Kitchen supplies? Why not ask customers to submit their favorite seasonal recipes?

Some of our most successful sites are those that are actively providing content. Mechanic equipment supplier DenLors Tools posts articles on automotive repair. Dog treat retailer Best Bully Sticks provides Dog Care Tips, as well as asks customers to submit photos of dogs using their products. Search engines are much bigger fans of sites that continue to gradually add content as opposed to being completely static.

You could also try what started this topic off in the first place: Add the ability for customers to submit product reviews (This feature is now available for MightyMerchant sites).

Using Google Analytics, you can then track what is drawing people to your site. The Content section will allow you to view what landing pages people are entering your site from, as well as what keywords led people to those pages, showing you what content might be good to focus on. You can even discover what other sites are linking to your content, which can give you a better idea of how traffic is finding it’s way to your site. This is just scratching the surface of how Google Analytics can help you determine what works and what doesn’t.

Any way you dice it, appropriate content is one of the most crucial components to draw traffic to your site. It’s beneficial to you as a site owner, and gives your visitors more reasons to find and stay on your pages.

Partially due to those reviews, I ended up buying that microphone. Although keeping a big chunk of the World Wide Web ticking along is a bigger priority these days than rock stardom, I don’t regret my purchase one bit.

We all know that it takes some work to build incoming links. And, good incoming links are worth their weight in gold. So why not give your site visitors a little incentive for linking to you?

Here is the plan.

Create a link invitation/instruction page. Preferably you will give several options that include a good sentence or two of keyword-rich text along with a link going to one of your internal pages.

And then make an offer of $5 off a purchase on your site.

Include a simple form, so your linking buddies can send you a link to their site and you can verify the incoming link.

Once you verify the link, reward them with a coupon code.

Give it a try and let us know how this strategy works for you.

Link building is one of the most difficult aspects of site optimization. Everyone agrees that a site needs incoming links in order to gain traction in search engine rankings-especially Google. Links are tangible evidence of a site’s ‘popularity.’ The more sites you have linking to yours is evidence that your site is offering quality, relevant content that other people view as important enough to link to, which is part of the criteria a search engine uses to assess rank. But there is little agreement on how to go about obtaining links and what type of links will be valuable.

A comment on my last post asking about links motivated me to investigate link building a little more.The question, from Dennis at DenlorsTools.com, asked what percentage of deep links is ideal as far as search engines are concerned? The problem is, there is no magic formula for links, and no systematic way to go about accomplishing the link-building task. And to complicate the issue further-the Big 3 search engines-Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN)-factor links and other on-page content differently. Google puts more emphasis on incoming links, or ‘back links’ as they call them. Yahoo and MSN weigh on-the-page content more heavily. So to rank well in Google, link building is key, which is why links have become commodities, bought, sold and traded through ‘link farms’ and other shady sites. Used to be, links from these sites almost guaranteed high rankings, because the number of links was all that mattered in the search engines’ eyes. Now though, this strategy of paid links can get your site quickly de-valued or even banned in extreme cases. Google discusses link exchanging schemes in their Webmaster Support section.

What types of links are useful? The most valuable links are from web pages that are related to your site. Links to or from pages that are not topically related to your site are less valuable, and in some cases, too many of these off-topic links can be viewed as spam and work against you. For instance, if your site sells soccer balls, a link from a site selling light bulbs will do nothing for you, but a link from a soccer ball manufacturer or uniform company would be ideal. It’s probably OK to have a few off-topic links, but the majority of your links should be from sites in your “neighborhood.” Search engines will penalize a link scheme that looks “unnatural,” meaning that the type of links do not match up with the content on your page or if the number of links suddenly increases drastically, which suggests you paid for them.

Now–how many links is desirable? The short answer is, more than your competition! But really, much of the success depends on what your competition is already doing. If they have 50 high-quality links, you need 60. How can you find out? Type [link:www.yourcompetitorsdomain.com], then type in your own site the same way to check your incoming links. (Note that there is no space after the colon!) The previous Advanced Search Operators post outlines that one and several other search operators that can be useful in analyzing your site.It’s far better to have few quality links than many links of low quality.

Links are so important that often only 5-10 high quality, relevant links is enough to make a big difference in placement. In essence, low quality links-from sites viewed as spammy, ‘link farms’, sites with low or no PageRank, links from ‘doorway pages’ with little or no useful content-won’t help at best and can get you penalized. High quality links-from respected sources like academic sites and sites that are closely related to your industry, sites with some decent PageRank-will get you the boost you want.

How to go about obtaining links is the topic for another post!

What is a family-friendly website? According to FamilyFriendlySites.com, a site displaying the Family-Friendly Sites Emblem displays content and links that support “physical, mental, and emotional development in a healthy way.” Their many categories of family-friendly websites include Arts & Culture, Health & Wellness, Hobbies & Collections, Science & Nature, Education & Learning, and Shopping & Auctions.

If you think that your website would fit into one of their categories, and you abide by their guidelines of displaying family-friendly material, you can request to be included in their directory. You will receive notification by email that you have been approved, and you will receive a listing in their directory and a Family Friendly Sites emblem to display on your website.(Update: A listing used to be free, however they have begun charging to have a site reviewed for inclusion in the directory. There is a one-time $39.95 fee for a permanent listing, which is fully refundable if your site is not approved.)

Parents will know that you’re a safe site for their kids to explore, you’ll get a high-quality incoming link, and more exposure. Sound good?