seo report | Understanding Backlinks from Search Engines

Most Search Engine Optimizers understand the importance of the backlinks in order for a website to succeed. Most search engines take into account of the backlinks quality for their ranking algorithm. We will cover the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) here and discuss how they treat backlinks from their point of view.The most popular search engine, Google, places great emphasis on backlinks. In fact, relevant backlinks is all a website needs to achieve a high ranking in Google result page. Google, however, does not shows all the indexed backlinks when user queries with the link: operator. In addition, Google does not update their backlink index as frequent as their search results.It is believed that multiple backlinks from a same domain does not have the stack effect in Google. For example, links from forum signatures and directories will have minimum weigh in Google’s ranking algorithm.Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to display all the backlinks to the users. A search with the link: operator often reveals most of a page’s backlinks to screen. Although they display most of the backlinks, it does not mean that they value them as much as in Google. Unfortunately, backlinks are not as important as they are in Yahoo than in Google.Yahoo has introduced a site explorer interface to aid the webmasters in locating the backlinks and other useful information. Yahoo also provides one of the best API for the web masters’ usage.MSN also offers to display all the backlinks to the user with the link: operator query. The backlinks update in MSN also seems to be the most updated among all the three search engines. It may seems that MSN focus a lot on backlinks but this is usually not the case. Backlinks are not as important as keyword domain in MSN’s point of view.In conclusion, Google is the only search engine that put a lot of focus on backlinks in their ranking formula and since they are the most popular search engine, backlinks are important for every website. It is recommended to use Yahoo or MSN to check for backlinks because they show a more complete listing.

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The Name Game: Using Keywords in URL Filenames

A few short weeks ago we were asked to begin to apply some focus to the competitive keyphrases ‘van leasing‘ and ‘van lease‘. On site modifications were underway to bring focus to this aspect of the companies business and these included choosing and applying suitable page titles, meta descriptions and copy for the commercial vehicle related pages of their site.

The page that the client wanted indexed for the search terms ‘van leasing’ and ‘van lease’ had been named ‘commercial-contract-hire.htm’. This was changed to ‘van_leasing.htm’ with an appropriate rewrite rule. At that time they were sitting at around #98 in Google UK for the term ‘van leasing’ and around #58 for the term ‘van lease’. After having made the URL filename change some modest promotion of the van leasing aspect of the business was carried out. Seven days after making the change the site had been crawled by the Google and the newly named page was now appearing at #24 for ‘van leasing’ and #18 for ‘van lease’.

A significant improvement in only seven days!Whilst this is clearly not a controlled experiment with the effects of only one change being accurately quantified it does appear to reinforce the importance of choosing URL filenames that include primary keywords or phrases that are relevant to the page content, title and description.This is not news but it is a relatively simple aspect of SEO which appears to be overlooked by many sites. Just enter almost any sensible search term and then look at the sites listed on some of the lower SERPs. For the term ‘van leasing’ these are some of the URL filenames that are being used by other businesses involved in van leasing:mercedes_contract_hire_deals.shtml
cars_and_vans/index.htmlcategory.php?cc=311&k=business_vehicle_leasing___purchasevolkswagen/8/index.html

SEO is all about paying attention to an extensive array of details, URL filenames being but one of these details. Relevant, appropriately chosen URL filenames will not magically result in a page rising from obscurity to prominence overnight but they are a key ingredient in the SEO stew.

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