E-commerce To Do List For January 2010 - Part Ii

With the New Year on the way and the economy moving forward retailers are hoping for a rosier year in terms of sales. This view is bolstered by the growing spread of broadband bringing more people on line and the overall growing use of and comfort with online transactions. Firstly, we covered the very important strategies related to organic rankings and paid search methods. A second set important strategy involves the use of networking. SEO reiterates the importance of linking as a primary strategy for attracting search engines. What have you done lately to improve your links?

Why exactly are links important?
When another site links to yours you have some access to that sites traffic so every GOOD link there are bad links as well is an expansion of your viewing group.

Search engines especially Google view links as essentially votes of confidence from the linking site. So the more important the site linking to you is the more impact of that vote. This is why directories are so important they are seen as authoritative. So even if you do not think your customers would ever look for you in a directory your presence in the directory with a link back will make it much easier to find you through search rankings.

The message is strive for great links. Link backs have become a lot easier now that you can blog on relevant blog sites and link back to your site. However the blogs don not always produce as much search engine attention as we might like. One of the strategies that makes great sense but is often avoided is to find links among the other sites that rank strongly on your keywords. True those sites can be competitors but not always. For example let us use our homemade catnip seller again. If one of the sites that rank well on your term catnip toys is a cat care site that sells organically produced cat foods they may be happy to link to a site that they believe fits into their philosophy.

To do list Check high ranking sites on your keywords. Evaluate for possible link opportunities.

The underside of that message is avoiding bad links. A bad link is a link from a site that is a known bad boy in the search engine world. Site reputations can be tarnished by engaging in bad practices such as embedding keywords all over their pages in white font on white background to get more attention or adding non-relevant keyword to highjack searchers. Their bad practices will negatively affect your ranking.

To Do List Check your links for any negative influences. There are a number of free link checkers out there. Remove anything that could be a problem.

Finally check your own site for bad links. It is just bad form and reduces credibility to have non-functioning options on your site.