Interesting News Articles

The first step to generate links to your website is to create a useful resource that people trust and rely on. There is no easier way to do this than by providing up to date news and information targeted towards a particular industry. If people see your website as an authority within your industry (or at least a useful resource) because of the news and information you provide then you will begin to generate incoming links, not only from forums and blogs, but from other highly respected websites who wish to source information (such as the BBC).

Controversial News Articles

Controversy will always kick up a storm. By writing a news article that directly disagrees with someone or something or by publishing something no other website would dare to write, you can quickly attract attention to your own website and again have other websites linking into your own. It is a fine line when trying to get this right without over stepping the mark, you could easily end up with egg on your face if you get it wrong, potential customers may think you have gone crazy or, at worst, you could even end up with a court battle. But if you get it right it will quickly generate a lot more links that a regular news article ever would.

Website Tools

Can you as a company or individual provide something that no other else can? Develop something new and exciting, something that is unique to your market. Can you create some kind of calculator which generates positive results (example: www.oneaccount.com) that will not only attract visitors but will encourage other websites to link to you because it is a useful resource? Offer these tools for free on your website, encourage visitors to use them. The more unique these tools are the more links they will generate.

Usable Scripts or Design Templates

Similar to the above but this time allow other websites to freely use scripts and/or design templates created by you or your company. Again this could be a simple calculator which you could allow webmasters to add to their own websites by simply dropping in a line of code, or it could be template designs for popular content management systems such as WordPress or osCommerce. The trick is to offer these items for free but require that a simple text link be added from their website to your own website to acknowledge the original source.

Competitions & Games

Everyone likes the chance to win stuff so running competitions will always attract attention. By making the competitions regular and by offering interesting and industry relevant prizes, you can quickly build up interest in your website.

Really good games created in something like Flash can in some instances become bigger than the actual website itself (thinking back to the coptor game), add a scoreboard and make it competitive, allow the option to invite friends and create banner links for other webmasters to add to their own website. Again target the market that your website is aimed towards, for an IVA website could you create a IVA/Debt Management game that asks visitors to play out their own real life situation, ending in a positive solution?

Make it Easy

Offer text links, banners etc. on your website. Encourage visitors to link to your website by simply adding some text such as “if you like our website, link to us with the following code…”, provide the HTML code so that it is simply ready to copy and paste.

Higher Rankings

Search engines rank webpages due to a variety of calculations and having keywords within your URLs helps increase your rankings for those targeted search terms. This works especially well when many dynamic pages are created which can target a variety of less competitive long tail search terms.

Highlighted Search Terms in Search Engine Listings

When you type in a keyword search into search engines the results returned will include links to relevant webpages. What you will notice is that the keywords that you have typed in will be highlighted within the listings, this includes the display URL. So by having the keywords within your URL, you will help your webpage listing stand out and help encourage a click.

Easier to Read and Remember

Visitors to your webpage will find it a lot easier to read the URL which again is useful when your webpage is listed in search engine results. It will allow users to quickly realise that your webpage is relevant to their search results. Compared to dynamic URLs, rewrote URLs are often a lot easier to remember which will help when visitors wish to return to you webpage whether through search engines, re-typing the URL or browsing their history.

Better Indexing

Search engines can have problems indexing webpages created through a dynamic URL, especially if there are several parameters within the URL. Rewriting a URL gives you control over the structure and allows you to reduce the total parameters or structure the URL to look more like a static URL.

The Google Webmaster Tools website allows website owners to register details of their own website to Google and includes several tools which allow you to further improve Google’s understanding of your website and its target audience.

One of these tools allows you to set up your geographic target when it is not obvious which region your website should be served to in Google’s search results.

Search engines generally operate within geographic regions so, depending on which country you are searching from, you will receive more relevant results. To gain the information on which country your website is targeted towards, the search engine generally look at details such as which country your website is hosted in, the location of websites that link to your website and most importantly which country your domain name is targeted towards. So if your domain name is a .co.uk then it is obvious to the search engines that you are targeting the UK, if your domain was a .de then obviously Germany. The problems arise when you have a .com (.net, .org etc.) domain, this is when search engine will look more towards the hosting location and incoming links to gain the geographical information.

But now Google Webmaster Tools allows you to override this information, if you have a .com or similar domain name, and choose which geographical location you are targeting. The advantages of this are that you do not have to change hosting locations or concentrate on gaining incoming links from other websites within your region. Plus there is also the option to change your geographic target location at a later date if necessary.

Again Google are leading the way when it comes to innovation within search engines and search results and hopefully the other big players such as Yahoo! and MSN will catch on and offer something similar soon.