HOW TO BOOST YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANK AND INCREASE INCOMING LINKS

You're trying to decide between two big summer blockbusters. Everyone you talk to recommends one over the other, and the reviews seem to back them up.

You're looking for a new pediatrician and the same doctor's name keeps coming up as you pick the brains of your friends and neighbors.

You're trying to find the perfect romantic restaurant for your anniversary so you start to chat up some other couples....

You get the idea.

We turn to others for recommendations, and when one name keeps coming up we rank that movie, or pediatrician, or restaurant at the top of our list.

Search engines work the same way. Let's say two Web sites offer information on organic lawn care. The first site has 10 incoming links--a link from another Web site--and the second has 100. The second Web site will rank higher for an "organic lawn care" search, all other things being equal.

Like recommendations, not all links are created equal. The popularity of the linking Web page, the number of links on that page, the words in the link and the context of the other Web page all affect how much "weight" the link has. (This is similar to asking two friends their opinion of Chicago restaurants; if one grew up in Chicago, you'll probably give her opinion more weight.)

It's essential to get quality incoming links if the search engines are an important part of your Internet marketing plans. Unfortunately, some businesses have difficulty getting incoming links. Here are some hints on how you can increase the number of quality incoming links to your own site.

Create content that's link-worthy. No one will want to link to a site that doesn't offer good content, so start there. Don't expect links to your Web site if it's just an online brochure.

Create a free tool that your customers will want to use. Whether it's a productivity tool like an ROI calculator or an application that turns your name into an acronym for a killer cyborg, the idea is to create something that will get other site owners and bloggers to link to you. A link from a popular blog like Boing Boing may cause your idea to go "viral" and be spread throughout the Web.

Get links from professional organizations. Do you belong to a chamber of commerce? The AMA? The APA? Some other TLA? (Three Letter Acronym.) Many associations post links to their members' sites. If yours does, make sure they link to your site.

Get links from directories. There are hundreds of directories out there. Besides big names like Yahoo and DMOZ, there are plenty of specialized directories as well. Two good places to start are the Internet Search Engine Database for Web Directories and this thread from the High Rankings forum .

Post articles to an article distribution service. Web sites like iSnare, The Phantom Writers and eZine Articles will distribute your article for a small fee, getting you loads of exposure. Each Web site or eZine where your article appears will include a "resource box" for your sales pitch and a link back to your Web site.

Start a blog. With a blog you have complete control over the text, so you can include keyword-rich links that give your search engine ranking an extra boost. You may see better results if your blog has a different domain than your Web site.

Leave comments on other blogs. Whether you have your own blog or not, you can leave comments on other people's blogs. In doing so, you can link your name (or signature) to your Web site, creating more incoming links. However, if you're not adding to the "conversation" of the blog, the blog owner may delete your comments. In other words, intelligent comments only, please.

Post to discussion forums that target your customer base. There are discussion forums, a.k.a. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), that target every demographic you can imagine. Find ones that target your audience and post (intelligent) replies to others' posts. Your signature file can include links back to your Web site.

I recommend first reading several posts in the forum to get a better idea of what people are talking about, asking about, and how they respond to "helpful" replies from vendors. You can also learn a lot about your prospective clients this way, and what problems they face.

By replying to their posts in a helpful manner you can establish yourself as an expert and a good resource for when they're looking for a solution.

A few words on trading links: There's no harm in trading links with another Web site. If the two sites have a lot in common it makes sense to link to each other. However, there is currently little value from a search engine standpoint. The idea of reciprocal links has been so abused by Web site owners and "black hat" SEO experts that the search engines give little or no weight to reciprocal links.

In short, link to other sites if you think your visitors will benefit from the link and if it doesn't cause you undue harm, but don't expect a big spike in your rank.

A few words about link farms: There are a few "bad neighborhoods" on the Internet that can actually harm you by providing a link. Although some legitimate directories charge for links, generally it's a good idea to stay away from sites that sell links to anyone with money in their pocket.

In conclusion, incoming links can improve your search engine visibility and drive new traffic to your Web site. Be sure to set aside time or money in your Internet marketing budget for link building activities.

How to Insert a Table Into a WordPress Blog Post

The default WordPress editor does not allow much HTML and it does not allow tables to be inserted. In this post I’ll show you a neat plugin that allows you to insert tables into your WordPress posts and exactly how to use it.

I was actually first asked about this a little while ago by Trevor Mulligan. At the time I had not needed to insert a table into any of my blog posts so I was unable to help him. A few days ago I published a list of over 100 CSS Galleries which are great for getting backlinks and traffic and I wanted to format the information in a table so I needed to figure out how to do it.

The wp-table Plugin

One of the reasons I love WordPress so much is that its functionality is infinitely expanded by the wide range of plugins available for it. One such plugin is wp-table by Alex Rabe. The instructions on that page work but I found it somewhat non-intuitive to use so I thought I’d do my own little write-up.

Setting up the Tables

Now here’s the weird thing - the plugin provides a table editor but that editor is separate from your blog posts. You create tables for your blog as a whole, each table gets its own ID and then to put a table into a blog post you insert a special tag. I would have expected the table editor to be built into the post editor but it isn’t which is why it’s a little confusing.

Once you’ve uploaded and activated the plugin you get a new option under the manage tab. You can see it below:

That screenshot also shows the one and only table I have at the moment which is the CSS Galleries one. There are two ways to create a table. You can manually add one by specifying the name and the number of rows and columns but that is restrictive as the drop-down only allows 20 rows.

Thankfully there is a second option to import a table from a file. You simply browse from a file on your computer and select a delimiter character to use. Here is a picture of that in action:

What I did for my post was to write the information out in Microsoft Excel (Open Office has the same functionality) and then export that as a CSV file. CSV is a Comma Separated file which means that each row in the spreadsheet is exported as one line of text with a comma character separating each column.

Inserting a Table Into a Post

Now once you’ve setup your table, inserting into a blog post (or page) is very simple. Make a note of the ID of the table which is 5 in the example above and then you use the following bracket notation to insert it:

Simple really.

Embedding Links in the Text

I hit a snag right away - a CSV file is plain text and I wanted to link to each one of the directories or the post wouldn’t have been nearly as useful. In Excel I was able to automatically turn the url’s into links but as soon as I exported them as a CSV they got stripped back to plain text.

However, the plain text can contain HTML so I changed the text of the link to the HTML required to display as a link using the HREF tag. I knocked up a quick program to do this for me so I didn’t have to do it manually for 100 lines of text!

Basically, if you want links in your table you have to ensure that the source text contains the full HTML to use.