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Here I will help you understand what makes a web page perform well in Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. I’m considering linking rather than page structure and content, I will do that another time,  for now we’ll assume that you have a search engine friendly website full of pages with interesting content about what you do.

Like me you probably use search engines in two ways.  Your either searching for a product or service for yourself or you’re wanting people to find you when they are searching for a product or service that you provide. The search engine, for its part, wants to keep everybody happy by responding with relevant and useful information. Of course for every subject there will be thousands or millions of  pages, so to determine which are the most relevant the search engine analyses each and gives ‘brownie points’ or pagerank according to all the positive elements it finds.  When asked the search question it then presents those pages in descending order.

So ‘brownie points’ for our pages is what we’re looking for and a primary source of these are backlinks or links to your page from another page. Sources of these can be directory listings, forums, links from other web pages and published articles but vary considerably in the value (number of points) they give to your page. Consequently it is a useful exercise to understand how this process works so that you can intelligently apply the time you spend building links according to their value.

Let us take a look at how search engines assess your page.  Taking Google as an example when it analyses a page the first thing it will do is search for links to that page in its index, links on pages outside of the index will not be seen and therefore will not count.  Secondly, having found pages, it will look at the overall site pagerank (0-9, the BBC have a 9) then analyses them for local rank, that is, do they contain key words or phrases that are also contained in your page and the targeted search phrase.

Imagine someone gives you a  bag of ‘pick n mix’ at the cinema, you like big sweets (pr 9s), strawberry flavour and jellies; so you go through bag picking all the strawberry flavoured sweets and all the jellies  but the very best are the big strawberry jellies.

Ok so all our links will be big strawberry jellies – ideal maybe but tough, because likely these pages will be your competitors and they are not likely to provide you with links; and if you do get a link on the BBC site let me know how! But we can improvise our way round these problems by writing our own pages containing the keywords we seek and post them out to other sites with good page rank that will be in Googles index. And don’t forget, using my analogy, you will still be munching the other sweets in the bag.  Lesser links whilst not favourites still add value such as directories and social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

To summarise, think about the key phrases you want to be found by and the  relevance of the links you seek; manage your time between building easy links which can be done quickly, such as directories and social media, but don’t add huge value; and writing article submissions, building a blog, posting to forums and engaging in social media which do take time but provide high value.

Plan and execute your strategy carefully and be patient, Google aren’t known for speedy responses, and you will be rewarded with highly ranked pages which lead to more traffic and more business.