Technical Questions Answers » SEO

What is a Backlink?

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:18:29 +0000

Backlinks or back-links are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

The quality of each backlink can be partly judged by the popularity of the page from which it originates. A page that owns few backlinks itself is not going to have a lot of traffic. And any page that has links to illegal material may actually decrease your page ranking. You can oversee number of backlinks by searching on GoogleÂ® with the search terms link: and then your website.

There are many ways to increase your backlink numbers. You can contact related sites, and ask them to link to you, and you can offer reciprocal linking. Another common practice is called link threading. By example:

- You can get your first Backlink just writing about your website and submit it to About Us wiki Page.

- Write comments on other Blogs or post in Forums, and link to your web site. Do not hidde links, it could be consider spamming.

What are Sitemaps?

admin — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:43:43 +0000

Sitemaps are a graphical representation of the architecture of a web site. They can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

What is a Spider?

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:06:04 +0000

Computer robot programs, referred to sometimes as “crawlers” or “knowledge-bots” or “knowbots” that are used by search engines to roam the World Wide Web via the Internet, visit sites and databases, and keep the search engine database of web pages up to date.

They obtain new pages, update known pages, and delete obsolete ones. Their findings are then integrated into the “home” database.

Most large search engines operate several robots all the time. Even so, the Web is so enormous that it can take six months for spiders to cover it, resulting in a certain degree of “out-of-datedness” (link rot) in all the search engines.

What is a Keyword?

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:03:04 +0000

Keywords are words used to search for information relating to an assignment topic. A keyword doesn’t have to be a single word – sometimes it can be a phrase.

Some keywords will come directly from the assignment topic (topic words). Other keywords will be closely associated with the topic (synonyms and/or related concepts).

Keywords are searched in any order. Use spaces to separate keywords in simple keyword searching.