So other than if you’re a an Obama fan why is this important?  It simply demonstrates the power of anchor text in links.  Nowhere on the White House page for Obama does the word failure appear.  Conventional seo wisdom would suggest that without that factor the page should not rank first for the term failure.  The one exception is that if you get enough external pages to place a link where the text of the link is a particular word e.g. failure you can get that page to show up for that term.   Want to show up badly enough for a particular term?   Get enough links with that term in it pointing to your site or page and you stand a good chance of reaching a top position.

In their Guide for Designers they state, “I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage.”

I have no problem with the above. I agree it’s a big mistake, but here’s where things get a little murky. They go on to say, “Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.” The implication is that this has to be from the home page, but it doesn’t.

So why point this out at all? Why not just let the statement stay out there as a warning to Web designers? After all, it’s really a very good warning. The reason is that there’s another party in the design process – the client.

Recently I gained a client who wasn’t showing up in the search engines at all. One look at her Website and I knew exactly what the problem was. Her designer had built her a site that was one .swf file. I groaned and rolled my eyes and let out a big sigh because liek Webdesignerwall I see this all too often, and then I told her what we could do about it. The problem was she was completely attached to her “home page” which really is nothing of the sort in an all flash Website. I talked until I was practically blue in the face about why this was a problem, but she didn’t want to give it up. I suppose I could have just said “Well then I guess you’re stuck not showing up.” This, however, would have done her a disservice. The reality is she could keep her flash home page and show up.

WebDesignerWall makes the assumption, or at least leaves the impression, that the only way a search engine crawler finds your content is to come to the home page, but that isn’t true. If you find yourself in the same situation I did here are some steps to take.

1) Make an xml sitemap. You can have one auto generated at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

2) Add a robots.txt – all search engines look for this first to know what to do so point them to your .xml sitemap

3) Verify your site in Google’s Webmaster Tools

4) Add your sitemap address to Google’s Webmaster Tools

5) Go out and get links to your internal pages

6) Link back to your home page with the phrase you most want to show up for in the link text

I will agree with WebDesignerWall given my druthers I would absolutely swear off the splash page it adds nothing in my opinion, but if you have a client that insists than use the above.

Here’s his latest. Brooks has been blogging for a little while but not too long. When he asked me to take a look at his blog I was shocked at the things he was already doing right. I remember asking him how he figured something out and he said something to the effect of it just seeming natural that that’s what would be good for readers. I am not the only one who will tell you this, Google says it all over the place, but if you do the right things for readers that’s the right thing for seo too.

One of the things that Brooks did recently was a post on TubeMogul in which he mentioned me. He didn’t tell me he was going to give me credit and he never mentioned that he had. Knowing Brooks it just seemed like the right thing to do. Needless to say when I looked at my WordPress dashboard there in the recent links area was a link from Brooks.

Now I am not suggesting you start randomly linking to folks you want links from, but I can tell you that your links do get noticed and some of them will garner you links.

Try it out. It’s the right thing to do.

Hint for this same site Yahoo!  shows 328,000 links from .edu pages, 4,680 .gov pages and this site has 73 listings in DMOZ.

Any guesses?

• AvivaDirectory.com
• AliveDirectory.com
• Haabaa.com
• DirectoryDump.com
• BigWebLinks.com
• ElegantDirectory.com
• eWebPages.org
• LinkBook.org
• Trincas.org
• CBravo.com
• CDHNow.com
• FreeWebIndex.com
• Mingleon.com
• PremiumDir.com
• Submission4u.com
• Aerospect.com
• Bakie.com
• LinkForever.net
• LinksArena.com
• LinksFactory.net
• LinksHolder.com
• WebVerve.com
• Wezp.com
• BestInternetResource.info
• DirSpace.com
• Eonte.com
• Frogengine.com
• LinkLister.co.uk
• LinkVerve.com
• LivelyDirectory.com
• Submitdotcom.com

Then you may be saying Oops when you learn that Google has penalized them. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, mostly because there are a few directories on this list that I would consider quality directories. Others less so, but the good seems to have gotten tossed in with the bad.

Directory submission has long been a mainstay of website promotion and is in my opinion a legitimate way to get traffic to your site. That said, these are all general directories and the reason that most people end up in them is they are easy to find, and there are free or inexpensive services that will help you get placed in them.

So what should you do now? Start hand submitting to relevant directories. How will you find them? Simply search for them in this fashion. Say your niche has to do with weddings you type a search of: weddings + directory + submit. This will bring up a fairly descent list of sites that are directories or have directories to which you can submit your site. Yes, it’s legitimate if you don’t have the time, and lets face it not every bridal shop owner with a website has the time, to pay someone to do this for you.

Honestly, it has always been better to be in these niche directories than general directories and more to the point if you can find good general directories it’s worth doing both.

You see building links through articles or any other means is not the end goal. The end goal is to get people to your website. What we all hope is that the links in articles help raise our site’s position in the search engines, so that we get more visitors. That’s right its about visitors, it’s not about links. Let me give you an example how you are missing the boat on article publishing if you just go after links.

Lets say that you’re an insurance agent in Missouri and you write, or have some articles written, to publish in ezines. If one of your focuses is on health insurance, you might title an article “7 Considerations for Buying a Health Insurance Plan.” But here’s the rub, there are over 1,600,000 results for the term this article is most likely to show up for “health insurance plans” with 223 daily searches for it. While the 223 daily visitors might be nice to have, it’s not likely that either your site nor your article is going to rank for this term.

What you may have a chance of ranking for is Individual Health Insurance Plans, because there are only 113,000 serps for this term which still gets 132 searches a day. Half the search volume, but a fraction of the competition. Even better than this, there are only 3,100 results for the exact match of “Missouri individual health insurance plans,” and 48 searches a day for it. Obviously, these are the searchers you want, so you take the article distribute it to Ezines Calling it “7 Considerations for Buying an Individual Health Insurance Plan.” You then put a reworded copy of the article on your Website using the same title, but including the name of the state in it, and you are almost guaranteed to pick a top search engine ranking placement. Of course, you will want to remember to repeat the phrase in your intro sentence and in your last paragraph.

So the next time you are thinking about “article link building,” stop and ask yourself how much more targeted traffic you could get from a well optimized article. If you don’t understand how to determine the best keywords to use go to my short post on researching keywords.