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There are thousands of small bits of information that make a linking strategy work and vigilance can produce optimal results as you observe the effect on ranking reports. One way to expand the view of your site in terms of search engines is to avoid repetition as much as possible in on-page and off-page content; efficient worksheets allow the SEO to adjust the work in progress to cover all imaginable terms that are associated with the industry sector and express the subjects in more words. Linking the pages of a website is done because search engines will be more aware of a site's presence when its pages are found at the other end of industry terms in anchor text contained with content at other locations. The total and quality of those links are factors that help promote rankings; when placed for SEO purposes they should be one-way links rather than reciprocal since reciprocal links are not any help in ranking brownie points and it is prohibitively time-consuming to administer a thousand of them. This is not to be confused with link exchanges; when you can exchange links with the right type of site it can be a positive factor and aid in the solidity of both. Worksheets must be kept to have a record of what content has been placed where, along with the dates of submission and approval, possibly a link to the published material (which only a small number of general SEO-friendly directories send in). I use an Excel spreadsheet to map out the campaign and have the directory material formatted for quick copy and paste execution. The keyword research goes on one sheet, next the content, and then sheets for general directories. The next sheet lists all the article directories and the cells in line are used to record your username, password, and the terms for the number of hyperlinks allowed in the body and how many in the resource box about the author. Across the page you would format cells recording the dates and actual number of links placed. This way all bases are covered and it's a simple matter to go in and edit if you discover a mistake or have thought about emphasizing a different page by changing one of the links. Google doesn't want sites relying solely on general directories so I limit my list to 300; with article directories I use around 60 and publish a series of industry articles in each. They approve in very different time periods: some are immediate and others take six months to a year. This may be one reason optimization is gradual in nature. Press releases and link exchanges can produce quick results and may be considered a priority in competitive sectors where the search engine optimization plan becomes time-sensitive to avoid losing prospective money. Tracking progress is essential so that adjustments can be made if an important key phrase is not showing up on the first page. It may be a matter of doing a press release focusing on that phrase or emphasizing titles containing the keyword in your next submissions. Just as all other facets of marketing by SEO, a lot of judgment calls have to be made based on experience, instinct, observation, and intuition. There are other worksheets to keep so that article material can be pre-formatted to meet the specific requirements of each directory; most of them require plain text but others throw curves into their submission forms that are very different. "About the Author" resource boxes will allow 1, 2, or 3 links in text or HTML and the article bodies might carry 1, 2, 3, or no links at all. Some summary boxes require more than 500 characters, some less than 500, some less than 250, and others less than 100 character summaries. Analysis on the situation of a page's optimization per keyword can be done with a software program called WEB CEO that enable you to do reports for clients, study competitors, find links partners, and run reports. I would warn against using any web tool to do automated ranking reports; they are not close to what is shown when done manually. Reports on rankings can be done on a spreadsheet as a list of fifteen key search terms and their weekly placement on Google, Yahoo, AltaVista (owned by Yahoo), Bing, AOL, etc. to give a really big picture or it can be a smaller sampling on two or three search engines if that will satisfy the client. Efficiency is time, time is money, and business owners like efficiency. SEO consultant Pat Boardman is the owner of SEO Web Design a Canadian company providing Search Engine Optimization, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Internet Marketing for North American clients.
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