If you have been involved with optimizing or promoting your website, you would have often searched your prominent keywords in search engines like Google to check where your site ranks. If you have to deal with more than 20 to 40 keyword phrases, checking your site ranking in the first 30 results, across 10 major search engines can be a daunting task.

Checking your site ranking of this magnitude can be very painful, especially if you wish to do it every month, unless you are using rank-checking software. Google and most other search engines discourage the use of automated software to check site rankings. Most search engines clearly mention this in their Terms of Service. Understandably, they would like to provision their server resources and bandwidth for human visitors and not waste their resources feeding content to software based queries.

If a rank-checking software like WebPosition Gold is setup to check ranking for 50 keyword phrases in the first 5 result pages, Google would have to deal with 50 x 5 = 250 software driven search queries. If the ranking were checked every month, Google would have to deal with 3,000 search queries per year for every site owner running automated rank checking software. Imagine the search volumes the search engines deal with even if a fraction of the billions of websites use the rank-checking software.

Most webmasters are aware that checking site rankings using software is disallowed. However, they do not have many ‘legal’ options to check where their sites rank. It is unrealistic to expect webmasters not to check their site rankings using software. Even if webmasters check the website ranking manually, Google does not really save server resources spent on such search sessions. Webmasters on the other hand also waste a lot of time, energy and resources (and often) dial-up bandwidth in evaluating the website ranking.

Website Ranking Report (in 0.74 Seconds)
Now imagine a scenario, if you could type in 100 keyword phrases along with your site URL in a special Google interface, and in a jiffy, Google shows up where your site is ranked for each of your keywords along with a count of number of pages ‘competing’ for each keyword. All this in Google’s famous 0.74 seconds! Looks too good to be true? Read on…

If Google and other search engines were to offer this rank-checking facility, it would greatly help webmasters in checking their site ranking and would take away a lot of pain associated with the task. As you would read further down this article, the webmasters would not be the sole beneficiaries. The search engines too would gain tremendously.

What should Google do?
Google should provide a rank-checking facility focused towards the webmasters, as a separate search interface, perhaps in their advanced search section. A proposed interface is suggested below:

• Check your site ranking on Google
• Site ranking result page

Google could offer two methods of rank checking. One as an interface proposed above and a second one through web API’s, which can be queried through rank-checking software.

Does Google have an Ability to offer Website Ranking Check Facility?
Since the database index is available to Google for querying in any manner, Google has the capability of querying its database and completing such a search in a single stroke, as against dealing with 100’s of queries to get to the same result. Sure they would have to write new codes and interfaces to offer this but the effort would be well worth it.

Who Benefits from a Web Ranking Search Facility?
There are several categories of Internet users who can benefit from a website ranking check facility. The following are the prominent gainers -

Benefits for Webmasters, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Companies
It would save webmasters precious time, bandwidth and resources. Results would be faster than anything they would have experienced in the past.

Some webmasters set a monthly (sometimes weekly) scheduler in the software to run periodic reports. If the website rank checking facility is freely available, they do not need to set an auto scheduler in their software. They can use the facility on as-needed basis, saving unnecessary resource wastage.

Benefits for Search Engines
Google would save significant bandwidth and server resources by handling such queries as a single search. Since, Web API search queries generated by software can be easily isolated from their main search traffic, Google would have more accurate data of real human traffic. This will give them more accurate information for evaluating traffic patterns and planning their future business strategies.

Google can prevent serving AdWords to the Web-API based software queries and get higher yield on serving AdWords to human visitors.

Google would be able to claim and publish traffic figures of higher integrity gaining industry and advertiser trust.

Google will have a focused audience of webmasters, SEO/SEM companies querying ranking on their human interface versions. Google can leverage this highly focused audience to sell AdWords to premium advertisers, such as SEO/SEM Companies, PPC companies, web development companies, web hosting companies, E-commerce solution providers, payment gateway providers, software companies or any company wanting to sell products to site owners.

Traditionally, the Search Engines and SEO companies have been in opposing camps. This one step can win Google friends in the SEO industry and build brand loyalty.

Benefits for PPC / AdWords Advertisers
Google advertisers using AdWords are forced to maintain a minimum click-through ratio (CTR) to keep their campaigns live. Unfortunately, AdWords are also served to non-human software-based queries, since Google cannot differentiate between software and human queries. This dilutes the advertisers’ CTR throwing their campaigns into ’stopped’ modes while also portraying an incorrect picture of their CTR. If software driven queries were isolated, advertisers would get the benefit of continued campaigns and a higher yield by serving AdWords only to humans.

Benefits for Rank-Checking Software Makers
Website Promotion software companies will find it easier to simplify their rank-checking software modules and improve rank-reporting efficiency by tying up their software codes with the Web APIs for rank checking.

Website Promotion software companies have to constantly update their search code to keep in tune with the changing search engine interfaces and sponsored listing locations to report ranking in natural results. An access to a Web-API can help them get free from this constant code updates.

Benefits for Search Engine Analysts and Statistics Companies
It is needless to point out that Search Engine Analysts and Statistics Reporting companies would have access to a more accurate industry data, which will help them in a more accurate industry analysis.

Summary:
Search engines are unlikely to succeed in warding off webmasters from frequently checking their website ranking on their search properties, no matter how many stringent rules they have in their “Terms of Service”. Perhaps the age old saying holds good - “If you can’t beat them; join them”

Google, are you listening?DM

While every one around the SEO corner is busy hoarding the page rank of their site using nofollow attribute in quest to rank the important pages of a website, I am quite sure this practice (page rank sculpting) is just an accident waiting to happen as webmasters will abuse it up to an extent that Google will do what they have done to ‘keyword meta tag’ – start ignoring it.

After the public announcements and claims done by Rand Fishkin, Stephen Spencer, Danny Sullivan and even Matt Cutts, that directing the link juice to the important pages of a website improves the Search Engine Ranking of a website, the SEO community is using nofollow on anything they don’t want to rank for, claiming it a ‘wastage of link juice’ otherwise. But I personally believe that this nofollow practice is taking the SEO community no where, as webmasters have a license to get away to rank their websites even with a poor internal navigation and hence poor user experience.

So obviously the nofollow era is facilitating more spammy websites making it to the top of the Search Engine lists. It’s just matter of time, when Google will take an evasive action.

If we have a look at the origin of a nofollow attribute, we find that nofollow attribute was made with the primary motto to combat comment spam (which it has failed miserably as comment spammers are still employed). Further Google found that nofollow can also help Google bots to firstly determine the most important pages out of huge websites with complex blog categories in little time and secondly the webmasters could use nofollow while linking to some website content which they don’t want to get associated with and vote to. Here is a recent precise statement made by Matt Cutts on use of nofollow attribute:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

Now getting back to my anti-nofollow visionary, the nofollow tags also facilitate a fake information architecture. As we know Google ranks the sites with solid internal navigational architecture higher on SERP as these are the sites which provide rich user experience to the Google users as the important content is just 3 clicks away, nofollow isn’t helping to their cause. Coz what most webmasters are doing at the moment is hoarding the page rank and shooting it on the targeted pages even when the target page is nothing but pure crap and weakly linked from other pages of the site.

Having said that, please don’t take me wrong, as I am not questioning the effectiveness of page rank sculpting, because it’s working great at the moment, but I am not too sure how long will this nofollow rampage last: I am afraid not too long. So I have a simple advise to give – use nofollow but only after you have crystallized your internal navigation and don’t rely 100% on this nofollow ploy as you might soon see Google derank the websites with weak internal structure indulging in page rank sculpting.

DM

You’ve built your site. You’ve spent countless hours optimising your pages and even more hours ensuring you have links with optimised anchor text pointing to your site. You’ve posted in blogs and forums and now you’re in a position where you have a healthy flow of traffic to your site.

But your visitors aren’t buying you products and/or services. What’s happening?

This is something that SEO can’t help with. This is to do with the behaviour of your human visitors, rather than Googlebots and spiders.

Not to worry. You can convert more of your traffic into sales without having to spend a lot of money. There are hundreds of ways to improve your conversion rate and the persuasiveness of your website, many of which can be done very quickly and most will cost you close to nothing to implement.

1. Use real customer testimonials with authentic customer photos…no stock photography. Shoppers can quickly tell the difference. Also, in many countries, using false testimonials is an offence. Be aware of this before you start typing up how great your site is.
2. Make sure your marketing effort attracts qualified traffic. For example, if you sell digital cameras, don’t advertise that you sell lenses just to get more traffic to your site. This may drive more visitors, but they are visitors with no intent to purchase, thus decreasing your conversion rate.
3. Get a toll-free number and make sure the placement of that number on your site is prominent and consistent.
4. Include points of reassurance at every point of action. For example, if you are requesting that a viewer provide you with their e-mail address, clearly state that privacy is very important to you and that you will not share that information with any other party. Offer a link to your overall privacy policy.
5. Use SSL (secure server certificates from a well known SSL authority) and make sure that the user knows you are using it. Display a prominent “Secure server” note at the top of the page. This shows users that you will protect their details when they’re purchasing or providing information. Also, many web browsers, such as Firefox3, are now actively advertising your SSL status.
6. Build trust. Subscribe to a service like VeriSign, Thawte or ScanAlert and prominently place these logos to reassure your customer that you care about the security of their information.
7. As previously mentioned, have a clearly defined privacy policy and link to it from all pages. Ensure that it is written in easy to understand English language – not legal jargon.
8. Include a physical address on your site. This shows that you are contactable “in person” if anything were to go wrong.
9. Don’t always concentrate on just making the “buy now” buttons the most prominent on every page, but rather concentrate on styling the “primary action” buttons the most prominently on every page. For example if you sell books, provide the customer with the ability to select a few related books and compare them before they can buy now. Make that compare button/link the same style as you would the “buy now” button/link on a page in which the button exists. This will help herd customers through your sales funnel.
10. Clearly Define your return policy in the same way you would for your privacy policy.
11. Make sure to include an “About Us” section on your site. The majority of my customers will visit or look for that section before making a purchase. It’s also a great way to show customers your “personal” side, your values and make them understand that you’re not a faceless ecommerce site. If you have staff, include pictures of them too.
12. Make your site load fast, easy to navigate and user friendly. I cannot emphasise this more; customers will leave if they cannot find what they need fast. No need for horizontal scrolling, excessive vertical scrolling, large animation files or intrusive pop-up windows. Keep it simple; make it work.
13. Keep your “buy now” button consistently and prominently placed on all product pages. The closer to the top of the page, the better.
14. Provide clear good quality images of your products with an “enlarge image” option. Don’t have a large image and squash into a small area. I’ve seen this so many times on osCommerce-based sites. It makes your site look les professional if you have distorted images.
15. Make your checkout process as usable, intuitive, reassuring and simple as possible. Losing a shopper during your checkout process is a CRITICAL loss.
16. Don’t make people type their e-mail address twice. Get the site to remember and do it automatically.
17. Don’t force people to install crazy plug-ins just to make a purchase from your site. Stick with JavaScript, Flash and the other breads & butters.
18. Read your copy, make sure it’s compelling, yet not exaggerated and too loud. Check for typos and spelling errors.
19. Identify your unique selling proposition and exploit it. If you are the only seller of medium-sized green widgets in the UK, clearly state that and be proud of it.
20. Implement a search box and make sure it is accurate. Not only it will allow users to find what they want quick, it will give you an insight as to what they are shopping for and what terminology(keywords/key phrases) they are using so you can tailor your copy (and ad campaigns) accordingly.
21. Don’t just focus on the many features of your product, but rather on the benefits those features will provide you customers with. Don’t just say “folding ladders”, say “Our folding ladders will save you valuable garage space”. The simplest way is to use the phrase “which means that”: “The ladder folds, which means that it can be stored away easily and save you space.”
22. Display your prices, shipping charges and tax clearly BEFORE the checkout process is completed.
23. Don’t use a drop-down for the “country” or “state” list over your order form. Many people are using scrolling mice these days, many are sure to accidentally scroll off of their correct state. If you must use a list, keep it to the bare minimum contents.
24. Let customers copy their shipping info to their billing info if they are identical, with one click.
25. Remove distractions as much as possible from the final checkout process such as the main navigation that existed during the shopping portion of your site.
26. Clearly provide a checkout process indicator. If your checkout process has 3 steps, clearly indicate at the top of the page what step they are on and how many steps there are to complete the order.
27. Clearly identify what info you really require during your checkout process. Eliminate unnecessary text fields/questions.
28. Use easy to understand, friendly error messages. No ”INCORRECT USER INPUT IN STATE FIELD!” messages. Instead, “Please enter a state.”
29. If your checkout error messages occur on a page other than the page with the errors, preserve the information that the user has already input and get the site to input it automatically.
30. Double-check the spelling on your site. And the spelling on your error messages. “Ers in input filed” would look very unprofessional.
31. Try and get good reviews from shopping authority sites (shopping.com, epinions.com, bizrate.com, etc) and from previous shoppers.
32. Don’t use complex formulas for shipping price calculations, Example - ‘if you buy 13.5 kilograms worth of x”, then multiply that weight by y shipping rate. Get the site to do the calculations and show the shopper the price.
33. Consider shipping the product free. This is often a very good selling point with online shoppers.
34. Display the stock status of the selected item and do so BEFORE the user puts the item in their cart.
35. If you don’t sell or run out of or discontinue an item, remove it from the site. Your site is not lap-dancing club; people don’t like being teased.
36. If you are offering a lot of products, users should be able to sort them by important criteria…price, size, colour, etc.
37. Provide an easy way for shoppers to compare details of similar products.
38. Use a custom 404 not found page to link people back to the important areas of your site.
39. Give a clear estimate of the delivery time.
40. Accept a wide variety of payment options and clearly display those options.
41. Important information should not look like ad banners. There really is such a thing as “ad blindness” and people will automatically skip over this important information.
42. Make sure you have a “first-time visitor” page. This is where you are going to explain why and how you are different from your competitors. Perhaps add this at an account creation page.
43. Update your copyright statements on page footers. Make sure that the current year is displayed….fix that 2003 copyright statement!
44. Let customer make a purchase without having to register with your site.
45. Consider making every link the last part of the statement “I want to…”. Don’t just have a link that says “the privacy policy”, but rather “read the privacy policy”. Do you get it..? The shopper wants to Read the Privacy Policy. Please bear in mind your anchor text optimisation with this point.
46. Don’t use too clever names for your shopping cart like “widget basket” or “widget box”. Call it “My shopping cart” or “My shopping basket”.
47. Don’t make the shopper specify select an option when there is only 1 option. If the product only comes in red, don’t make the shopper select the red radio button or choose from the drop down. Get the site to do it automatically.
48. Provide clear shopping instructions in an empty shopping cart. Don’t just say “your shopping cart is empty”.
49. Provide a “special sale” or “special clearance” section. This will attract the budget-conscious shoppers.
50. The most important golden rule…you must portray a lot of trust and credibility to instil shopper confidence and get them to make a purchase. Good luck!

DM

There’s been a story brewing for quite some time about the attempt by Jason Gambert to trademark the term “SEO”.
Gambert claims that the words “search engine optimization” have no real linguistic English value beyond being a process;. So, he’s trying to trademark “SEO” as a service, basically claiming that “SEO” itself is Net lingo and has no “Official English linguistic value.”

In his blog, Gambert claims that “I am helping the search engine marketing community establish an approved SEO process, which can be sold as an ‘SEO service.’” He goes on to explain that other industries have standards and guidelines and, as these industries are recognised as services, it means that there is a way for consumers to identify practitioners with credible offerings.

Now, although we can jump on the “fry Gambert” bandwagon and I think that his idea is nothing more than a revenue/copyright ploy, I’m going to leave that to the rest of cyberspace. Instead, Gambert’s comments do raise an age old question that I would like to discuss: Do we need SEO standards?

It’s true that other areas of web development have standards: HTML has validation; w3c produces reams of standards on CSS and XHTML; there are standards for ECMAScript (most commonly JavaScript); but do these really create security amongst web designers and developers?

The SEO industry really does have its share of cheats and con artists. We’ve all heard stories of small business owners getting hoodwinked by SEO scams. Shouldn’t we, as responsible professionals, do something to remove the black-hatters from our field?

Perhaps we should, but is a body of standards the best way to go about it? I’m not convinced that standards will separate the expert from the swindler. Indeed, SEO was effectively started by scam artists - how else would you describe someone distributing spam to a forum in order to increase their own SERP?
Whom would the community trust as members of a body that certifies a person or company is following SEO standards? Never mind that, who would we trust to create those standards in the first place?

Yes, there are respected SEO professionals, but as a whole the industry is young enough to still be a little rough around the edges. Some might argue that this is exactly why we need standards – but consider what would happen if someone tried to create them and enforce them. You’d more than likely get a mess that’s even worse than what Gambert is trying to pull.

Would a body of standards prevent people who don’t do due diligence from getting scammed? No. Will it prevent those who carry the SEO trademark from scamming others? No. Gambert’s trademark claim should be invalidated as the cheap swindle it is and the industry should promote the ideals of SEO experts and educate consumers on what to look for in them; something that I will cover now.

What to Look for in an SEO Expert
Here’s the paradox: Bad SEO works, and works quickly, but will ultimately get you banned from the search engines. So, from a consumer’s point of view, poor (or black hat) SEO appears to give them results that they need. They pay. Then the expert is gone, just in time for the customer’s rankings to start falling like a blind roofer.
Like all things in life, nothing worth having ever comes easy; and quality SEO is no different. When looking for an SEO expert, this is rule number one:

Always ensure that the expert is prepared to offer a medium-to-long term relationship.

SEO is not a one-stop shop. It is not an overnight fix. It requires time to follow your keywords; to establish links and drive traffic from forums, blogs and article sites; to manage on-the-page metatags, titles and internal links; and manage off-the-page anchor text optimisation.
All of this requires the expert to be on hand to compete and monitor the optimisation process. If they are unwilling to offer this, they may be a fly-by-night “expert”.

Does the expert know what they are doing?

This may seem like a very vague and expansive question, especially as consumers may not know what they are expecting of their expert. However, it is a pertinent question nonetheless. You and your SEO expert should look for three things before even attempting to optimise your site:

Are your customers searching for your products and/or services online?

This should be very easy for your expert to determine by putting the appropriate keywords in Wordtracker. It’s not just about whether people are searching for your kind of offerings online, though; it’s also about how many people are searching. If too few people are looking for you online, SEO on this area would be a waste of money – and your expert should advise you of this.

Are your competitors showing up for the terms that you want to target?

This could indicate that your competitors have found it worth their while to spend money on SEO. That doesn’t automatically mean that you will as well, however. Your expert should be able to advise you of the benefits that his/her services will offer.

What effect would an increase in targeted traffic to your web site have on my business?

This is really the most important question. If your web site effectively converts traffic into sales already, then you can expect SEO that increases your traffic to also increase your sales. If it doesn’t, more traffic is not going to translate into more sales.

If, between you and your expert, you can answer these questions positively, then it should be worth continuing with SEO.

What kind of SEO services do you want?

Do you want someone who specialises in on-the-page? Who specialises in content writing? Article submission? Do you want someone that knows all areas of SEO, or maybe someone who’s new to the field (and therefore cheaper)? Do you want to spend money on an AdWords or a PayPerClick campaign?

Fleshing out your requirements and their potential return on investment is the next step with your expert. There’s no hard and fast list of questions that you need to ask next, but there are a few that you should always check with your new hire, to paraphrase Jon Rognerud, writing for Entrepreneur.com:

What ranking guarantees do you provide? No honest, reputable SEO will make any kind of ranking guarantee. If you see anything like “#1 position for your keywords in six weeks!” run the other way.

Are you going to change my web site? The answer to this had better be “yes;” SEO is based on site content and structure.

How do you handle linking? Honest SEOs will explain their approach in great detail and let you see what they do. If they get evasive or claim that they use proprietary software or techniques, they might be engaging in black hat and/or spammy practices.

What are your other services and what is your pricing model? This should be clearly explained, not “sold.” Sure, SEO may be the company’s main service, but it may also do web analytics, pay-per-click, e-mail marketing, social media optimization, and more.

Who are some of your competitors? An honest firm will tell you who their competitors are and provide details.

What are your qualifications? Though no certifications are required for SEO, some things can help, like the Google Advertising Professional program. You may also want to consider time in business, though that’s no guarantee of expertise. Does the firm specialize in certain market segments? This would also be a good time to ask for customer references, just as you would for any contractor.

What kind of traffic results can I expect to see, how soon, and how much will they cost? Don’t judge them on price alone. Some scammy SEO companies will set up a pay-per-click campaign without their clients’ knowledge; the client pays fees every month, and the minute they stop paying, their traffic disappears.

Ideally, you and your SEO form a partnership. They should keep you apprised of what they’re doing and the effects, with weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports. With patience, planning, cooperation, and a lot of research, getting an SEO for your site could be an excellent decision. Good luck!

DM

Dynamic pages are fantastic. They mean less work for web designers, who can create a single webpage and change its content through a database connection. They’re quicker loading for visitors (after the first load), as the graphical elements are cached by most web browsers and only the content changes. They allow for great flexibility in content, such as shopping sites, blogs and more.

However, before you get excited about dynamic pages and race off to learn PHP, there is a downside to these web pages: Search engine bots cannot see them. And if they can’t be seen by the bots, they can’t be indexed by the engines.

The purpose of this article is to show you how you can index your dynamic pages with the search engines, and some of the pitfalls that you can avoid when submitting these to Google et al.

What is a Dynamic Page?

As mentioned above, a dynamic page is a static webpage that dynamically pulls it’s content from an external source – usually a web database such as mySQL.

This has many benefits, not least of all for the designer, whom only needs to create one webpage design. If he wishes to update his site, he need only change the one page and all pages presented to the end user will be changed too (as they all use the same template and change content dynamically, of course).

So you can use dynamic pages any time that you have information that is categorized by date or if you use an ecommerce shopping sites. Dynamic pages are also compatible with multiple service providers; so no need to worry about cross-browser support or migrating your site to another host (migrating the database is another issue).

You can spot dynamic pages as you surf around the web by looking at their URLs. Dynamic pages contain the character “?” or one of “#&*!%” within their link, such as www.yourdomain.com/?page=10

So What is the Issue?

The issue is the characters used in the URL. These instruct the webpage to send a command to the web server to fetch the content from the web database. So, in essence, the content isn’t retrieved unless the web page asks for it.

Googlebots, and other bots for that matter, cannot send commands to the web server, and so cannot retrieve the content. Remember: if they cannot see it, they cannot index it.

Additionally, some black hat SEO people and spammers use the same characters to trap search engine spiders. When you consider both of these reasons, it’s not hard to see why the spiders are both unable and unwilling (if you can say such a thing about a program) to index your dynamic pages.

So I’m Stuck Then?

Not at all. As webmasters, we have to be a little more imaginative in dealing with the issue of non-indexing and there are plenty of white hat SEO options available to you.

Make regular static pages that link to your dynamic pages
This one is really simple. On areas of your site that are static (and therefore can be indexed), add a link to your dynamic page.

Google and the others will be able to access the page via this link, and index the result. Also, please remember to optimise your anchor text too. You can read how to optimise anchor text in another article.

Make blogs or blog posts that link to your dynamic pages
Similar to the previous suggestion, but involves linking to one dynamic page from another. The difference is that, as well as linking from your blog/post, your blog post would also be submitted to various websites or feeds, such as Digg, DropJack etc.

As these sites are heavily crawled by Google, they will also index your blog articles. Once these are indexed, their “child” links will also be picked up too.

Optimize any dynamic pages that need to be indexed
Just because your page is dynamic, this is no reason to ignore the importance of on-the-page SEO.

Look at your metatags, including the title, and optimise wherever possible. Optimise the content itself. Good content attracts both search engines and visitors. Check your keywords and their densities. In short, do everything that you would do if the page were static.

Articles and content pages
If your dynamic pages are articles, such as a blog post, submit the article to webfeeds and sites, such as Digg.

As mentioned earlier, these sites are heavily crawled and indexed, and, even with a link to a dynamic page, Google will index your page with ease.

Link to your dynamic pages with a table of contents
Create a single page sitemap of your dynamic pages. Do this for your web visitors – not for the search engines – and optimise the anchor text.

The benefit of this is that the static sitemap page will be indexed quickly, depending on the directory depth of the page, and, likewise, the pages it links to will also be indexed.

Rewrite Your Page URLs with .htaccess
This is an extremely powerful, but potentially complex, means of dealing with the issue of dynamic page indexing.

Basically, a rewrite can change your url from yourdomain.com/?page=10 to yourdomain.com/dir/page10/. This works with Apache servers, and is well worth considering, if not implementing.

This rewrite rule will convert pages like this yourdomain/posts.php?page=1 to yourdomain/posts/page1

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^files/([^/]+)/([^/]+).zip /posts.php?page=$1&file=$2 [NC]

Of course, this assumes that you are using PHP as your dynamic page language.

If you are interested in this option, the Apache documentation covers mod_rewrite in much more detail.

So if you really need dynamic pages, remember to set them up so that the Googlebots can see and record all the information on your site. As illustrated this is not an impossible task. It is just a question of working within the Google rules to help those bots to read all the information in your site.

DM

If you have done some serious reading about your website optimisation, you probably would have come across the phrase “anchor text optimisation”. In this post, we’ll discuss the definition and importance of anchor text and how you can use this powerful website optimisation feature to get high ranking in search engines.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. Let’s take this example: “Please visit our blog for information on Search Engine Optimisation.”
Here the words “blog” and “search engine optimisation” are hyper linked to the URLs for our blog. The words within the hyperlink, “blog” and “search engine optimisation”, are called the anchor text.

In a normally built site, anchor text is usually used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. For example, the text “search engine optimisation” indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content about case studies pertaining to SEO if they visit the link. This pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to enhance the relevance of the “target” or the “landing page” URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text.

Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page

Please note that the keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL. Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimised anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site.
Bear in mind that anchor text is used to direct visitors around your on site, as well as from and to external sites. Many webmasters do not optimise their internal site links for anchor text and are missing out on a really powerful, but simple means of increasing page relevancy.

If you need evidence of how important anchor text optimisation is, perform a Google search for “click here”. You can see that the number one position is held by Adobe Reader. Now, take a look at the page. The meta tags, title and description do not mention “click here” anywhere. In fact, the phrase doesn’t appear on the page at all.
This is evidence of just how much weight Google places on anchor text optimisation. (The ranking is also due to the calibre of sites that link to the Adobe Reader page, such as the BBC, Google themselves and many other popular sites).

Search Engine Algorithms like Anchor Text

As you can see, the inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: ‘allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages.  Type this command into Google, replacing “keyword” with the keyword you wish to search against and you will be presented with a list of sites that use that keyword in their anchor text.

Google Search

This further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate queryable data, thereby emphasising that Google considers it an important pointer to page relevance. My research leads me to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website’s ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text.
It has also been studied that anchor text, whether from external, or internal pages, is important. It should therefore be ensured that significant attention is given to the inclusion of important keywords in your anchor text.

How to Optimize Anchor Text Within Your Site

Anchor text optimisation can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content. You would be surprised, how easy it is, and to find suitable instances of hyperlinking structures to make use of optimized anchor text. When linking to internal pages, it is better to use the format:

Read all about Anchor Text Optimisation.

Instead of

Read all about Anchor Text Optimisation here.

The above example shows us that you can leverage the hyper linking of important keyword phrases instead of hyperlinking unrelated text wherever possible. It is always a great idea to restructure sentences if keywords don’t fit in anchor text.

Using Keywords in Natural Text to Create Anchor Text

You can also locate (or insert) important keyword phrases in your page’s natural text and link it to relevant target pages of your site. Consider the paragraph below: -

Search Engine Optimisation is an important part of any search engine marketing initiative. Some people believe that submitting the site to search engines alone is sufficient in getting top-10 ranking. This is not true. Search engine submission only announces your site’s existence to search engines. To get a good Title tag optimisation, Meta tags optimisation and anchor text optimisation of your website amongst other SEO techniques. You’ll need to optimize the visible text of your site through SEO copywriting after an extensive keyword phrase research. It is also important to boost your Google PageRank in order to get a good website ranking. You can increase PageRank of your site by building your site’s link popularity through a link building campaign. A link exchange campaign with good industry relevant sites is the simplest way to get several incoming links to your site quickly. Remember, search engine positioning is a powerful media for your website promotion.

Now notice below how the above text is reformatted where highly relevant keyword phrases have been converted into powerful anchor text. Each keyword phrase links to an important relevant section of the same site -

Search Engine Optimisation is an important part of any search engine marketing initiative. Some people believe that submitting the site to search engines alone is sufficient in getting top-10 ranking. This is not true. Search engine submission only announces your site’s existence to search engines. To get a good search engine ranking, it is important that you carry out Title tag optimisation, Meta tags optimisation and anchor text optimisation of your website amongst other SEO techniques. You’ll need to optimize the visible text of your site through SEO copywriting after an extensive keyword phrase research. It is also important to boost your Google PageRank in order to get a good website ranking. You can increase PageRank of your site by building your site’s link popularity through a link building campaign. A link exchange campaign with good industry relevant sites is the simplest way to get several incoming links to your site quickly. Remember, search engine positioning is a powerful media for your website promotion.

While the above example seems like overkill, this is just to illustrate how you can accommodate your important keyword phrases by carefully rewording the text of your web pages. If you feel that the standard blue underlined hyperlinks appear ugly on your website, then you can re-format its HTML markup code to change colour of the text and get rid of the underline without losing the power of the anchor text.

You may not have noticed, but the first paragraph also has the same keywords hyper linked, but without usual underlines. Bring your mouse over the keywords to notice your cursor show up the hyperlink.

Anchor Text Optimisation of External Links

Keywords within the anchor text are equally useful from links pointing to your website. If you are pursuing or considering a link building campaign, put some serious thought in writing multiple options of the title and description of the link pointing to your website. The “title” which is usually used as the hyper-linked text, should contain your important keywords. It is good to work with ten different options of title and description as it not only gives you more room to play with several keywords, but it also helps search engines give you a wider keyword coverage.

When soliciting external links, it is better to provide your own “cut and paste” HTML code. Webmasters like it when a ready to paste HTML code is available for them to use, to provide a link to your website. I offer this on Datamouse.biz as follows:

<a href=”http://www.datamouse.biz” target=”_blank”>Web Design Stoke on Trent</a> - Database, Web and Icon Design | DataMouse.biz

This gives the anchor text as “Web Design Stoke on Trent”. Notice how I don’t include “in”, as in “Web Design IN Stoke on Trent”? This helps keep the keyword density of my anchor text optimised too. Likewise, I use the pipe (“|”) instead of the word “from” before DataMouse.biz.

Now consider the following examples:

Title: Website Promotion & Search Engine Optimisation
Description: DataMouse.biz provides Website promotion and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services for small websites to large e-commerce sites requiring Search Engine Optimisation & Ranking
Landing URL: seo-programs.php

Title: Google PageRank & Link Popularity
Description: Increase your Google PageRank (PR) and your website’s Link Popularity through focused link building. Read more about the role of PageRank (PR) in final Search Engine Rankings.
Landing URL: google-pagerank.php

Title: Search Engine Promotion and Link Building Services
Description: SEO Rank offers Search Engine Promotion, SEO, and Link Building services for small to large online businesses.
Landing URL: seo-services.php

Title: Search Engine Copywriting Tips & Techniques
Description: Search Engine Copywriting services at DataMouse.biz - offering Search Engine Copywriting tips and copywriting techniques for creating your Search Engine Friendly copy.
Landing URL: seo-copywriting-article.php

Title: PageRank & Link Building Campaigns
Description: Increase your site’s PageRank (PR) and Link Popularity by choosing from our Reciprocal Link Exchange or Only Incoming Link Building Campaigns. Boost your site’s Google PageRank through a focused Link Building program.
Landing URL: link-building-costs-calculator.php

Notice how not only each of the title anchor text is optimized to contain important keyword phrases, but also that the description text varies to accommodate more keyword variation. Also, note that each variation has a different landing page URL to boost the relevance of your site’s individual pages depending upon the theme of that page.
Links from external sites help your site to gain relevance for keywords mentioned in the anchor text which boosts your site’s ranking. As the number of such inbound links increase, so will your site’s ranking in SERPs.

Anchor text therefore comes on top of the checklist in your SEO initiatives.

DM

Microsoft Access is a database management system that allows you to create and process data in a database, which has rapidly become the database of choice for Windows based database development. If you are self taught and have not had any Microsoft Access training you are probably unaware of the many shortcuts available within Access. This article aims to provide some useful tips and shortcuts to help you when using Access.

Tips

Here are a few simple tips to make using Access easier:

Importing a Microsoft Word Table

To import a Microsoft Word table into Access follow the steps described below:

In Word select the table you wish to import, click on the Table menu, select Convert and click Table to Text

Copy your selected table into a new document and save it as a text file

In Access use the Get External Data command to import the contents of your newly created text file

Use wildcards in the search text box

You can use wildcards such as question mark (?) and asterisk (*) in the search text box. The question mark will match any single character, for example, s?t will find “set” and “sat”. The asterisk will match any number of characters, for example, s*d will find “sad”, “started” and “standard”.

Display current date and time in a column of any width

The function =NOW() will return the current date and time, but when entered in a column which is not wide enough to display the returned value the cell displays ###. You could get round this by widening the column but this is not always convenient, the column may already be at its maximum width to be able to see all the columns on one screen or it may force you to change your print settings. The solution is to use the TEXT function to convert the value returned by the NOW function to text. Text, as opposed to a number, will stretch into the next column. There are two arguments in the TEXT function. The first is the value to convert to text, the second is the format to show it in. Custom number codes in quotation marks should be used to specify the format. For example, TEXT(NOW(),”ddd dd/mm/yy hh:mm”) will return the current date and time in the format MON 09/10/06 11:38.

Archiving data

If you can’t bear the thought of deleting obsolete records you can instead flag them with a Yes/No field. You can then use the value in this field to determine whether to show records. For example, you could only display records with a Yes value in your queries, reports, forms and so on.

Automatically compact and repair

To ensure optimum performance you should compact and repair your Microsoft Access files regularly. In the Tools menu select Database Utilities and then click on Compact and Repair Database. You can simplify the process and get Access to do this for you automatically by completing the following steps:

Open the Access database or project you want Access to compact automatically On the Tools menu select Options Click on the General tab Select the Compact on Close check box

Shortcuts

It is true that the keyboard is faster than the mouse for a number of commonly used tasks because you don’t have to go through the point, select and click sequence. Here is a list of speedy keyboard shortcuts that you can use to save you time when working with your Access databases.

Moving records

Add a new record CTRL++ Cut current line and copy to clipboard CTRL+Y Delete current record CTRL+- Insert new line CTRL+ENTER

Moving through database

Move to beginning of multiple line field CTRL+HOME Move to end of multiple line field CTRL+END Move to first field in first record (Navigation mode) CTRL+HOME Move to last field in last record (Navigation mode) CTRL+END Move to page number/record number box F5 Next window CTRL+F6

Find and replace

Find CTRL+F Find next SHIFT+F4 Find previous SHIFT+F3 Goto CTRL+G Replace CTRL+H

Misc

• Close CTRL+W
• Copy CTRL+C
• Cut CTRL+X
• Edit/navigation mode (toggle) F2
• File/Save As F12
• Save current record SHIFT+ENTER

There are literally hundreds of shortcuts available. If you learn just one a day, you can save hours off development time!

DM

What is Link Popularity? Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your site, from other sites on the web. The Search Engines consider your site important and rank it higher if several other sites link to your site.You can search for this on Google by typing in the following command:

Link: www.yourdomain.com

The above command gives you a selective list of links, usually from PR4+ link pages. For a more extensive list, you may search the following syntax -

“yourdomain.com” -site:www.yourdomain.com

There are also tools available, such as SEOElite, that will provide more analytical information about your links.

History behind Link Popularity and Google PageRank

The web, by its very nature, is based on hyperlinks, where sites link to other prominent sites. If you take the logic that you would tend to link to sites that you consider important, in essence, you are casting a vote in favour of the sites that you link to. When hundreds or thousands of sites link to a site, it is logical to assume that such a site would be good and important.

Taking this logic further the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page formulated a Search Engine algorithm that shifted the ranking weight to off-page factors. They evolved a formula called PageRank (named after its founder Larry Page ) where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and assign it an importance score on a scale of 1-10. More the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

Google’s PageRank is important because it is one of the primary off-the-page factors that influences your page’s ranking in the search engine result pages.

PageRank in Google’s own Words

Google explains PageRank as follows ( http://www.google.com/technology/):

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

For more information on Google PageRank, go to

http://www.google.com/technology/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html

Benefits of Building Link Popularity

Building Link Popularity is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective Search Engine Optimization campaign today. The ‘off-page’ factors such as link popularity, PageRank and Anchor Text in incoming links play a major role in your site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Search Engines consider your site more important if more links point to your site. Building link popularity improves the PageRank of your web pages (Read more about PageRank). The higher the PageRank of your website, the higher its importance for search engines and higher it gets ranked in the search engine result pages. Search engines also take into account the PageRank of the pages that link to your site and its industry relevance to your own industry. Links from higher PageRank pages and industry relevant sites give your site a higher value.

Types of Links

There are two types of links you can establish on the web. One way is to trade links (Link Exchange), where you give a link from the links Page on your site to the partner sites. The second method is to establish ‘only-incoming’ links also called ‘one-way links’ or ‘Non-Reciprocal links’.

Only-Incoming Links

Only incoming links are the links established on the other websites where you do not need to link back to them. There are various compelling reasons and methods to establish such one-way links which include linking back from a different website that you may own, publishing articles on sites, content syndication, listing in trade directories and giving out press releases in news networks.

Link Exchange

Link exchange is an easier way to establish links from other websites to your website. In link exchange process, you trade links with prospective partner sites by offering a link to their site from your own site. This method is a fast way to establish several hundred links to your website. However, it may not get you great benefits.

Only Incoming Links vs. Link Exchange

Google developed the PageRank algorithm to provide authentic and quality information while making it difficult for webmasters and site owners to contaminate the search results by artificially inflating their PageRank.

The new algorithm came into effect with the launch of Google in 1998. Google’s PageRank was based on the logic that more the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

As webmasters realized the importance of PageRank, they found ways to artificially inflate their PageRank by manipulating direct link exchanges. This defeated the very essence on which the Google PageRank algorithm was build. To counter this, Google has constantly been fine-tuning and updating its algorithms.

The search engines are aware that a large number of sites are deploying link exchange campaigns to boost their site’s PR. Search engines are working towards fine-tuning their algos to discount direct link exchanges in order to preserve the effect of their link popularity related algorithms and rationalize artificially inflated links popularity of sites.

While the algos are yet to reflect this change, I believe that it may happen soon enough. In the long run, I recommend investing your resources in an ‘ only-incoming links ‘campaign for your website which is likely to benefit your site more as opposed to a direct link exchange campaign.

Important Parameters to Consider while Building Link Popularity

Some of the important parameters that you need to consider while establishing links with any website are discussed below:

PageRank or PR of the Linking Page

PR of the linking page is one of the most important factors. PR of the linking page determines how much value of importance is passed on to your page. Higher the PR of the linking page, higher the value you get. The home page PR is not as important, but it is an indicator of how much PR a linking page may jump to, in due course of time. For instance, if the PR of the site’s link page is 0, but the home page PR is 6, then, there is a bright possibility that in a month or two, the link page PR may also jump to a PR of 4 or even 5 due to the internal linking structure of the partner site. While sites would be happy to give out links from a PR 0 page, you can estimate that in two months time, this link page can jump to a high PR, giving you great value in the future.

Identifying Total Number of Links on the Link Page

The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PR value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page. Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 outgoing links is much better than getting a link from a PR4 page that has 60 outgoing links. With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links. It is therefore as important to evaluate the total number of outgoing links on a links page, as it is, to evaluate the PR of the linking page. This is where many people often falter, as they usually insist on getting a link from a high PR page, but if that page has 100 outgoing links, your page would only get 1/100th of that value.

Industry Relevance

Search engines give high importance to links pointing to your site from your own industry segment as opposed to those from an un-related industry. For instance, a hotels and reservations website is likely to benefit more from links pointing from a related industry site like travel, vacation packages or cruises, than those from an unrelated industry like a drug site.

Industry relevance also needs to be given a high weight while creating resource directories. For example, if you have a site related to hotels, then you can create a resource directory related to your business that could be pertaining to travel, tourism, cruises, vacation rentals, vacation packages, car rentals, food and beverages etc.

Page Relevance

Most sites offering links have several categories listed on their sites. Try and get a link from a category that closely matches your own industry. For instance, if you have a site related to hotels, then, on your partner site, a tickets site for example, try and identify a resource directory pertaining to hotels, resorts, reservations, vacation packages, travel, tourism, food and beverages etc. If the concerned site has a directory on hotels, you should request a link in that category, as a link from that page would be relevant to a hotels site, thus getting you more benefits. An algorithm called “Applied Semantics” determines the industry relevance of a page within a site. Applied Semantics algorithm studies various keywords on a web page and tries to determine the industry or business segment of each page. Applied Semantics estimates the industry segments that are relevant to a particular page. If the link to your page is coming from your business specific segment, then you are likely to draw more benefit.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text on a web page. Since anchor text is very important, make sure that your most important keywords appear in anchor text from the link pointing to your site. You should try and work with at-least 10-20 keyword and link text options. If you are creating a large number of links using only one standard link text, then the search engines are likely to detect a pattern. It is possible that future algo updates may do away with all repetitive and similar looking links to your site. You can also refer to our article on Anchor Text Optimization for more details.

Link Page Title

As well as the anchor text of the link back to your site, the page title is also taken into account. We have already discussed the importance of the title tag in your own on-the-page SEO campaign, and this also counts when linking back to your domain. Where possible, try to gain links from pages that have your keywords in their title too. This also helps with the page relevance.

Pre-Indexed Pages

Try and find link partners in Search Engines like Google and Yahoo, and check if the links page is already indexed in the search engines. Search Engines frequently re-index the pages in its database. They are likely to detect your link faster on a page already existing in their database as compared to a ‘yet-to-be indexed’ page. The safest way to check is to copy the prospective link page URL and paste it into Google Search. If the page is indexed, Google would show a result in response to your search, otherwise it would respond with a ‘no result found’.

The robots.txt File

robots.txt is an exclusion file that contains specific instructions for search engine robots regarding the content they are not allowed to index. Links placed on a page that the search engines robots are not allowed to index, would not benefit your site. Considering the importance of robots.txt file, it is a good idea to study a site’s robots.txt file to identify the excluded pages before approaching a site for establishing links with your site. Read our article on Working with robots.txt file.

Dynamic Link Pages

You should also watch out for any link pages that are generated dynamically. Chances are that such pages would not get indexed soon enough, which means that a link from such a page would not benefit you. Some dynamic link pages are intentionally generated in such a way so as to prevent them from getting indexed. Some unscrupulous webmasters do this to trick you to prevent any PageRank leaking from their site to yours. Links from such pages therefore do not give you any benefit.

Java Script Link Pages

It is also important to identify pages that are generated through Flash or a Java Script, as Search Engines cannot read flash pages or the links embedded within flash. These are some of the tricks unethical webmasters use. While a site can claim to have placed a link to your web page, in effect they are not giving you any benefit.

Re-Directed Links

A link that is first re-directed to another page within your partner site before pointing to your site is a re-directed link. You should watch out for such links, as search engines do not give weight to re-directed links. It is very unlikely that your site would draw any benefit from a re-directed link.

Frame Sites

Avoid getting links from framed sites as search engines cannot read texts within frames. A link placed on a frame site would not get your site any benefit, as search engines would not be able to recognize such a link.

Directory Depth

It is important to evaluate the depth of the directory of the linking page. Avoid getting links from pages that are embedded in a very deep directory or pages that are more than two directories deep (e.g. www.domain.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/linkpage.php is not a good link page). Deep directories seldom earn high PR. They are also slow in getting indexed, if at all.

Building Link Popularity is a great way to help your site gain competitive PR. Links from other sites also sends direct human traffic to your site. Observing a little care in developing links will go a long way in getting your site rank high in search engines. 

DM

You may or may not have heard people claim they can get listed in Google in only 24 hours. It seems that nearly 100% of the people you run across in forums act like in order to get indexed by Google in 24 hours is some miracle feat that can only be accomplished by doing some “top secret” marketing tactic or advanced optimization strategy.
Well, the truth of the matter is getting listed in Google in under a day is actually quite easy!

First, let’s define what “getting indexed by Google” means…

Let’s say that you create a brand new website. For our purposes, we’ll call it www.datamousetestwebsite.com. If we go to Google and enter: www.datamousetestwebsite.com into the search box, we’ll see that no results are returned.

The reason no results appear is because our website is new and it’s not “in Google’s index” yet. If you’re not in their index, your site can’t be ranked by them because they don’t know your site exists. So, in order to rank in Google, you must first get into their index. Once your website is in there index and you do a search like we did above, you’ll see the site appear in Google. Your website title, description, and URL now appear; the website has been indexed by Google.

Ok, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk next about what NOT to do when trying to get indexed by Google. This drives me absolutely crazy when I see people doing this, and is actually what I did at one time as well. The following URL might look familiar to you: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

This is Google’s actual website submission form. They state that you can use this form to submit your website to their index of websites and it can take up to 6 weeks for your website to be placed into their index. I don’t know about you, but 4 weeks is a heck of a long time to just wait for your website to be placed in their index rotation, let alone get a top ranking!

My first piece of advice is: Never Use The Google Submission Form. You should NEVER use this form, or any other of the top search engine’s submission forms for that matter. These search engines include Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, and Alltheweb.
So, how do you get your website indexed within 24 hours?

Let’s stck with our dummy website, www.datamousetestwebsite.com, I will take you through the steps you’ll need to do to get indexed by Google in under 24 hours, guaranteed.

Go to Google and enter the broadest keyword you can think of that’s related to your website. In our example, it will be “free icons”. Once you’ve done this,
you’ll see a list of Google results. Browse through each website and pay particluar attention to the Google PageRank of the website.

Note: Remember, Google Page Rank is measured by the number of websites and the “importance” of those websites that link to your website. In general, the more websites that link to your website, the higher your Page Rank will be.

So, as you’re looking at these top ranked websites for the search term “free icons”, you should try to find websites with a Page Rank of 5 or higher. Once you’ve found several websites like this, you should check and see whether or not they have links pages. Usually you’ll see links from their index page that say (resources, links, related sites, etc.) Now, you need to search their website for their contact information or information on getting a link from one of their high Page Rank webpages. Once you find their contact information you should send them an email asking if they will link to your website in retur