External SEO.

The need for "external" SEO

The need for external SEO came naturally with the SERPs becoming more and more commercial due to a continuous growth in the number of the Internet users willing to buy something online. The "battle" for the first page in SERPs for lucrative keywords became the primary objective of a lot of websites. Unfortunately, not all the websites aiming for first page results were honest or provided original content, so the search engine had to come up with a new criteria of evaluating a website relevancy: popularity. This new factor was inspired by Academia. In academic circles an article or a book is more popular if more articles quote or refer to it. Popularity works on the same principle. The more references (links) from similar websites a website gets, the more popular it is believed to be for that area (keywords) of expertise. So, external SEO is that part of the search engine optimization practices that deals with increasing the website's popularity.

The power of a link

We know now that in order to increase the website's popularity, you need to have Inbound Links (IBL). However, it's not the number of the incoming links but rather their "strength" that counts the most (of course it is best to have both numbers and strength). The strength of a link depends on several factors, some related to the webpage/website from which the link originates, and some related to the link itself.

Web Page/Website factors:

• Web page/Web site "power" - from which the link originates. Google for example has a PageRank algorithm that allocates a page rank (PR) of 0 to 10 to a web page. A link coming from a web page with PR of 5 has a lot more strength that a link coming from a page with PR of 2. But it's not necessarily about the PR of the webpage; other factors like the topical relationships between the full content of a website and a user's given query, how relevant to your keywords is the web page, how popular is the website or how authoritative is the website in the community related to the keywords are also important factors in determining the web page/website power;
• Trust Level - .edu and .gov websites for example, are seen as more worthy of being trusted so links coming from web pages that are part of .edu and .gov websites are considered to be more valuable;
• Age - is similar to trust. Search engines seem to "trust" older websites. The older the webpage/website, the more powerful the link is. When it comes to Google, some people call this effect, the "sandbox" (new websites will not appear in the first SERPs no matter how much you optimize them;
• Statistics - like bouncing rates, time spent on pages, CTRs (click-through-rates), etc. are the latest "fashion" in SEO. They are not so important today (2008) but experts say they are the future of SEO;

Link related factors:

• Number of links - on the page that links to you. The more links on that page, the more diluted the strength that is passed through the incoming link;
• Anchor text of the link - this aspect was also discussed in the Internal SEO article. Basically if, let's say, the name of a link to a page is Web Hosting, then it is more probable that the page is about web hosting services. So, when you will get people linking to your web pages, try and get them to use links with relevant names. A Click Here link doesn't help you too much with your keywords unless you want to rank high for "click here" searches.
• Link's age - is different from the age of the website. It is believed that a link gets to full strength only after a period of time (i.e. 3 months, 6 months). So, in order to fully benefit from your IBLs you need to make sure that the incoming links are there to stay;
• Surrounding text - is important. This concept was already discussed in the Internal SEO article;
• Bad Neighborhoods - it's the reverse of the coin. If you link to spammy websites or websites that are not in good standing with the search engines you will be penalized;
• Link tags - there is one tag that you can use to prevent linking to bad neighborhoods or in the case you don't want to "vote" for the linked to website. The "I'm linking to this website but don't consider the link as a vote" tag for a link is < rel = "nofollow" >. When a search engine finds this tag associated to a link, it either doesn't follow the link or if it follows the link but it does not count the link as a vote (the link has no strength).

There is a difference in the weight that the big three search engines allocate to each of the listed factors and no one except a few (very rich) people know exactly how the weight is distributed and if these factors are the only ones that matter in calculating the popularity of a website. In fact, as soon as somebody comes close to figure what factors are important and how much weight they carry for the SERPs and more and more websites are using that info, the search engines adapt their algorithms in ranking the web pages in order to prevent less "honest" websites spamming the first SERPs. Nevertheless, the listed factors above seem to be "eternal SEO truths" no matter how the ranking algorithms change.

SEO Summary

In conclusion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about building relevant, popular websites with the goal of coming up in the first Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for the selected keywords. It's a part of your overall web marketing efforts and is an efficient tool to get you quality traffic, but to convert that traffic into sales it depends on how clear your marketing message is. "Sale" here is used as a broad term for a product sale, a subscription, a quote, etc.

To improve conversion rates, first you must analyze the traffic you're getting, to see what type of visitors come to your website, traffic sources and which pages are the most and the least successful. This way you will know what needs (or needs not) to be changed on the pages and how your visitors are entering and leaving your website. Google Analytics is a great, free tool for analyzing the traffic.