Your business website design should reflect your marketing goals. You should be making decisions about your website to improve your marketing results. This usually means improve usability and optimize for search.

1. Define Your Goals: Start with your business goals for your website redesign. What do you need to accomplish? This could be to attract new clients, generate leads or to help brand your company as the premier provider in your industry.
2. Keep the Best: What does your current website do well? This could be servicing existing customers or converting visitors into paying customers. Preserve what you are already doing right and improve from there.
3. Website Styles: Just like fashions, website design changes. For instance, Flash intro pages were popular until web designers realized that users didn’t like them and they caused search rankings to plummet.
4. Branding and Image: When people visit your site, they see it as a reflection of your company. It is important for your site to reflect the identity and ideals (brand) of your company. Your company can appear as an industry leader.
5. Website Traffic: Your goal should be to get more visitors and more leads. Design your site with organic search in mind. Select relevant keyword phrases that will be used in page names, body text and link text. Websites should be built in XHTML / CSS to be search engine friendly.
6. Customers Expectations: Look at your industry, what is expected? A website in the financial products industry is expected to be very business professional. A medical website has a clean design and uses cheerful colors.
7. Watch your competition: Look at what your competition offers and stay ahead of them. Look at the image your website gives your business. Is your information searchable? What features do your competitors offer?
8. Attract and Convert: This should be your central focus for your site. What action do you want from your visitors? Build this into your navigation. Each page should have its own call to action.

Link love is linking to blogs that you enjoy and admire. These links of “love” make these blogs more important in the eyes of the search engines. These links are important for pushing blogs up in the search engine rankings. Search engines see blogs receiving many links as more important and reward them with higher search rankings.

Link love leads to link popularity for blogs. These links not only improve the search positions, they bring a steady stream of visitor referral. The 80-20 rule says that 80% of your referral traffic will come from 20% of your links.

Search engines love links. In fact, they will only respect you if many others already link to you. Little links are good because they potentially develop into major refers over time.

Remember deep linking is natural in blogs. These are links to individual postings. They funnel link popularity to the home page as well as all other pages of your blog. This gives the entire blog the ability to rank well on hundreds of medium and long keyword phrases.

Here are 5 ways to build link popularity in blogs:

1. The basis for ranking well with a blog is to have original and interesting content that people want to read and link to.
2. Try word-of-mouth marketing or viral marketing. This is where you post a funny video or something so interesting or valuable that people instantly link to it.
3. Link Baiting: This is similar to viral marketing. There are a number of approaches that are used to get people to link back to your blog. This can include providing website or analysis tools or running some sort of competition or awards. Another approach is to take a controversial position or attack a prominent blogger hoping to attract links from other bloggers.
4. Trade links with other bloggers that you respect on your Blogroll.
5. Get links from directories where you can list your blog. Some are free such as DMOZ.org. Some are paid such as Dir.Yahoo.com or JoeAnt.com.

Linking is where a link is placed to the home page or the top level domain for a website. Deep linking is where a link is placed directly to an article, graphic, video or some other file. So is this something you should do or not?

There are two different camps on deep linking. The first is the PRO group represented by web optimization firms where deep linking is necessary to get good SEO results. The second is the CON group represented by some legal groups and website owners who only wants links through the home page.

SEO and Search Engines
Search engines want to see links distributed throughout the website and not just to the home page. Links pointing only to the home page looks artificial and unnatural. The search engines count the aggregate number of links toward link popularity. It is natural for people to link directly to information and articles that are very interesting and readers don’t want to wade thru an entire website to find pertinent information.

Getting good SEO results today for a website requires that a deep linking strategy be incorporated into the SEO strategy. The simplest way to get deep linking is to place great original and valuable content onto your website. Other websites will link to the internal pages, even without asking for them.

Legal Viewpoint
This is the copyright infringement viewpoint. This is the exact opposite point of view. There have been a number of court cases and legal battles over deep linking. At the heart of this is website owners wanting to direct traffic past advertisers and wanting credit for the works they have created.

Here is an example. Two brothers ran a small website where they linked into a printer friendly version of an interview from a much larger competitor website. They received a cease and desist letter stating deep linking constituted copyright infringement.

Conclusion
Deep linking is here to stay and a very important part of building popularity for websites. Care must be taken to credit works of others. Before linking to a document, check for statements limiting or restricting linking. If you receive a legal notice, remove the link and move on. In the vast majority there will be no issues with linking, in fact tlinking is highly desirable.

Link popularity is the most important element in any search engine optimization strategy. Getting relevant links is very important. In reciprocal linking, most people stay away links with competitors so they won’t lose visitors to a competitor. But links from your competitors are some of the most relevant links available. And one way links are the most highly valued links by the search engines.

To get these highly valued one way links, you need to give some thing of value. You need to offer “link bait” in the form of great content or extremely useful tools with links embedded back to your web pages.

1. Publish articles regularly and publish on an article syndication website. Allow websites to re-post as long as the resource box is left intact.
2. Publish a blog with your postings having embedded links back to your website.
3. Create a tool such as an innovative mortgage calculator, a new SEO tool or something else useful and allow this to be used by others.

Having a business blog can play a powerful role for most traditional website businesses. Blog marketing is part of the cutting edge of Internet marketing and search engine optimization strategies. Business blogging is important for marketing, public relations, and adding fresh new content. This steady supply of content is one reason they get rated so highly in the major search engines.

Having a blog added to the company website or as a stand alone blog website is a very effective way to increase link popularity. We have found that adding postings at least 3 times per week will boost link popularity. This is as long as the content posted is fresh, informative and interesting.

The core to this link popularity strategy includes placing links in the posting using your targeted keyword phrases (anchor text) and linking directly to the page in your website that discusses this topic (deep linking). This is most effective when the blog website is a separate website hosted on a separate server.

The interesting result is a very fast boost in link popularity and an increase in website rankings. For this to work, it takes dedication in regular postings of interesting information written in a conversational writing style. It is this great content that causes these blog postings to be picked up distributed to other websites via RSS. It is the embedded links that boost link popularity.

Renting one way links can vary from a complete waste of time and money to a good supplement to your link popularity strategy. This is one area where you have to be very careful of which websites you contract with.

First, stay away from discount programs that promise Get 1000 one way links for just $25 per month. These types of offers are a complete waste of time and can poison your rankings and SEO efforts.

If I were to use link renting as a link popularity strategy I would only deal with a broker with an excellent reputation. You usually can research this by going to the various forums or by searching for the company name along with the word fraud or scam.

Choose only highly relevant websites and get links from the highest PageRank websites that your budget can afford. I would choose home page links and stay away from sites that have over 10 outgoing links on their home page.

How much would you expect to pay for a monthly rental cost for a home page link? Well, the price is very dependent on PageRank and how much the individual website owner wants. Typical monthly rentals for homepage rentals are:

• PR4 $40/mo
• PR5 $55/mo
• PR6 $65/mo
• PR7 $125/mo

Before you spend your money, carefully research the broker and the website the link will be coming from. Does this fit your search engine optimization strategies and your budget.

In a three way link exchange, some times called triangle linking, there are 3 websites involved each giving a one way link to the other. A links to B, B links to C and C links to A. This is a complex version of reciprocal linking in an effort to get a series of one way links.

Search engine algorithms that detect reciprocal links and discount their value, also detect three way links and discount their value. Our experience is that people engaging in 3 way link exchanges are doing it with the clear intent to manipulate search results.

The usual three way link offer that we have seen involves a webmaster with two websites. One site is their primary site and is of good quality. The second website is a lower quality website. In exchange for a link to the high quality website you receive a link back from the poor quality website.

With the link trades we have seen, their complexity and no real advantage over reciprocal linking, my company does not participate in any three way links and do not include this in our SEO strategies.

One Way Linking
Getting One-way inbound links are viewed as having the greatest importance with the search engines. Just like other types of links, the quality and relevance is very important. Here are 10 one way linking strategies as part of your SEO campaign.

10 one way linking strategies

1. Create a top “10″ list of tips, hints or popular items. Create a list of the top 10 myths about a particular subject. People love to link to these lists - hint…hint…
2. Publish a compelling article and submit to several of Article Syndication sites. Have embedded links back to your website in a resource box at the end of your article. Allow this article to be re-posted to websites as long as the links are left intact. You can do the same with technical papers.
3. Syndicate a quality and newsworthy press release with embedded links.
4. Publish a Blog with useful content and embedded links. Post regularly and focus on great content. If you have interesting things to say, people will link to the postings.
5. Contribute to forums and include your link.
6. Build a collection of free and useful tools such as mortgage calculators, SEO tools and useful scripts that can be placed on websites. They can be free for others to use, they just need to leave the links in place.
7. Host your own affiliate program on your own server.
8. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce and look for area business directories. Example
9. Contact your business partners, suppliers, customers and ask for a link to your website.
10. Advertise services on Craigslist or other online classifieds and place a link back to your website in your ad.

Link popularity strategies are critical to getting website traffic and a good search engine ranking. There are several basic strategies that you can follow. We will each linking strategy in greater depth in later installments. These are the four basic types of links in use today.

Reciprocal Linking: Some times referred to as two way linking. Reciprocal linking is a basic link exchange where two websites agree to link to each other in an effort to boost each others rankings. This is the most often used linking strategy today. There is a debate over the effectiveness of reciprocal links. We have excellent results as long as we select carefully based on relevance and quality.

One Way Linking: These are incoming links where you don’t link back to them. One-way inbound links are viewed to carry a higher weight and importance for link popularity. There are a number of strategies that will allow you to develop these one way links. In general you have to offer something of value that people will post on their websites that will contain a link back to your website.

Three Way Linking: 3 way linking is an alternative to reciprocal linking. This involves a series of 3 one way links between three websites. Search algorithms may be able to detect link trading and there is concern that the search engines may discount the value of these links.

Paid Linking (renting links): Paid linking services can be effective, but stay away from services that approach link building in a bulk or automated fashion. The same rules apply as in other linking methods, links should be high quality and relevant to your website. stay away from websites that have large numbers of links on a single page (link farms).

What is link popularity and why is it important? Link popularity is a topic discussed at length by the search engine optimization experts (SEO). It is a measure of the quantity of web pages that link to your website. These are sometimes called inbound links or backlinks.

Link Popularity itself does not factor in the quality or context of the link. It is raw number and is used as a measure of the importance of a website in determining rankings with search engines such as Google.

PageRank is named for Google’s founding CEO, Larry Page, who helped develop this as a key part of the Google Search Algorithm. PageRank or PR is a measurement of importance of a web page on a scale from 0 - 10, where 10 is the highest. The main factor behind the PageRank algorithm is link popularity. In addition PageRank looks at the quality or PR of the linking webpage.

PageRank or link popularity is only part of the search engine optimization puzzle, but it is a very important element. Next we will explore link popularity strategies that can be used in Part 2.