Trust in your website, that is.

As soon as you spend any time looking into search engine optimization (SEO) you run into PageRank. This is Google's original, big innovation: rank the relevancy of web pages by looking at who links to them.

It's pretty easy to game PageRank, though. Build reciprocal links, join link farms and pay for text links and you'll have a pretty good PageRank. That's why PageRank, as you see it on the Google Toolbar, isn't very important. It's just easy to talk about because it's such a visible element of SEO.

When in comes to links, what really matters in showing up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is the quality and relevancy of those links. A lot of folks in SEO circles refer to this as TrustRank (the original paper was written by Yahoo!, but the term is trademarked by Google), and what it means is that Google wants to see links to your website that are relevant to your spa.

What this means:

• Develop links with businesses and organizations with which you have a real relationship. Do more than just a link: add a paragraph to your website including the link. For example, describe the bed and breakfast down the street on your site, and ask them to do the same in return.
• Just ignore the vast majority of reciprocal link requests. Random reciprocal links won't help your search engine placement, and may actually hurt it.
• Connect with local websites and blogs. Serenity Gardens has a Hero's Week every year, which was picked up by popular Albuquerque blog, Duke City Fix.
• Send out releases whenever you've got something new to announce, for example, your great new Instant Gift Certificate capability. Then, send them using the free online services of a company like PRWeb, and make sure to include your website in the press release.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website