Mike, sorry if my question sounds daft but SE's still confuse me a bit

Here it goesfor this example, assume i have a website)
If i register on a forum and in my signature, i mention my website or a keyword like "Sony Laptops : wholesale prices blah blah"...for every post i make there will be more instances of my site being mentioned. Would that mean that my site will be ranked better in Search engines?

nevermind my previous post. I just read the first page of this thread. It explains it all.

Thanks

Only a flying visit at the moment will be back on later...

A forum signature link counts as a link to your website and as the SE's (in particular Google) treat links as a measure of the websites relevancy (or authority on the subject) then yes it will help in your SERP's.

The key to linking (apart from quality/quantity) is to have a mixture of anchor text links, ie. different keywords so that it forms a more natural linking strategy because SE's are becoming more and more negative towards unnatural website development. That also applies to the development of content for your site, and postings to your blogs etc etc.

Also a lot of people assume that you always have to have links from higher PR rated web sites, this is not the case as once again this is unnatural and it is always best to have a mixture of new/old sites low/high PR sites etc. Again if you think about this it is more natural in the life cycle of a website that this is true.

Also, try to spread the pages that these links link to. Do not have them all pointing to your homepage, try to spread them so that they point to a number of your pages so once again to establish a natural linking development.

A trick I have always used and Google have just started to formalise (Google Site Maps) is to have a few pointing towards your web sites site map (always include a sitemap) as this lists all your web pages and will provide not only a useful resource to the reader but will also provide a 'hub' of links for the SE spiders to follow when they index your site map and hence index your site..

Example site map : http://www.onlineauctiontrader.com/sitemap.htm (not a Google Site Map)

I will illustrate this using pages from one of my sites when I am out of the 'Google Juggle' that is happening at the moment, my sites are jumping/dropping PR almost hourly..not unique to me quite a few are experiencing it and hence the flying visit as I want to keep an eye on things and monitor/track for reference etc..

Be back later

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I just trialled a Google sitemap on a new site for a friend and it was hit by the Googlebot 6 hours later....not bad considering they are usually last to hit down. Still needs monitoring to see impacts but its definately not gonna do you any harm to put one together.

Mike

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Mike

Whats the difference in a site map and a google sitemap??

Dave

Essentially they are the same, but the Google one is developed in XML format and the one for your site is HTML. There are some great tools out there to do this for you, I recommend this Free Google Sitemap Tool

Mike

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