SEO projects work in a number of stages. One of the first stages, after research and development, is getting a website indexed. The search engines need to learn that your pages are online and that they are ready to be placed in the search engine result pages. Initially, they will not perform that well, especially for your most competitive terms but getting indexed is vital. Similarly, it is an early SEO goal to ensure that all of your pages are indexed and not just the main page.

Early Stage SEO - Site Wide Indexing

Site wide indexing is achieved through good navigation. Regardless of the type of navigation you use, whether it be text based or flash based for instance, it is beneficial to offer a sitemap. Sitemaps are used by human visitors and can be offered as a means for search engine spiders to effectively access and index every single page of a site. Use an HTML or XML sitemap and place a text link from the home page of your site.

Updating The Search Engines Of Any Changes

Once a sitemap has been created you can use this to help get your site indexed. The search engines all offer a method of submitting a sitemap to them. On doing so, they will then submit a spider to each of the pages you have detailed in the sitemap. When you update your site and subsequently the sitemap (the best sitemap will automatically update to include changes), you can then inform the search engines of these changes and they will again index your entire site.

Leverage Your Existing Network

Another method of getting a site indexed is through the acquisition of an external link to your website. If you own or manage a network of websites on the same or similar topics and one or more are crawled frequently, then add a link in a relevant place on that site. When the spiders next crawl your established website they will instinctively follow the link to your new site and index and rank the pages they find. A lot of network owners leverage their existing network to improve their SEO efforts and this is just one way that they do so.

Article Marketing

Article marketing can be used throughout a search engine optimisation campaign in order to help build inbound links. Article directories are updated frequently and, as such, they are also crawled and indexed very regularly. This means that starting an SEO campaign by submitting an article to a number of directories can help to quickly get a site indexed by the major search engines. It will also start to build your SEO link profile.

SEO And Indexing

One of the first and most important steps in SEO is ensuring that every page of your site is indexed by the search engines. Naturally, some search engines are slower at doing so than others, but all need a push in the right direction in order to even recognise that your site exists. Creating and submitting a sitemap offers you the opportunity to be indexed and can be used throughout your SEO campaign to update the search engines with any changes. Gaining a link from other sites is also another method and, again, one that you will need to continue using throughout your search engine optimisation.

The use of paid links in a search engine optimisation campaign is always the subject of much debate. On the one side of the coin it is believed that search engines devalue the weight given to paid links when determining the ranking of a web page. On the other hand it is difficult for search engines to determine whether a link is paid for, or not, if it is acquired using the appropriate means. One fact that remains constant though, is that a good link is a good link regardless of its value in search engine optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation Goal

The ultimate goal of a search engine optimisation campaign is to drive targeted traffic to your web pages. Building links helps by improving your ranking in the search engine result pages for specific search words or terms. As such, building links is treated as a vital facet of an SEO campaign and marketers are constantly looking for cost effective methods of building high powered links to web pages with minimal effort for hopefully massive return. One method is through paid linking.

Paid Link Services

There are a number of services on the web that offer paid linking. Either they offer it through their own network of websites, or they broker deals between advertisers and publishers. Payment is usually determined by the PageRank of a web page and paid on a per term basis (monthly or annually, for example).

Search Engine Devalued Links

Search engines are known to devalue links when they are aware that they have been paid for. This could mean that a paid link is worth nothing more than the traffic it directs to a web page, and this is likely to be the best way to judge whether a paid link is really worth it or not. However, some point out that by using certain services it is almost impossible to be found out by the search engines for using paid links. Certain brokers give information about a potential link location but do not give specific details. In these cases, the link may have benefit to search engine optimisation.

A Good Link Is A Good Link

Whatever your views on the matter of paid linking, one thing is for certain – it is a genuine and viable form of online marketing. A link from a prominent position on a prominent website geared towards a related demographic of visitors as your own site can drive a lot of highly targeted and very active traffic to your web pages. In this respect, paid linking is greatly beneficial.

Paid Linking For More Than SEO

When looking at paid linking, it is best not to consider it a form of search engine optimisation. Judge each paid link on its own merit. If the search engines do determine it is a paid link then they won’t give you the benefit of that link when determining your search engine ranking. However, if the link is a good link from a relevant page that naturally attracts a lot of visitors in its own right then it is a viable form of advertising that should be considered. After all this is the goal of your search engine optimisation anyway.