Traditional methods of link exchange and buying links is not the answer. The answer is knowing how to get people to link to you voluntarily. You need to view your site as another site owner would and ask yourself if you would want to link to your site? Is your site stuffed with poorly written content simply for the purpose of placing adsense ads on it? Before SEO became a must, people relied heavily on the originality and uniqueness of their sites to draw traffic. Today, that seems to be a lost artform for most. Google is starting to tell web site owners that they need to do more than exchange and buy links and that fancy methods of linking won\'t hold much weight. In actuality, continuing to adhere to outdated link methods may result in your site not being fully indexed.

Matt Cutts recently stated on his blog that "if you were getting crawled more before and you\'re trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don't be surprised if the new crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn't crawl as much". Back in 2004, link exchanges were the "in" thing to do. Now, however, Google is aware of the possible arrangements (including the "triangle" exchange) and as a result, they hold little merit. Linking to bad neighbors or unrelated sites can have a negative effect on your site. Matt stated that owners should be careful regarding link exchange policies as it can be a risky practice that could affect your sites value in the long term. The same goes for buying links on related sites. When buying links, you should be using the no follow tag. This will help ensure the link will not be counted in a negative way. especially if buying from sites that are not related to yours. Fact: The Bigdaddy crawl looks more at inbound than outbound links. The quality of the links will determine how deep to crawl a site or if a site should be crawled at all!

What Makes Your Site Hard to Crawl?

* Using Cookies
* Using Session Id's
* Frameset can be indexed but there is room for improvement so becareful, not the best solution.
* Flash still should be accompanied with HTML text

How to Make Sure Your Site is Indexed Correctly?

* Use Google sitemaps
* Stay away from free hosting
* Using too much Java
* Mouseovers
* Over-designing your site

To see how your site looks to spiders, use a text based browser. If you can't make out what is on the page, neither will the spiders. Making sites clean and useful is the goal. Too many effects, Java, flash and other fancy features can hinder your sites indexing.

Google has also stated they want to align themselves with sites that offer useful content to get links, so content is still king. Quality is more important than quantity.

Google is doing its best to make it so that webmasters cannot control the linking process. They want people to naturally want to link to you, whether it's because you have a great message board, informative articles or quality related content. Google is trying to push sites that are relevant as it will positively affect the public's view of their engine. So, before you buy a link, sell a link or try to find a sneaky way to build backlinks, try good old fashion web site marketing 101. When creating a site, give people a reason to want to come back! Too many marketers worry about bringing in visitors for that one time sale or visit. If they took the time to separate their site from the competition with helpful content, a great layout and easy navigation, they would have little trouble establishing links. If your site is informative and resourceful, people will find you and so will the search engines.

Joe is an SEO Consultant visit his site for more information, read his SEO articles, listen to his podcast on SEO or check out his SEO forum all at http://www.mr-seo.com

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