Integrate SEO into all you do. Even sending out a bill is an opportunity to ask someone to engage with your site. And hopefully link to it.

Ask your friends, associates, suppliers and customers to link to you. Do the same for them. Create a personal link network of like-minded people and grow that network wider and wider. Think of it as a circle of trust.

Recently I was talking to a website owner about linking from their website to other people’s sites.

The person expressed fear that a link to another website will take potential visitors away from their site. They believed that this action will minimize the chance that they have to get value from the site visitor that they have, the old adage “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.

This attitude of referral selfishness is still very prevalent as an attitude among a large majority of smaller website owners. Unfortunately for them the very thing that they fear is what will help them improve their reach and conversion.

I like the way Peter expresses it as “A circle of trust”. If there is anything that I could recommend to a webmaster it is to find and trust other people in your industry that are trying to achieve the same thing you are. Work together. Don’t work against each other.

Looking at some Hitwise data for search engines in UK, Australia and New Zealand there seems to be a trend that search engines are forcing more people to use their local search engine. For example Australia is google.com.au as opposed to google.com. Driving people back to their local search engine allows the search engine to provide more tailored search results for a particular region.

What does this mean when thinking about the borderless nature of the internet?

A website will get tagged as specific to a region and will appear in one country’s specific search engine results for a particular keyword and not in another country’s search engine results for the same keyword. A website desiring international traffic from the internet will need to worry about rankings on each individual search engine e.g. (New Zealand )google.co.nz (UK) google .co.uk (Australia) google.com.au. It means that to reach an international audience a website will have to work at getting indexed by each different country search engine.

This is not a new phenomenon, but the extent that Google is implementing this seems to have increased a lot over the last six months. Unfortunately the old web where a site will appear in google.com and allow connectivity around the world is starting to fail with distribution of a websites message via search engines where the website is not country targeted.

Hitwise data for Search Engine Analysis
74.61% of Australian searches happening on google.com.au – 2% increase swing
78.62% of New Zealand searches happening on google.co.nz – 2% increase swing
87.27% of United Kingdom searches happen on google.co.uk – 11% increase swing

This trend is growing but will be subject to the staged roll out of personalization to the different countries.

Link building or Link love runs the same risks of landing you in hot water be it through love or the lack thereof.

With any relationship, to keep “the love alive” work is needed. The work on a website takes the form of content creation, linking out, networking and asking for link dates, which may develop into something more meaningful.

It is easier to start and maintain a long-term lasting relationship with those whom you have values in common. All of us aspire to come from the uptown side and because we do, we should act on this reality. We should create effective websites concentrating on good usability, great content and effective links both in and out. Looking for like-minded links is part of the process of establishing an uptown website.

So who are the links that live on the uptown side?
Housing commission

• Comment spam
• Guest books
• Link farms

Railway tracks

• Junk directories
• Dofollows Blogs
• Forum Signature
• Social media profile
• Sites you own
• Reciprocal links

Middle class

• Partners
• Blogrolls
• Good Directories

Upper Crust

• News/Blogs mentions
• Editorial
• Badges/Widgets

The higher we aim in the social hierarchy of links the more difficult getting that link is. As they say “Free LOVE is dead”

When undertaking link building the best advice is to concentrate on the links that count and don’t get discouraged with lack of success. And remember dating links from the bad side of town will not help make your website more desirable.

talk and get search results

Here is the link to the press release
http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_j/press_release/pr2008/pr20081008/pr20081008.html

http://www.voiser.jp/