Here are some of the guidelines I follow when determining the value of a link – whether to buy it, request it, write content to earn it, etc.

1. Anchor Text
Targeted anchor text can have a very powerful effect. Some bloggers proved the power of anchor text a few years ago by mass-linking to George Bush’s whitehouse.gov biography with the anchor text “miserable failure”. That page is still #1 for the search in Yahoo, and was #1 in Google until they “adjusted their algorithm.”

So if you, Company X, are trying to rank for a term such as “Product X”, it will be helpful to have trusted sites linking to you using the term “Product X”. A link with optimized anchor text is more valuable than a generic link such as “Company X” or especially an URL-only anchor text such as “http://www.companyx.com”.
With this in mind, linking opportunities that offer targeted anchor text are more valuable than those offering URL-only or generic anchor text.

However, Google does take notice of sites whose links consist almost entirely of similar anchor text, especially if that text matches the page title and H1 tag of the site (but is not found in the domain name). So it is always a good idea to vary the anchor text with which sites link to you, and to have plenty of links whose anchor text is your official site name.

2. Image vs. Text
Text links are given more trust and weight than image links, and are more valuable. However, if all you can get it an image link, ensure you get maximum value by having the site fill the image’s ALT tag with your site’s name, or your keywords.

3. Top-Level Extension
Links from .edu domains are worth more than links from .coms, .nets, and .orgs. Many SEOs believe that links from .info, .ws, and some of the less popular extensions are worth less than .com, .net, and .org links.

Links from .gov sites are the most highly valued and influential, and can greatly improve your site’s TrustRank.

4. Who links to the page?
Let’s call the page you’re pursuing a link on Page A. PageRank and TrustRank, two of Google’s most prominent algorithms, both look at who links to Page A when determining how much benefit your site will receive by having a link there.

If a page has a large number of inbound links, it will transfer more authority to your site than a page that has little or no inbound links. Another important factor is the quality and type of links the page has. SEO For Firefox is an excellent tool to help determine some of these factors. Once installed, it allows you to select “Lookup This Page” from the right-click/context menu and see a number of indicators of how popular or authoritative the page you are viewing is.

Yahoo’s backlink tool provides much more public data than Google’s, and shows the number and URL of sites that link to a particular page. You can query Yahoo for things like ‘link:http://www.site.com’ to view a list of indexed pages that have linked to a particular URL (also try link:http://site.com to get different results).

Check out a few of the pages. Do they appear to be spam or low quality? Do they have little or no inbound links? Any popular or large site will have a lot of links, and some of them will be spam or scraper sites. However, if upon investigation it appears that sites like this comprise most of a site’s link profile, it isn’t a good sign.

5. Who else does the page link out to?
If a site is linking to a lot of poor quality and low value sites, it’s usually best not to seek a link from them. Even though the site may have a decent visible PageRank, their TrustRank score is probably going to be very low, and that will affect the ultimate value of the link.

One of the purposes of TrustRank is to flag sites with high PageRank that have very few or no trusted inbound and outbound links. Sites flagged for this have typically gained PR by garnering hundreds or thousands of links from low quality and spam pages.
On the other hand, if a site is linking almost exclusively to well established or high quality sites in your field, you want to be listed there without exception, unless it is cost prohibitive.

6. Google PageRank
The “visible”, or “toolbar”, PageRank of a site is something to consider, though a high-PR link is not automatically “good”. There are factors than can dampen a site’s PageRank and prevent it from being passed.

If a site is very obviously selling links (and using language such as Sponsors, Advertisers, Paid Listings, etc. to denote those links), it’s possible that Google no longer allows it to pass PageRank. Keep that in mind before you get out your wallet.

7. Last Crawl Date/Index Check
Thanks to Aaron Wall for this useful link value metric that I use almost frequently.

Don’t expend time or money to gain a link on a page that is not indexed. Obviously, if a search engine doesn’t even care enough about a page to index it, it won’t find your link there, and if it did, it wouldn’t be worth much anyway. You can check any search engine to see if a page is indexed by entering:

cache:url

Try entering the URL both with and without the www prefix if it does not show up with one or the other.

You can use this to see if the page is indexed, and the last time it was crawled. Though you will not always get the most accurate crawl date, it’s still good to check. A good guideline to follow is that if the date shown is more than 45 days old, the page is not very trusted and a link there won’t carry a lot of weight. Probably the only exception to this guideline is if the page is on a highly trusted domain like business.com, dmoz.org, botw.org, dir.yahoo.com, or some other popular site that is viewed as an authority or resource within your niche.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule – for instance, new sites may not have been fully crawled yet – but in most cases, the last shown crawl date is worth paying serious attention to.

8. Domain Authority
Some domains are very established and trusted, and a link there carries weight regardless of other factors like PageRank. Some of the domains mentioned in #7 are good examples.

There are two ways to estimate a domain’s general trust and authority. If you see things like forum posts or untargeted inner pages from that domain competing with homepages of related sites in rankings, you can assume that search engines are showing that domain favor.

You can also view all the inbound links to a domain to determine if it is listed in popular/trusted directories, authority sites, media outlets, etc. Chances are, if a domain has a high number of quality inbound links, a link there will benefit you, despite any other factors (as long as the page is indexed).

Links on obscure pages of high authority domains may not do much for your PageRank, but will definitely improve your TrustRank.

A domain’s age is another important factor. The longer a domain has retained the same WHOIS information and been indexed by search engines, the more trust it is given. You can check a domain’s WHOIS/registration info at sites like domaintools.com, while archive.org can often show you the history of a domain’s content.

9. Is this site part of the active web?
Google’s algorithm is changing to incorporate the ‘active web’ such as Digg and social bookmarking sites. Forums, blogs, and social sites where communities frequently introduce and rate sites and content is a good link resource, and it pays to have a presence in sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, forums within niche authority sites, etc. None of these links are worth a lot individually, but they can begin to add up.

Web 2.0/bookmarking/networking sites are also the gateway to more natural links. A forum signature or Digg submission may lead a blogger to your site. If he likes it, he may write about it. By spreading content to the active Web, a lot of content writers gain links they never even asked for.

10. If the site sells links, it is obvious?
I mentioned this in #6, but it’s worth elaborating on. Google has become very focused on stripping the ability to pass PageRank and influence rankings from sites that are selling links.

Don’t expect much of a ranking increase from pages that openly advertise that links are for sale, have links that appear “over-optimized” and out of place, have text such as “Your Link Here” or “Sponsored Links”, etc. If the site appears spammy but you want a link there for direct marketing purposes, ask them to tag your link with rel=”nofollow”, so search engines are assured that you didn’t purchase a spam link to try to manipulate rankings.

11. Is the link nofollowed, or does it use redirects?
Many links are implemented with redirect code so the site can track how many visits they are sending you. Search engines often have trouble with the redirect and do not end up crediting you with the link. Examine the site’s source code and see if they are adding extraneous code into the ‘href’ portion of the link tag. If they are, tell them you want a clean link.

You can test to see if search engines can handle the redirect by looking at the link profiles of sites being linked to from the page. If the page shows up in their Yahoo link profile, you should be fine.

Also be sure that there is not a rel=”nofollow” tag on the link. If there is, it will carry no authority over to your site. Also check for the meta “nofollow” tag in the headers of the page’s source code. This code tells search engines not to follow any of the links appearing on the page.

12. How relevant is the site to mine?
As search engine algorithms have evolved, one increasingly important factor in a link’s effectiveness is how relevant the page that links to you is to your site’s content. An irrelevant page is obviously worth less as a link than a relevant one.

Also take note of how strong the on-page optimization is. Two pages may be related to Product X, which you sell. One may have a page title of “Welcome”, while the other may have an optimized page title like “Product X Information”. Even though both pages are relevant to your site, the latter, optimized page will be a stronger link.

13. Does the site openly require a reciprocal link?
Obviously, search engines don’t quite care for reciprocal link exchanges. A site should at least require this privately, when someone contacts them seeking a link.

That’s it for my 13 link quality metrics. In a nutshell – seek links with descriptive anchor text from sites that are:

• relevant
• internally optimized
• quality resources
• linked to from other quality, established sites

You’ll find that by following these guidelines, you may not pursue or obtain as many links, but your time (and money) will be better spent on links that will actually make a difference to your rankings.

If you see any of the following techniques promoted by a company, be leery:

We submit your site to thousands of search engines! Even if you add up every kind of search engine – standard, meta search, pay per placement, and anything else, there aren’t “thousands.” This doesn’t even take into account the fact that many of the smaller search engines draw their results directly from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. (The only reason many of the smaller engines are in operation is so they can display their own pay-per-click ads and make ad revenue.)

When it comes to search engines, you only need to concern yourself with the big three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live Search. (Some webmasters and companies go so far as to only concern themselves with their Google position.)

Statistics vary, but these three sites deliver well over 90% of searches. Chasing all kinds of other search engines, many of which are glorified spam directories, just isn’t worth the effort.

We can you get a priority submission! Also see, “Guaranteed listing in 7 days!” First of all, never let a company charge you to submit your site to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. That process is simple and free.

• Add a site to Google
• Add a site to Yahoo
• Add a site to MSN

Don’t let anyone fool you: neither Google nor MSN offer a “priority submit service,” and no one can guarantee listing in a certain number of days unless the search engine itself does.

Yahoo does offer a paid inclusion/priority submit service, but it’s not worth it for most sites. Even if you use it, the service is easily accessible by anyone, and you don’t have to pay someone else’s markup on it.

With that said – the free submission forms are not the best way to submit a site to the search engines, and it does not mean that the site will be included in or stay in their indexes. If the site has no inbound links, is poorly coded, uses improper redirects to another URL, has stolen the content of other sites, or appears to be spam, it may not remain in search engine indexes.

The best way to have a site noticed and indexed is to let the search engines discover it naturally via a link from a relevant site that is already established in the search engines. This is the most effective way to minimize or altogether bypass the “sandbox effect” (an extended period of poor or fluctuating rankings) that new sites can sometimes experience.

A quality SEO can help you get your site into search engine indexes as quickly as possible, without the gimmicks.

We submit you to thousands of directories! Simply put: there aren’t “thousands” of directories worth submitting to. There are a number of established, well maintained directories which search engines trust; but the majority of directories carry little link value, and even less traffic. On top of that, some directories use redirection, ‘nofollow’ tags, and other code which totally nullifies the value of the link.

Most general-purpose directories require a fee for submission. This fee can vary dramatically, but one common scam is to submit your site to paid directories without paying the fee. The “SEO company” then provides the directory’s confirmation page as proof that they have submitted your site. They have submitted it, but the listing will be denied because the fee wasn’t paid.

The main thing to consider is that the Internet is just like the real world – there are good neighborhoods and bad. You do not want search engines to find links to your site in the types of irrelevant, spam-filled, generic directories that these companies often put you in. Search engines do pay attention to who links to you, and who you link to.

Rip-off SEOs also frequently encourage you to link to other, unrelated sites, who will then link back to you. Google is especially adept at detecting these attempts to manipulate your ranking, and will penalize you for it. Search engines also pay attention to the number of new links sites over a given period of time. If you engage in a spam campaign as these types of companies are known for, garnering hundreds or thousands of cheap and irrelevant links, you may possibly be even be removed from the index altogether.

A real search engine optimization firm will get to know your site, and identify opportunities to develop quality, relevant links to it.

Magical Meta Tags. Another big trend seems to be companies offering to “optimize your site’s meta tags” so you can achieve top rankings in the search engines.

Meta tags are simply optional code placed within a web page that helps browsers and automated crawlers identify the content of a page. Ten years ago, search engines paid a lot of attention to them, and users of some of the meta search engines like Webcrawler can probably remember the ludicrous amount of spam that always ended up in search results.

As search engine technology has evolved, meta tags are becoming less and less of a factor in a site’s ranking. Some have gone so far as to say that Google doesn’t even consider them anymore. While Google has not officially commented, Yahoo has explicitly stated that meta tags do not influence a site’s position in search results.

Proper meta tags are still part of a well-optimized website. Search engines sometime use the “description” meta tag to provide a summary of your site in their search results, and the tags are still good for other purposes. However, don’t let anyone tell you that this miracle quick-fix will do much, if anything, to help your ranking.

A competent search engine optimization firm can identify numerous on-site techniques to enhance your site’s search engine rankings, many of which can have a powerful effect. A hallmark of fly-by-night SEOs is an unwillingness to do any real on-site optimization, because that would actually take work.

We generate tons of content! Typically, the cheaper these companies are, the lazier they are (volume over margin means less time for individual attention). They use software to automatically submit your site to “thousands of directories and search engines” (see above), and they also use software to automatically generate content and/or steal content from other sites.

Let’s say you have a site about finding a job. They may offer to generate hundreds of articles for you to put on your site. The articles will in turn create lots of content, which of course will lead search engines to think that your site is an authority on the subject of job seeking.

This sounds good on paper, but the fact is that we’ve yet to see software that can generate articles about targeted keywords that don’t read like they were written by a computer. Worse yet, these programs often intentionally overuse keywords, leading to results like this:

“When trying to find a job, you should look in all listings of jobs, so that you can find the job you are seeking and apply for that job.”

“Keyword stuffing” is a common practice. When it’s this obvious, search engines penalize. The content on your website needs to be unique and well-written. A good rule of thumb is this: “Will it sound like spam or bad English when a user reads it?”

Another common use for of software is to “scrape” for content. Unscrupulous companies canvass the Internet for unique, human-edited articles and site content relevant to your targeted keywords, then add it to your site.

This technique solves one problem only to lead to another: search engines hate duplicate content, and they will in most cases heavily penalize a site that features it. This effect can be manipulated and has even been proven to be bypassed, but even if you can accomplish this, the moment someone manually reviews your site your work (and money) are down the drain.

Any real SEO will tell you that creating original content for your site, even if it costs more or takes longer, will deliver a real and lasting benefit.

In summary, be careful who you let handle your site and your online brand. There are some great deals out there, but in most cases, you get what you pay for. Companies wishing to develop strong, lasting search rankings are best served by investing in a competent and thorough search engine optimization firm that can actually deliver what so many of the scam artists falsely promise. The cost will be greater, but the long-term increase in traffic and sales is well worth it.

Some people go to a lot of risk and trouble to manipulate the system. Yet in many if not most cases, it just isn’t worth it. Before I talk about some reasons why, let me start with a classic example.

Just out of curiosity, I queried “search engine optimization tri-city” to see where we’d rank. Here’s a screenshot (roll over to enlarge):

There we are, #2, right under a rather spammy looking #1 result for “Tri-City Airport” search engine optimization.

Now, that page title just begs for further investigation. I followed the link and got this:

On the landing page, we’re invited to consider this company for “all your Tri-City Airport search engine marketing needs.” I think I will – if I ever decide to run a spam campaign. Obviously, these guys just plugged into a database somewhere and made a generic page for every town (and airport?) across the state, perhaps the country, in hopes of achieving results in local searches.

This was just a few days ago, and that page has already been removed from the SERPs. I can’t find it at all. Google either canned it (not likely, since the rest of the site is still visible in Google), or the company realized that some of their robot-produced pages looked really dumb and obvious, and did some cleaning up.

Stuff like this is common. There are a lot of “black hat” SEOs and database programmers who will charge you a healthy fee to automatically generate a large number of pages. Black hat is big business now, and there are still plenty of techniques that continue to fool search engines, like scraping, cloaking, hidden content, and redirects. There is even a technique many black hats claim can often destroy the search engine position of competing websites.

A related phenomenon known as “google bombing” generated some buzz some time ago when bloggers were able to cause the whitehouse.gov presidential biography of George Bush to appear as the #1 result for “miserable failure.” Google has since responded to this exploit, but the trick still yields the same results at Yahoo and MSN.

Regardless of your politics, you probably aren’t looking for a biography of George Bush when you search for that term. Likewise, you probably aren’t looking for cheap, mass-generated spam pages like the one above when you search for local search engine optimization companies.

Where am I going with this? Simple. SEO is only half the battle in online marketing. You can spends tens of thousands of dollars, buy hundreds of links, and employ every trick in the book to get top rankings for a variety of searches – which may or may not be relevant to your site – but it’s all for nothing if you don’t convert those rankings into visits, and those visits into sales.

Number one, if you’re ranking for searches that have nothing to do with your site content, then you’ve wasted a lot of time and money, and you’ve risked being banned from the search engines. Your target audience is just like you – they get annoyed with irrelevant search results.

If you’re mass-producing pages, scraping, cloaking, or using other techniques to capture a wide range of search results within a specific topic, at least attempt to stay away from the spammy look and feel that usually accompanies these types of sites.

Sometimes black hat and/or aggressive SEO is great, especially for blitz marketing. But if your business is interested in protecting its reputation and maintain a lasting presence (read: not get banned from search engines), don’t go too far.

I’d rather search and get ten clean, informative, relevant sites than a thousand generic, cloned, cheesy ones, and I’m going to do business with the company that looks the most credible and the least desperate to reach customers at all costs.

I think we’d all agree.

The company that hosts your site will either help or hurt your business, depending on the reliability with which they deliver your content to visitors. So before you choose a host, there are some important questions you should ask.

• How accessible is their customer support?
• What kind of computer will be hosting my site, and how many other sites will be on it?
• How easily can I access my site?
• Do I really need all these features?
• A note about resellers.

How accessible is their customer support? Look for a company that offers both phone and online support. If a company lets you contact their sales department by phone, but not their customer support, it’s a clear indication of their priorities.

A good hosting company should also offer an online help desk. This is basically an interface that allows you to generate a support ticket and communicate via email if you are experiencing a low priority issue, or something more easily handled online. Ours is here.

What kind of computer will be hosting my site, and how many other sites will be on it? We’ve all been frustrated by a slow computer taking forever to load websites or programs. Your site needs to be hosted on a computer with sufficient hardware to guarantee that it is capable of quickly delivering information to the network. This is especially critical if you are running a database driven or media intensive site. Budget companies typically use low grade CPUs and small memory to keep costs down.

Another important factor in your site’s performance will be the number of other sites that are hosted on the same server. “Shared hosting,” which is what all budget plans consist of, means that your site shares a server with other websites. The number of other sites you’re sharing with varies, but some have been known to stuff 1,000 or more sites on one server.

My IP Neighbors is a free service which can tell you how many other people are sharing your server (it has been known to be wrong, though). One thing to keep in mind is that one large, very active site can drain more system resources away from your site than 100 small, low traffic sites.

There is another very important reason to know who else is sharing your server: whoever shares your server, shares your IP address. If you’re not sure what an IP address is, I talk about that in this article.

In the simplest terms, this is like someone sharing your Social Security number. If they run up a huge bill on a credit card, you’re left with the mess. Similarly, if spammers and fraudulent sites are operating on your server (which can easily be the case with budget hosts, which take any and all comers), your IP may become blacklisted in various networks and mail servers, causing problems with email delivery and site access. I’ve had this happen, and it is not fun.

By selectively screening clients, and hosting them on a virtual private server with a unique IP address, we can guarantee our customers that they won’t be sharing a server with dozens or even hundreds of other people that they – or we – know nothing about.

How easily can I access my site? A lot of site owners like to know they can do anything they need to on their own, without having to wait or rely on someone else. A lot of hosting companies offer Plesk, cPanel, or some other “control panel” solution that allows you to perform functions like adding and removing email addresses, changing files, editing databases, downloading backups, and more. We offer cPanel 11, the most powerful and flexible control panel available. Check out a demo here (username and password are demo).

Some hosts offer no control panel at all; stay away from that. The greater level of control you have over your own server, the better.

Do I really need all these features? 1,000 subdomains! 5,000 email addresses! 250GB bandwidth! 20GB storage! 99% uptime guarantee!

That’s the “fluff” I mentioned in the title. Yes, we offer all that, and more. Any good host does. But what budget hosts know is that no site is really going to be using anywhere near that amount of resources. The average site is just a few megabytes (nowhere near 1 gigabyte, much less 20), uses five or ten email addresses, and pulls nowhere near 250GB bandwidth each month. And the 99% uptime guarantee? That is important – but it’s also as common as guys offering to sell you cars at “true wholesale.” You can’t always trust it.

This is all designed to get consumers thinking, “this is high quality service at a cheap price.” The reality is that if even one of the sites those guys are stuffing left and right onto their servers used anything close to those resources, the whole thing would crash.

Don’t be fooled by flashy numbers and promises to deliver things you’ll never even need. Gauge them on performance, reliability, and customer service – which you won’t find everywhere.

A note about resellers.

Many – probably most – hosting companies are reselling someone else’s services, much like regional wireless providers sell service based on a larger national network from someone like AT&T. Even GoDaddy, arguably the most popular hosting companies in the country, is a reseller.

Resellers aren’t bad, but sometimes the budget companies are reselling from resellers. This makes it difficult for them to respond very quickly to customer service issues because they are even further from the source.

Again, resellers aren’t bad. Through their connections, they’re hooked into the same high performance Internet backbones as everyone else. And just as retail stores save you from having to buy in bulk when you only need a limited quantity, resellers can give you access to powerful hosting at a low cost.

So what’s the bottom line? We believe that hosting shouldn’t be outrageously expensive – but it should also be something you don’t get wherever it can be found. If your site is non-commercial, doesn’t have a lot of content, or won’t have much traffic, it probably doesn’t matter. But if you need reliability, site access, and peace of mind, it’s worth the extra dollars each month to go for something better.

In this article, I’m going to discuss this problem a little bit, and show you how to avoid it.

If you’re familiar with how the Internet works, skip down a few of paragraphs to learn how to protect yourself. If you’re not sure what domains, servers, and hosts are, keep reading.

The Internet runs on “IP addresses.” This is the unique address of a computer that is receiving information, just as your postal address is how mail carriers know where to find you. IP addresses are numeric, and would be very difficult to remember. Therefore, a central registry was created that redirects “domain names” to a certain IP address.

So, let’s say your business owns a domain name, randomcompany.com. You pay a company to host your site. What they are doing is providing a “server,” which is a computer that holds all the files for your website. The server has a unique IP address. As long as you are using that particular company, your domain name randomcompany.com will point users to the server’s IP address, and your hosting company’s server will display your site.

Anyone can go to your server and view your page, but they can’t make changes to the files. If you want to update, add, or remove content, you will need FTP access. This is a user name and password that lets you log in to the server and access your website’s files. If you don’t have this information, you don’t have access to the server you are paying for. It’s like having a computer in your office that no one can log on to.

In many cases, companies choose to let the person who designed their site do all the updating. That’s fine, but be sure you have FTP login information for your server in case your designer falls off the face of the earth or goes out of business.

What’s even more critical is that you have access to your own domain name’s settings in case your hosting company stops giving you the level of service you expect. If you have access to your domain’s settings, you can switch to another hosting provider without any help from your current host. This is also a way to get around the problem of not having FTP access to your site.

I highly recommend registering your own domain, which has become extremely inexpensive. For more information, check out my article on selecting and obtaining a domain name. If you let someone else register it for you, insist on having them register the domain in your name, with your contact information, and having the necessary login information to change your “nameservers” if necessary.

This simple step could save you a lot of frustration, and puts you, not another company, firmly in control of your own domain.

A third point is definitely worth mentioning. Many hosts offer a “control panel,” which is basically an interface you can log in to that allows you to modify all kinds of settings, such as adding email addresses for your domain. We use the very popular and efficient cPanel 11. Some companies use Plesk or other control panels. If a company doesn’t offer one, they’re probably not worth the money. Ask if you will have a control panel, and if so, how to access it. By doing so, you won’t have to rely on a (possibly slow or unresponsive) third party to do things for you. Also, cPanel has a powerful file editor that allows you to easily make changes to your site.

OK, here’s a recap:

• Ask for a copy of all files after your initial web design is completed. This is especially important if the site is interactive or database driven. This way, if your host goes MIA, you can at least have a starting point.
• Get FTP login information. There is no legitimate reason why a designer or host shouldn’t give it to you.
• Insist on knowing where your domain is registered and how you can access the domain settings. It’s critical that you are able to change your nameservers if your relationship with your hosting provider goes south.
• If your hosting provider uses a control panel like cPanel or Plesk, get the login information (optional, but highly recommended). If they don’t offer a control panel, they’re probably not a quality host.

There’s only one problem.

Have you ever tried on shoes that were just one size off? You love them, you want to buy them, but you just can’t get them to work. That’s kind of how templates can be – especially ecommerce templates (we’ll get back to that).

Templates are usually created by graphic artists in something like Photoshop, then ported to HTML (the code that web pages consist of). Unfortunately, the coding is often poor, and results in a product that is difficult if not impossible for a novice user to edit. Even if the code is good, the templates are so designed that to customize even the smallest detail causes everything to get thrown off.

eCommerce templates are especially notorious for not working with the software they’re designed for. Functions are often “hard-coded” and don’t work with the administrative backend. Other functions aren’t supported at all. There are plenty of horror stories and refund requests.

The other downside of a template design is that there will be other sites – often in the same field as you – who may be using it. You don’t want your site to look like your competitor’s. And if you want to own exclusive rights to that design? Let’s use this nice architectural themed template as an example:

Quite a bargain at $64 – unless you want to be the only site on the Internet with this design, which will set you back $2,450, plus the fees you’ll have to pay to have the site customized for you.

Plus, anyone who has already downloaded this template can continue to use it, and will be likely be available in the gigantic packs of pirated and stolen templates that are easily available for download.

The other reason I don’t like templates is that they’re often Flash-based. We certainly aren’t afraid to design in Flash, but I advise anyone looking for strong search engine rankings and/or the ability to easily update their site to avoid it like the plague.

In a nutshell – templates can be a great starting point, but you will still need someone to help you incorporate your custom graphics and content. This is one of the times when it really is too good to be true. A high-quality, customized design is one thing worth paying for.

First, the basics. Google’s assigns a PageRank to URLs within its index. This PageRank value is determined by the number and quality of links Google can find that point to the given URL. You can check a site’s PageRank by downloading the Google Toolbar, or with some of the many free PageRank tools like this one.

New pages are generally unranked for several weeks or longer. PageRank is most commonly referred to on a scale of 0-10, but the true PageRank of a URL is between 0 and the high billions. The 0-10 scale, which PR-checker tools all use to display PageRank, is on a logarithmic scale. Thus, a site with a PR of 6 is not twice as “popular” as a site with a PR of 3 – it’s actually four or five times more popular.

There are complicated formulas some SEOs have used to calculate “true” PageRank, but everyone just refers to it on the 0-10 scale. Just know that this scale is not exact, so two sites can show a PageRank of 1 but one will have a higher “true” PR than the other. An additional factor to consider is that Google has traditionally only performed “visible” PageRank updates on a quarterly basis.

PageRank was, in my opinion, a Google marketing strategy. It was a pretty brilliant move, because business owners started asking, “What’s our PageRank?” Suddenly, search engine marketing became about getting a good PR, and getting links from pages with high PR (when a page links out to you, some of their PageRank is transferred to your page). When Google became popular, the term “just google it” came to mean “just search it,” and this is what they’ve done with PageRank.

PageRank is just another part of the total Google ranking formula, but when they gave a name to it, people stopped asking, “Where does your site list in the major search engines for your keyword terms?” They started asking, “What’s my Google PageRank?” In this way, Google has somewhat successfully shifted the focus from optimization for all search engines to a single minded focus on attaining a high PageRank.

It’s great to have a site with a high PR. It typically means that Google will visit your site more frequently, index its changes, and rank it higher in searches.

However, PageRank is only part of the total picture. In fact, you will often discover that top results have a lower PR than lower search results. In fact, there is a general consensus within the SEO community that PageRank is playing less and less a part in Google’s ranking algorithm, and Matt Cutts of Google has openly stated that the search engine has begun stripping the ability of some sites to pass it through links, due to abuse. There are a number of other factors that determine a site’s trust and link authority, and PageRank can often run in contrast to these (for instance, a domain with primarily spammy links that has obtained some PageRank, but has very low trust scores).

It is important to have relevant, quality sites linking to you, and it is important to have good, search-engined optimized content. PageRank is fun and glitzy, but nearly irrelevant to a successful SEO campaign. Focus on building quality links, and you may well end up with high PR – but at the end of the day, it is only your placement in search results that matters.

A number of free analytics services can be used as an incredible resource for webmasters and companies to gather detailed site usage info – in particular, detailed reporting on what search terms are getting users through to your site, and what search engines they’re using.

If you’re looking for a free solution that still offers invisible tracking (ie., no clunky “counter” graphic):

• Clicky
• Statcounter
• Google Analytics

Mint is a solid commercial analytics package, and very affordable at $30 per license. Because it’s self-hosted and doesn’t require Javascript, it’s likely to be faster and more accurate than externally hosted packages.

When you’re ready to select a name, 1and1 is offering .com registrations at $6.99 per year with no contract, including private registration (keep reading for an explanation). This is an absolutely phenomenal price. Private registration costs at least three times as much anywhere else.

Since many of the domain names are already taken, your first step is to decide if the name you want is available. Click here to check availability.

Some tips on selecting a domain name:

• Search engines do give weight to your domain name, so if it contains terms that you want your site to rank well for, try to include them in a tasteful way. The domain name qualityvinylsiding.com looks good and a user would likely go there; the domain name quality-vinyl-siding-contractors-fast-cheap.com screams “spam” and you’re not going to get very many hits. Your domain name does not have to contain terms you want to rank for. It’s helpful, but not necessary.
• Your domain name shouldn’t be excessively long. Choose something easy to remember.
• There are a lot of domain name extensions open to the public – .com, .net, .org, .ws, .us, and .biz to name a few. It’s usually a good idea to have a .com address, as it looks more professional. It’s also more easily remembered.
• If you want jonsusedcars.com but it’s taken, I don’t recommend getting another extension like jonsusedcars.biz. There will be no shortage of people going to jonsusedcars.com – your competitor – by mistake, because they’re used to .com names. If at all possible, choose a domain name that no one else is using.
• For sites that will be heavily promoted, it’s often a good idea to register the name in .com, .org, and .net extensions, because spammers will often throw up pay-per-click sites at similar sounding domain names, and this could potentially mislead customers who mistakenly visit yoursite.net if your page is at yoursite.com.
• Consider a private registration. There is a publicly-viewable “WHOIS database” that contains the name, address, phone number, and email address of the person who registered the domain. Private registrations hide this information from the public (WHOIS lookups are how spambots get many email addresses). For personal sites, I recommend private registration. For company sites, I recommend that you allow your contact information to be viewable in the database (it increases credibility).
• Make sure you know how to access and change the settings for your domain. For an explanation of why, and a brief overview of how domains, servers, and hosts work, click here.