This is part 4 in our series about SEO - Search Engine Optimization. SEO is essentially marketing your acupuncture website to the search engines, so they’ll let you rank better or even first in the search results.

Is Your Site Important?

The search engines want to know if your site is important, or if it belongs buried at the bottom of the search results.  The most reliable way of knowing this is looking at who links to it.

Think about it… If no one liked your site - if they didn’t find it important or relevant, they wouldn’t link to it, right?  Incoming links to your site is the number one way that Google and the other search engines have of determining if your site is important to the searcher.

A large number of links from other websites is a sure clue that your site is relevant and important.  However, there’s more to it than that.

Are The Sites Linking To You Relevant?

It’s easy to get links from all over the place by:

• Submitting your site to various websites
• Leaving blog comments with a link back to your site
• Participating in forums with a “sig” (signature blurb) that links back to your site
• Setting up Squidoo Pages or other pages at various online directories
• Submitting yoru site to social bookmarking/networking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, even Myspace.
• Submitting articles around the web.
• There’s even ways to automatically submit to hundreds of directories in a short time.

The problem is, some links are worth more than others.

All Links Are Not Created Equal

When the search engines look at your incoming links, they try to find out several things.

Authorative - Is your site authorative?  Respected?  Google has a measure called the “Page Rank” which measures the authority of your website.  If you’re curious, Wikipedia has a good article on page rank.  Page Rank (or PR) itself only determines if a site is authorative.  It doesn’t determine if a site is authorative about your keywords/topic.

PR used to be far more important for SEO.  It’s less important now that Google has focused more on their methods of measuring a site’s relevancy.

Relevant -  A high Page Rank helps some, but gives the biggest boost if the website is also relevant.  As I mentioned before, Google considers related words using an algorithm called “Latent Semantic Indexing.”

Reciprocal - If you link to a site, but in exchange it links back to you, that’s considered a reciprocal link.  Instead of linking to a site because you like it, it looks like you’re linking to a site for a return link.  So reciprocal links are supposedly discounted in Google’s ranking method, and probably the other search engines too.

A particular danger of reciprocal links is that you can link to a site that’s garbage.  If they’re selling Viagra or otherwise annoying people searching the web, Google will knock a bit off the authorativeness of your site.

Even if they’re not scummy now, you have to keep an eye on them.  They could later become garbage sites.  This applies even if you know you’re linking to an excellent acupuncturist.  If they lose their site (by going out of business or simple mistakes), someone else can buy the domain name and put spam on it.

Link Text - The text of the link to your site is VERY relevant.  If you want to rank high in the search engines for “Toronto Acupuncture” and the website link shows “Best Acupuncturist Ever!”, it just won’t be as relevant.  Having a large number of backlinks using the exact keywords you want to rank for is THE most reliable way to get a boost in the search engines.

Like most SEO, this may seem complicated, but it’s really not. To handle the off-page ranking factors, simply:

1. Get links to your site by registering at various directories, and using the tactics mentioned above.
2. Make sure the link text includes your keywords as much as possible.  If you’re wondering which keywords to use, see Keywords and Search Terms.

Since most acupuncturists barely even show up online, this will be enough to rank on the first page in most areas.  I will be offering SEO services in the future.  Contact me if you’re interested in getting your website ranked high so you get free traffic (and patients) to your site.

Other articles in this series:

Part 1 - Lies And Half Truths About Your Website

Be sure your SEO includes all the factors mentioned in this series.  A recent email that sums it up:

“A lot of web hosting companies claim to do/support SEO.  They simply add a few meta tags to your site (as shown in video from last week) and call it “Search Engine Optimized”.  That’s like putting a gallon of fuel in your car’s gas tank and saying I’ve put gas in your tank.  It’s not a lie, but it’s misleading.”

Part 2 - Keywords and Search Terms

What are people looking for, and how will they find you?

Part 3 - On Page Ranking Factors

How do Google and the other search engines discover your website is relevant?