Last week Inexo acquired a new SEO client.  They came to us and asked how their website can be better positioned on Google and other search engines.  Inexo, using our Website ScoreCard,  did a complete review of their site.  One of the site's biggest issues was inbound links.   We let the client know that this was an essential part of developing a strong search engine optimization campaign for them. When we mentioned inbound links, we realized that not everyone knows what inbound links are.  With that in mind, we put together a reference document titled SEO Introduction - What are Inbound Links?  We thought we should share it, as there may be others who are new to SEO, need a little information about inbound links, or could use a real-world analogy to gain a better understanding.

SEO Introduction - What are Inbound Links?
 
Inbound links to your website are often called incoming links, inward links, backlinks or half-a-dozen other terms.  These terms can pretty much be interchanged.
 
An inbound link is simply a link from another website to your website. It is a word, string of text or image, that when accessed, allows for your site to be accessed.  The total number of links is one indicator of popularity or relevance of your website on the web.  Each link also has a ranking. For example, Google uses what is known as a Page Rank (PR) for links.  Most small business sites have ranking of 3 - 5 with sites like Yahoo and Facebook having a rank of 9. Links from more popular / accessed sites carry a much higher value, along with links from an authoritative site with information about the same topic as your site.     
 
There are many ways to acquire inbound links.  As an example, since the Inexo website has a PR ranking of 5, we will post sites on our portfolio page the day they go live.  Google frequents the Inexo site quite often, usually daily. This link is provided as a courtesy to our clients.  Often times product vendors, industry associates, and sites dedicated to the discussion of your business / service / offering will provide links if requested. They may have an online form or require you to email them the details.  These links are added at the discretion of the site and done on their timeline.  Links can also be purchased.  Typically these purchased links have a higher PR ranking, as where you purchase them is a dedicate source for links like Yahoo Business Directory or Business.com.  Each site charges a different rate - some one-time, others annually, and others use even more complex structures. You can think of these directories as a modern-day “Yellow Pages”. In addition, the paid links are typically added rapidly.  Inbound links can also come from advertising on other websites, from websites that provide reviews of your product or services by your customers, or social media websites.
 
Think of it like this. Let’s just say that for some crazy reason you went out in the middle of the desert and built the best restaurant in the world.  Let’s also say that you had the best recipes, best staff, nicest interior fixtures, and a great patio.   You open your doors and not one customer is standing there.  We often say that if you build it, it does not mean that they will come! You would need to build roads to the restaurant, place billboards or ads for it, get reviews, and do other marketing to let people know about your restaurant and the magnificent food!  Now think of your website.  You built the best website, with great content, and rich features and functionality.  It is sitting there in cyber space. When you start to gain links to your site from other sites, it is like advertising. Google or other search engines pick it up and understand how to get to your site. The search engines see one link, two links, and more and understand that it has relevance and value.  Speaking of value, the value or popularity of the site from where you get the link, also strongly impacts the link. Carrying this analogy forward, if your friend told their friend about the restaurant, that is like having a low ranking site link to your site.  Now let’s say that your friend is a newscaster and talks about your restaurant on TV.  That is like having a higher ranked site link to yours, as the reach is greater and more popular.    
 
Next to original website content, it is Inexo’s belief that inbound links are one of the top factors of successful SEO.  There are many additional aspects of inbound linking that Inexo has spent years mastering.  These include, but are not limited to the link text, link URL, page linked to, and number of links acquired over a given time period. Should you need additional information, please feel free to contact Inexo.  We are more than happy to explain anything that we do and show you real world examples.  

Contact Inexo today at sales@inexo.com or by calling 602-200-0110, option 1, to discuss your SEO or website needs.

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What makes our websites so easy to find online? The secret is in the SEO sauce.
 
The Internet today is vast, and the adage if you build it they will come is now an obsolete way of thinking. It is more important than ever to ensure that your business or organization does not become lost in the depth of today’s web world. In order to do this, every website we create is built on the Inexo platform. This special platform was designed to optimize a site’s visibility to search engines. In other words, we make sure search engines like Google find your website and assign a high level of importance to its content, so that when people search for the products or services you offer, your site is easily found. The more people that find your website, the greater the opportunity for your business to grow, and we want nothing more than to help you and your business succeed.
 
 Our clients are constantly impressed with their online visibility and how often their website appears in search engines. We tell them that the secret is in the sauce. In actuality it is because the platform we use is optimized to achieve the best SEO results.  We have studied the search engine algorithms and stay up–to-date on the newest changes to ensure that we are always ahead of the game.
 
There are many factors taken into account in optimizing a website. We know sometimes it is difficult to understand how and why this is so vital to your website. Below we explain the process in order to give you a better understanding of SEO and to share our secret.
 
As mentioned above, every website we develop is built on the Inexo platform and each page of the website includes metadata. The metadata of a page is composed of the website’s title, along with the page description, keywords, and image alt tags as defined below.
 

• The keywords for your webpage are the words that define your page for people to find in search engines. Your best keywords are the words that are most commonly related to searches for your website. The more a word is searched, relating to your website, the better a keyword it is. Many search engines are not putting as much emphasis on the declared words, but more so, the number of times a word or phrase is used in the content.  This is referred to as saturation. It is important to research such words, as often times we have discovered that they differ from your expectations.  Inexo suggests that keywords be defined early-on as they are the foundation for the title, description, alt tags, and H1 headers. For an average site, 15 overall keywords / keyword phrases are suggested, listed in order of relevancy. Keywords are not displayed to site visitors, only in the code for the search engine to use. 
• The title of your webpage is a concise description of the page and provides the headline that appears in search engine results. This is displayed in the tab of your browser and in the search engine results.  Best practice is to limit to 70 characters, keywords closer to the beginning.
• The page description combines keywords to give a brief summary of the page contents. Typically one sentence, using one to two of your keyword combinations, will perform well.   Best practice is to limit this description to 150 characters and use the keywords towards the beginning. Page description is not displayed to site visitors, but shown in the search engine results. 
• Image alt tags are words defining each image on your webpage. The alt tag provides a brief description of the image to the search engines and to visitors with special needs. Best practice is to limit to no more than 80 characters using appropriate keywords. Moving your mouse over the image displayed will typically reveal the associated image alt tag.
• H1 header is the title for the content on a webpage, much like how the title of a document describes the information in the document.  Often times it is given special aesthetic treatment, such as a larger font or special styling. The title is visible to visitors on the web page and in the search engine results. 
• Site Map is a textual based listing of all pages on the website, like the index of a book.  It is typically displayed to the visitor as part of the web page footer, but can be part of the site’s menu. The H1 headers are used to represent each page. 
• An XML site map is similar to the site map, but is encoded for the search engines to define relevancy and frequency of updates to the web pages.
• XHTML Strict is a set of standards that ensures our sites are read the same way across all browsers. By adhering to the XHTML Strict standard, we can ensure continuity of design across your website. If a website is not read the same way, the site may appear different depending on the type of browser you are using. For example, you may view a web page using Safari and that page will look slightly different than if you view it using Internet Explorer.
• Spidering or web crawling is the process used by search engines to visit websites and read pages to help create entries. We use a spidering tool on all the websites we develop to make sure that search engines can visit and read all the pages to maximize results.
• SEO-friendly URL is when the URL (the line of text that you put into your web browser to navigate to a particular site) uses words to describe what the page is about as opposed to a collection of numbers and letters strewn together. Both page visitors and search engines can read the URL and determine its relevance to the page. For example http://www.inexo.com/clients is a natural URL.
• The code we develop is clean and optimized so that pages load quickly and search engines favor it.

 
There you have it, many of our top SEO secrets revealed.
 
Please contact us at 602-200-0110 or sales@inexo.com if you have any questions or would like further information regarding our services.
 

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