Optimizing Before You Purchase Links

There are many ways to increase a sites ranking such as purchasing text links, but it seems that people are forgetting the basics. Before you purchase text links I would make sure you have optimized your website for the search engines. Here are the most common mistakes that I see:

Meta Description - Although meta tags don't seem important you would be surprised at how much a unique meta description tag on each page of a website can do to your rankings. You can try stuffing them with keywords to see if it helps, but I recommend tailoring each description to accurately represent the content on each page.

Sitemap - You want to make sure that your web pages are getting indexed by the search engines. If your content does not get indexed how do you expect the search engines to rank it? Using a simple sitemap structure can work well for you if you have a small to medium sized website.

Robots.txt - Most people think that the more pages you have indexed, the more traffic you will receive. In many cases this is not true; by removing duplicate content from the search engines you can actually increase your traffic.

URL strings - A lot of people use content management systems which make their URLs look all funny with extraneous characters. Clean up your URLs, the difference is like night and day.

Code - By using clean and compliant code you can keep your website search engine friendly. You can use basic code elements such as headings or alt tags to help improve your rankings.

There is nothing wrong with purchasing text links, but before you do, I recommend you cover the basics. If you do not do the basics then you will not be getting the most from the text links you purchase.