Educational back-links (.edu) have always been much more important to the search
engines because of their difficulty to obtain.
Educational back-links cannot be purchased by just anybody; .edu domains are strictly reserved for educational institutions.
If you as the webmaster would like to purchase an .edu domain in the United States, you must accredited by an agency working for the Department of Education.
Stringent policies are in place in other parts of the world, in addition to the United States, to ensure that .edu domains continue to maintain their credibility.
One of the reasons educational back-links are so valuable in search engine optimization, is because they are not easily attainable.
For a variety of reasons, educational back-links hold a great deal of link juice with Google, as well as the other search engines.
This makes them highly beneficial to any Search Engine Optimization campaign.
Although Google has not officially acknowledged how much additional weight they put on .edu links, you can be sure it’s substantial.
Acquiring educational back-links is not nearly as easy as building back-links from conventional websites.
Educational site webmasters do not eagerly provide their high quality links to just any website.
Forum signatures, guest blogging, commenting on blog posts, and the normal link building strategies that get links from webmasters of conventional .com or .org sites, are not as effective on .edu websites.
Webmasters of .edu domains are notoriously “picky” about which sites they link to.
This is probably due to the difficulty in their obtaining .edu domains, as well as their responsibility of maintaining website credibility.
Still, high quality educational back-links can be acquired if you are willing to put in the time and effort that is necessary.
The basics still apply to getting authority site educational back-links.
The more relevant your link, the more “link juice” it will provide to your website, so focus on .edu sites that are similar to the niche you are occupying.
If you place you focus on random .edu sites; your results will be the same as when you to focus on random .com websites.
If you try to get a .edu link from a sports site and your niche is in Internet marketing, the webmaster of the .edu site will probably label your link as spam and ignore it.
If you are running a fishing website, concentrate your linking efforts to an outdoor sports or fishing .edu domain.
A good way to find similar educational back-links to your niche is to check out what .edu links your competition has.
There are several ways to do this but the easiest is to download the SEO Quake toolbar for your Firefox browser or download some other backlink checker tool from the Internet.
Then all you need to do is enter your competitors domain URL to see how many .edu links they have pointing to their site.
Make a list of the educational back-links and try to acquire them from the same or similar .edu sites to increase your ranking in the search engines.
Make no bones about it, educational back-links are still extremely valuable in Search Engine Optimization.
Fresh content is a primary focus for Google, according to their most recent January algorithm update.
Although most of us in Internet marketing already know that fresh content is an important factor in getting a new website recognized by Google’s search engines, this round of adjustments to their “freshness” algorithm which was released back in November, seems to put more focus on accelerating daily content production.
Google’s search engine now seems to be more clearly focused on providing their users with more recent and relevant search results.
Google’s recent introduction of more relevant related searches (“searches related to“) located at the bottom of the results listings with other suggested queries, is now providing users with more useful query results.
In the near future, Google users will also probably be seeing more news results blended into their natural organic search results.
In their quest to make their search engine results more responsive to real time trends, Google’s improvements as to which queries should show news results should be loved by the Search Engine Optimizers, as well as their users.
The modifications that Google has made this past month in relation to titles in their search results and it’s much talked about introduction of Search Plus Your World, is why Google remains the “top dog” of search engines.
Search Plus Your World blends personal search results that are relevant to you with Google’s universal results and helps you connect with people you care about.
These revelations should act as a catalyst for webmasters to accelerate their production of daily fresh content on their sites.
Fresh content is a primary focus for Google and remains the best way for webmasters to get their sites listed on the first page of Google’s search engine results page.
There are many reason to use Facebook and in the future there could be many more if you are a home based Internet business trying to get yourself noticed on the web.
With Facebook’s initial public offering filing this past week, it’s clearer how Facebook makes their money.
Although their business model could change in the future, the social networking giant currently makes about 85% of their revenue from online advertising.
This pits them squarely against Google, Yahoo and Microsoft which also run the Google and Bing search engines.
Payments and fees from other company’s transactions on their site comprise an additional revenue stream to Facebook.
Are these good reasons to use Facebook?
Probably not right now, but many analysts predict that Facebook has ambitions on becoming “THE” website where everyone hangs out to hopefully spend most of their money.
Some analysts apparently believe that Facebook’s ultimate goal is to acquire more users the ability to be able to make all their purchases on their site, to the point of doing all their banking and even making airline reservations.
Once you enter Facebook’s online community, everything you need will be available for their users.
For home based businesses this could be the ultimate place to make your pitch.
Facebook currently has almost 850 million users.
Right now groups and businesses can pay to highlight posts from a user’s friend network or other pages on Facebook, through sponsored stories advertisements.
Facebook users can become fans for different products or brands by simply clicking “become a fan”, with fan advertisements.
Brand advertisers are moving a ton of money into Facebook as are small and medium sized businesses.
In last year’s third quarter, Facebook took over Yahoo as the number two position in display ad revenues, second only to Google.
Facebook’s advertising effectiveness is primarily due to the possibility that every ad placed in the Facebook user network has the potential of going viral.
Of all the reasons to use Facebook advertising, the potential of your ad going viral is the most often stated.
With Facebook going public, there is speculation in some circles that they could entertain moving into the search business which is currently dominated by Google and to a lesser extent, Yahoo.
In addition to current Facebook advertising, a search engine would provide users with the ability to easily purchase products and services on Facebook as well.
Should this occur, Google’s domination could be seriously affected.
Home Based Internet Marketing Information provides many reasons to use Facebook for advertising or branding your small business, however a Facebook search engine would definitely put the “icing on the cake”.
