If you want to see where your blog ranks in terms of power and following, here are a couple of websites that you might find interesting:

1. SeoMOZ Trifecta- Trifecta comes up with your blog’s score by estimating several factors including:

• Alexa Rank
• Google URL mentions
• Technorati authority
• Google BlogSearch Links
• Yahoo! Explorer Backlinks
• PageRank of both homepage and domain
• Compete Rank
• Quantcast Rank

Once Trifecta comes up with your score, it also allows you to compare your score to well known blogs in any category to see how you stack up. It’s very fun to keep monitoring your score over time and see where you end up.

2. Blog Juice- This site creates a score for you blog based on four different sources of data. The most heavily weighted source (40%) is the number of Bloglines subscribers you have. Second (30%) is your blog’s Technorati rank. The last two sources of data each count for 15% of your score and are your Alexa rank and Technorati Links.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to get that Pagerank 5 website to provide a link back to your new website? Not only could it drive quality traffic to your site, but it would also provide a great backlink for the search engines to find. Unfortunately, unless your website is truly groundbreaking, it is unlikely that a big website will be eager to just give you a link on their main page. Their webspace is too valuable to be giving free links that provide little return benefit for them.

Given this all to common dilemma, a market has been created for the buying and selling of text links. There are many different places online that will allow you to buy links on high-quality websites and they all usually work a little differently. The most common way for these link marketplaces to work is that you pay a set amount and receive a link for a certain period of time, like $5 for a month or something similar. As you would expect, the higher the Pagerank of the website and the higher the traffic, the more expensive the link will be.

I realize that at first glance, this tactic seems to be very appealing for a startup website owner. Buying a prominent link could really put your site on the map! Before you run off and start buying links, however, realize that this method of linkbuilding is considered by many to be in the realm of the “black hat” SEO tactics. Matt Cutt’s of Google has been very clear in his opinion on link buying….he doesn’t like it. Neither does Google apparently. If Google is able to tell that a website is selling links, it will sometimes penalize that website and anyone who has bought links there also. I’m not telling you this to scare you away from this tactic, but it is something that you need to consider and be aware of when buying web links.

Now that I’ve gotten my little disclaimer out of the way, let me say that I do not believe buying links to be a bad thing in most cases. People buy and sell advertising every day, and link buying can be looked at as form of advertising. There are some webmasters that do sell links that are clearly not providing any benefit for their readers, but the majority are shown just as advertisements would be. The major difference is that advertisements generally include a “nofollow” link attribute and do not pass Pagerank to your website.

If you do believe that buying text or other links would be beneficial to your website, here are a few guidelines for you to keep in mind when shopping for links.

Domain Age: Generally speaking, the older a domain is, the more favorably the search engines will view it. When considering websites, use a tool such as archive.org to see how long the website has been in existence. Try to get links from the websites that have been active for the longest period of time.

Relavance of Website: Make sure that the website providing the link is relevant to the page you are linking to. A link from a completely unrelated website will not do much good in terms of your search engine rankings and Pagerank.

Placement: If you are purchasing a link that will be on only one page of a website, make sure that page has the Pagerank and other attributes that you are paying for. If the main page of a website is PR 5, but your link is on a PR 0 page, you won’t get much benefit.

Number of Backlinks: It is also helpful to research the number of backlinks that the website has from other sites. This will be shown to some extent in the Pagerank of the website, but PR is not updated all that often and can be inaccurate. A website with more backlinks pointing to it is a better candidate for purchase than one with fewer backlinks.

There are others things to consider as well, but they are more obvious. I certainly hope that you consider the Pagerank and quality of any website that you are buying a link from. Also be sure that the links are not “nofollow” links, as these will provide your website with very little benefit. It is rare that you will receive much traffic from users clicking on the link itself. Most of the benefit you are buying relates to SEO and improving the Pagerank of your website.

One thing that I read a lot of people asking about is how to increase the rate at which Google will crawl your website. The higher that your Google crawl rate, the more important Google thinks your website is. That said, all you have to do to increase the crawl rate is to increase the importance of your website, right? Well, yes, but here are a few more actions that you can take to try and get your site crawled more often.

1. Most importantly, update your content regularly and ping Google when you do. Try to update your website at least 3 times per week, if not more. Make sure Google knows there is new content each time, so it can tell that your site provides fresh content on a regular basis.
2. Make sure all of your webpages and links are working. Finding broken links on a website is a big turnoff for Googlebot, so it is well worth your time to make sure everything is working on a regular basis.
3. Keep your sitemap updated appropriately. The faster Googlebot can get through your site, the more pages it will get to, so make sure all of your important pages are on the sitemap and that unnecessary links are left off.
4. Do your best to get backlinks from regularly crawled websites. Social bookmarking sites are good for this purpose. Generally, Pagerank can serve as an indicator of how often Google searches the website.
5. Make sure each page of your website has unique title and meta tags.

These are just a few suggestions that might help. If you continue to add good content to your website on a regular basis, your crawl rate will increase over time. Making sure that you do the five items listed above, should help get you there a little more quickly though.

Have you ever gone to a website and wondered how in the world it got that Google Pagerank of 4 that your Google Toolbar is showing? Well, chances are, it didn’t. Rogue webmasters have found ways to fake a website’s Pagerank and fool the toolbar. This trick is especially common with scam artists that sell websites by making the buyer think that it has a higher PR than it really does.

Unfortunately, getting the Google Toolbar to show an incorrect PR is not very hard. Webmasters create a 301 redirect header that only affects Googlebot. So when your toolbar tries to find the PR for a website, the 301 redirect sends Googlebot to a different website and it returns the Pagerank for that site. Before you ever buy any links or website based on its PR, there are several websites you can visit to find out the actual PR for any site. Live.ezer.com is one that I’ve used often. Be careful who you trust online…a second opinion never hurts :).

Ann Smarty over at SearchEngineJournal.com has posted another great article that covers the ins and outs of the most popular blog search engines. She does a really impressive job of detailing each website and giving you all the information you need to help you decide where to focus your blog searches. You can read Ann’s blog search engine reviews here

When trying to build backlinks to your website, there are several things you want to consider about the pages that are linking to you. Many people make the mistake of just focusing on PageRank, but there are several other factors that make a backlink better or worse for your page.

• Anchor text of link- This is very important with Google and can make a huge difference in your rankings for certain keywords or phrases. All the anchor text refers to is the actual text that is used in the link to your site. Being able to control the anchor text is what makes services like Linkvana so valuable.
• Frequency of change of anchor text- Google does not like to see your link’s anchor text change often. This isn’t a big problem for most people, but just try not to change your information in web directories and the like too often.
• Age of link- Generally speaking, the older the link to your site, the better. If you are able to get a permanent link on the homepage for a website, it will be much more valueable than a link that Google pick’s up and is gone two weeks later. Common sense right?
• Number of outgoing links on the referring page- The lower the number of outgoing links there are  on the referring page, the more important Google considers your link to be. This is often a downfall of directory links and “links pages” on websites. If you are just one of 30 links on a page, Google won’t consider that anything special.
• On-the-page factors of the referring page- Google looks at the keyword density, title, and other on the page factors of the site that is referring to yours.
• Theme of referring page- You want the website theme of the referring page to be related or similar to your general theme. Having  links on completely unrelated sites won’t do much good.
• Expert sites- Google considers some websites to be “Expert” sites for certain topics. It isn’t known exactly which sites these are or what the criteria is, but getting a link from an expert site is a huge boost!
• Finally, PageRank- The higher the PageRank of the referring site, the better it will make the link. PageRank considers several of the factors listed above already.

So, there you have it. My experience has been that any link from a related and non-spam site will be beneficial to your page, but getting links based on the above factors will really maximize the power of the link. SEOmoz has some really cool tools on their website that can help you to estimate how strong a link from a given website would be and can even provide a list of the best sites to try and get links from.

Google announced today that it will hold its third webmaster chat session this Wednesday, the 22nd, at 12 noon, Eastern Time. If you are available then, I highly recommend registering to join the session. It will be very informational and you’ll get access to some of the biggest names at Google like Matt Cutts.

Last week, we focused on SEO tips and techniques that you could implement into the html code of your website. Today, is is also extremely important to understand the off-the-page factors that contribute to your standings in Google. This week we are going to focus on some of the key off-the-page factors to consider.

• PageRank- Trying to increase PageRank is all the rage these days. The truth is, PageRank is important to your website’s ranking in Google, but is more of an indication of ranking than an actual item you can improve.
• Backlinks- Backlinks are links from other websites that point to yours. Google is by far the pickiest search engine when it comes to backlinks and will display only a small number of your total backlinks at any time. It is believed that Google focuses on showing the higher PageRank links, but in actuality, the backlinks shown seem to be almost randomly selected. The bottom-line is, the more backlinks (excluding spam sites), the better.
• Backlinks from high ranking pages- This is one of the most important off-the-page factors to focus on because it is somewhat possible to control. Google loves to find webpages with high PageRank linking to your site.
• Acceleration of link popularity- This is a hotly argued issue. It is commonly beleived that too many backlinks within a short period of time will be seen by Google as artifical and can result in your site being penalized or sandboxed. Look for a post later this week explaining the Google “sandbox”.

These are some of the off the page SEO factors to consider. Tommorrow, we will go into the key attributes that Google considers when deciding how much weight to give to any particular backlink.

One popular way to boost your off-the-page factors and your Google ranking has been to get your site listed in web directories. There have been rumors that Google is beginning to discount these links (see our previous post), but for now, this still seems to be a somewhat beneficial strategy.

DMOZ

Google’s own web directory is feed straight from the DMOZ Directory (also known as the Open Directory Project). If you aren’t familiar with the DMOZ, it is probably considered to be the most respected directory. It is completely free to submit your site and is run completely by volunteer editors. The bad news is that it is just about impossible to get listed in the DMOZ. Many webmasters have been unbelievably frustrated by their failure to get  very high quality sites listed in the DMOZ. Because it receives so many submissions, it can take months (or longer) to even get an editor to look at your site.

I personally do not like the DMOZ (it has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve never had a site listed there….I promise). I have experienced the frustration of trying to get listed several times. The volunteer editor system allows for too much power and subjectivity of one person in the process. The only way to get in now, is to know the editor.

You should find the best category and submit your site to DMOZ, but just don’t get upset when you don’t get in. I wouldn’t even bother, but it is free and maybe you’ll get lucky!

Yahoo Directory

The other very important directory is the Yahoo! Directory. Like DMOZ, this is a human-edited directory, but it is not free (for most). There are some categories that you can submit your site to for free if it is not a commercial website. For all other sites, the cost is $299 a year ($600 for adult sites) to get reviewed. This doesn’t even guarantee inclusion!

Some webmasters are adamant that the fee is worth it, while others are just as sure that it isn’t. For many webmasters, the fee is too high for it to even matter. If you have a good website that should be accepted, it might be worth getting listed for a year or two. After that, you should have enough credibility to live without it.

Other Directories

There are many other directories, both free and paid, to get your site listed in. Here are a few items to consider when deciding on which directories to submit to.

• Age of directory- The older, the better
• Directory site structure- Make sure the directory has a search engine friendly  structure.
• Size of directory- This seems to be changing. It used to be that a directory with many pages was thought to be better and have more authority. Today, it is so easy to copy links from other directories in a matter of hours, that fewer pages seems to be gaining preference with Google.
• Theme- If the directory has a similar theme to your website, that is a plus.
• PageRank- The higher the PR of the directory the better. Keep in mind  that the page your site will be listed on is usually not the main page of the directory. If your category page has a high pagerank, that is very beneficial.

I recently came across this article over at the Search Engine Journal (written by Ann Smarty) that I found really useful. Ann lists, rates, and explains 6 different all-in-one SEO tools that can help you get a fast and easy analysis on your site. There were several great tools that I had never used before. I definitely recommend that you all take a look.