CHAPTER 3. HEAD SETS THE STAGE 33
But that’s just our entry into the game. We can buy 99 years of domain
name and still not achieve a high page rank.
3.6.6 We Can Pay Money
There are lots of sites that will offer to get us noticed by the major search
engines, and even the minor search engines, for a few USD a month.
My sense is, don’t bother. We will get noticed anyway. They are just taking
money from desperate web designers. Ignore them.
3.6.7 We Can Swap Links
The more sites that link to us, the more we look like a hub or touch point
or crossroads or nexus. And that is good. If sites link to us, presumably it
is because we are worth linking to. We have valuable content.
This nexus idea is actually at the core of the Google PageRank system. The
more places that point to us, the more important we become.
Say we have 100 friends, and each of them adds a link to their homepage, or
a nearby page, mentioning us. Our PageRank goes up. We are popular. Of
course, we would be willing to reciprocate and put a link on our homepage
to each of our friends, right?
If we want to scam the system, we can invent 100 friends and make a real
rat’s nest of links back and forth. It’s a bit of work, but we can be sure
someone has tried it. Lots of someones, actually.
However, if the links are not relevant to our topic, we could be penalized.
Garbage links make us look like a non-content website.
3.6.8 Page Design
Design your content to make it easy for web crawlers to understand. Use
the latest HTML5 tags, like article and header and footer.
Include lots of keywords and phrases that you think people will be looking
for. Think like a fish to catch a fish.