ChristianPortals Blog

Advanced Link Checks.

View the source of each and every page: is there JavaScript and CSS on the page? Remember that spiders may not index pages that have more than 10k or so of JavaScript or CSS embedded in them. Spiders don’t enjoy getting tangled up in JavaScript. So as a general rule you should avoid putting out prompts and alerts using JavaScript every time that a page loads. Because of this rule, it is also wise to avoid link partners who do so on the pages that they link to you from. If anything looks fishy, it probably is.

CSS won’t give you many problems. If you are going to use CSS, it is best to link to it from another source. Create a separate CSS page and use the
tag to work it into the head of your HTML. This method will keep your file size down considerably, and since you will probably be using the same CSS on several pages, decrease your bandwidth usage. Normally a large quantity of CSS within the document isn’t indicative of any suspicious behavior on the part of the linker. If you feel that you are, indeed, suffering from the fact that the site uses such an excessive proportion of CSS on the page itself, suggest to the webmaster that he/she may want to create an external CSS document and link to it in his/her header.

Check that you’re still on the domain you clicked on a link to, and you haven’t moved to another site or a subdomain. Some people will move you to another domain while telling that’s their site and your link is there, relying on you not checking the address bar. This trick is all too common and happens to folks who are new to SEO every single day. This sad fact will continue until people begin to catch it every time.

If the domain has changed, delete your backlink to the site in question immediately and then email the webmaster with your complaint. If the webmaster does not fix the problem you may even want to request that they remove the link as the site may wind up discredited as a link farm or some such thing that you do not want to be associated with for fear of being banned from many popular search engines with technology used to combat link farms.

On a related subject, when you check your back links, make sure that these links appear in legitimate places. If the site is completely dedicated to linking to other sites and doesn’t seem to be a directory or something similar you will want to get your link removed as soon as possible. There is no time when one link is worth the risk of being permanently banned from any popular search engine. Aside from the traffic that you will lose from that one search engine, you may wind up “red flagged” so to speak. It seems to be common practice among search engines that if one finds faulty activity the rest seem to find out soon afterwards.

Overall, if it seems dodgy, leave it alone. It’s better to sacrifice one link in caution than to destroy your site’s rankings by accepting one you’re not sure of. There are hundreds of situations aside from link farms that can and will give you trouble. It would be impossible to list every scam as there are people who make their living (or seem to anyway) in creating and executing these scams. Whenever there is a new form of “SEO” technology that “can’t fail,” you should watch out because it is almost guaranteed to blow up in your face. The only truly powerful and guaranteed method of SEO is to make your site valuable to your visitors and then let it fall where it may in the realm of the search engine.

It is difficult, after you have optimized your pages and submitted them to search engines and directories, to sit back and wait, but there is not much that can be done aside from attempting to accumulate links from good, solid places. The work that you have done is bound to pay off sooner or later as long as you stay honest. When it comes to the world of SEO, honesty is, indeed, the best policy.

About The Author: Alex Matthews - the newest leader in online information publishing. For more information about this topic or/and other topics, please visit http://www.MoreDotCom.com

Crossmap Launches Christian Business Directory

Crossmap.com Launches Christian Business Directory

Crossmap.com announced today the launch of its new Christian business directory, an online listing of Christian businesses ordered by category. The new section, accessible at http://biz.crossmap.com, fills a marketing need for the burgeoning Christian business sector.

Christian businesses have been booming the past several years. In America alone, there are over 88 million Christians who call themselves born-again. Christian-owned businesses that once operated non-religiously are re-branding themselves as Christian companies.

These days, Christian businesses can be found in almost every sector traditionally dominated by non-religious corporations. Education, insurance, banking, mortgages, and credit card processing are examples of secular industries that today have Christian counterparts.

Michael Zigarelli, the dean of the School of Business at Regent University, a Christian school operating out of Virginia, estimates that there are 500,000 to 600,000 “Christian owned and operated” businesses in America today. This accounts for approximately 10% of all corporations.

The new Crossmap business directory is designed to organize the hundreds of thousands of companies run by Christians, allowing other Christians to find companies that share their values. Other listing services, such as the Shepherd’s Guide, have had success building Christian business directories that are distributed in a print form.

Crossmap is taking steps to ensure that all business listings are submitted by Christians. As a requirement for having a listing in the business section, the company owner must acknowledge that he/she agrees with a basic Christian statement of faith. This will help build a sense of trust among those who list in or browse the directory.

Both free and paid listings are available in the business directory. Free listings will allow company owners to list their company name, description, and a link back to their website in the appropriate category. Paid listings come with a banner image at the top of the category, a phone number, and form that allows potential clients to email the company. Paid listings are also displayed before the free listings. Paid listings cost $20/month, and can be paid on a monthly basis or as a 6-month prepay.

According to Crossmap spokesperson, Rick Li, the new service “offers targeted exposure at very reasonable rates for Christian businesses. We believe that the Crossmap business directory will be the first stop for any Christian company that wants to begin a marketing campaign.”

About Crossmap

Crossmap.com has been operating in California since 2000, and operates over 15 Crossmap web portals in 7 languages worldwide. Crossmap serves millions of Christian visitors each month, and has grown to be one of the largest Christian websites on the internet. Alexa.com, the website ranking service, ranks Crossmap as the 2nd most visited Christian website, and among the top 2,000 websites in the world. Popular sections on Crossmap include our Clip Art, Backgrounds, Pastoral Resources, and Web Site Directory.

BibleGate.org

Welcome to BibleGate.org
The Free Home Site and Web Directory services have been discontinued due to increased maintenance cost. Sorry for the inconvenience. The Freemail email service is still available. Feel free to contact info@biblegate.org if you have any questions.

SEO Tips for Google.

Google is still the most popular search engine out there, and they’re not showing any signs of slowing down. It’s important to know how to get on the right track with your SEO for Google. It is also important, however, to remember that Google is not the only search engine out there and that Yahoo! is also a highly rated search engine which actually has more pop culture usage.

Before you can truly understand Google you must understand a little bit of the history behind Google. In the beginning, Google was considered by many to be the “Geek’s Search Engine.” This changed as Google started delivering better and better results. Google slowly evolved into the most trusted search engine around, but Yahoo!’s advertising strength and popular usage has still claimed a large number of users. It wasn’t all that long ago when Yahoo! was the most popular search engine by far.

Google’s search engine is based on PageRank, a complex algorithm that was revolutionary when it was invented. This page rank is the primary reason that Google is so popular. The Page Ranking technology that Google has created and the evolutionary steps that Google has taken to increase the strength of its algorithm has made it a search engine giant which actually sets out to protect internet users from fraudulent web sites. Google has come to be a search engine that cannot really be tricked. It’s kind of the integrity police f the world wide web. Basically, Google checks the number of links to each site in its database, and treats them as ‘votes’. Here are some tips on getting ranked high on Google:

1.The more incoming links you have, the better your chances are. Good links are ones that are relevant to your own page and link with text that makes it obvious that they intended to link to your site. Google has also recently integrated a new piece into its algorithm which makes old links better than new links. In Google’s opinion, if a link withstands the test of time it is has to be relevant or else both parties would have removed the link after not seeing any positive action by Google. Basically, this is another one of Google’s “keeper of integrity” options that have become so famous among SEOs.

2. Links from ‘authority’ sites, such as directories or non-profit organizations, tend to produce better results than links from commercial sites. Google likes to decide what sites are important. A site has some huge credential for being a spectacular source for quality information will be appreciated more than sites that don’t have such strong affiliations with quality work and content. This will result in stronger, more heavily weighted links to and from this site.

3. Site elements to consider for Google are the title (including the strongest keyword phrase), the meta description (Google displays this to its users) and the body text (it needs to be highly-focused and use keywords well), as well as your onsite navigation.

4. Make sure that Google can spider the whole site easily. You’ll probably want to have plain links to every page on your site at the bottom of each of your pages.

Don’t forget, though, that Google is strict about ‘cheaters’ who use unethical SEO techniques. Here are some things that Google hates:

1. Getting lots of ‘shadow domains’ that all point to one site.

2. Using doorway pages.

3. Using falsified WHOIS information.

4. Sites that are “fake” search engines or spyware.

Google Facts and Fiction.

Google has an article on its site called ‘Google Facts and Fiction’. For example:

Fiction: Advertising on Google affects my rankings in the search results.

Fact: Advertising with Google neither helps (nor hurts!) a site’s rankings on Google.

Fiction: Sites that are not HTML are not included in Google’s index

Fact: Google is and does index as many file formats as possible, however there are some that it cannot index. File types Google is able index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.

Everyone who wants to optimize for Google should make sure they read this article, to avoid common mistakes.

About The Author: Alex Matthews - the newest leader in online information publishing. For more information about this topic or/and other topics, please visit http://www.MoreDotCom.com

SEO Tips for Yahoo.

With the improvements that have taken place at Yahoo over the last few months, the site is starting to become important again. Many say that their new search tool provides more relevant search results than Google does now – great for Yahoo, since they were the top dog before Google came along.

Even for a few years after Google’s conception, Yahoo! was the high and mighty search engine. It is still the popular choice for those who are seeking popular culture solutions and should be the target search engine for such pages. Yahoo! will put up a fight here for the king pin of search engines again before too long so make sure that you have quality results here as well as Google.

In general, Yahoo’s spiders work the same way as Google’s, following every link they find on the web and putting that information in a database. As always, you can also submit your site to the index manually. These manual submissions will speed up the process slightly but probably won’t give you instantaneous results. There are no real ways to incorporate highly

Yahoo places some weight on your incoming links, but not as much as Google does – it’s more interested in your content, which could explain why Yahoo’s results seem to be more relevant. To get a strong ranking at Yahoo, you should pay more attention to your keyword density than you do to your link popularity. Yahoo is also less likely to index a huge number of pages than other search engines are. Normally forums and posts are not touched by Yahoo as it will deem them unnecessary. There are times when this may seem like a good idea to many searchers, but there are also times when these types of results are missed. Basically, keep in mind that you will not get as many pages indexed by Yahoo! as you will by Google, MSN, and other search engines. You may, however, get a higher number of hits out of each page that you get listed in Yahoo! depending on the type of site that you provide.

At a Glance.

1. Use keyword-rich titles, about 20 words long and unique for each page of your site. These titles are the first things that Yahoo! sees and are the single most important aspect of your site regardless of which search engine you are optimizing for.

2. Use the meta description tag on each page too, with a description that fits your site well. Yahoo! still uses meta tags for its descriptive purposes but not necessarily word for word. Make sure that you have a quality description so that you don’t run into situations where you don’t get listed because of lack thereof. Basically, your description tag is an evasive action rather than an attempt at attaining a high number of hits or a higher rating.

3. A meta keywords tag should be included on every page of your website, and it should list words and phrases related to the site. Make sure that the key words describe the specific page rather than the site itself except for the index page. You don’t want a bunch of people to be going to the wrong front page. They may see the page, not find their answer and leave. If they find your home page, they’ll probably see that it’s a home page, look for a relevant link, and find the answer or material that they are looking for.

4. Well-written, keyword-rich content will help you a lot with Yahoo. Well-written content is important regardless of search engines. This content is the entire reason for your site’s existence. Make sure that the content that you deliver is something that you want your name on. Something that you can stand behind.

5. Easy-to-follow internal links in plain text will help Yahoo’s spider – the bottom of the page is a good place for them.

The key to getting a high ranking at Yahoo is to keep adding keyword-rich, relevant content to your website on a regular basis. Continual updates let Yahoo’s spiders know that you are maintaining the site and keeping your information updated – they’ll come back regularly to check out these changes.

Yahoo’s improvements are sure to help them in the market, and the number of users flocking to Yahoo is starting to show optimizers that there are more search engines out there than just Google.

About The Author: Alex Matthews - the newest leader in online information publishing. For more information about this topic or/and other topics, please visit http://www.MoreDotCom.com