The referencing encompasses all technics and tools that enhance the visibility of a web site on the Internet (that is to improve the chances that the web site appears in the first lines of the search results).
The referencing is one of the main sources of the traffic on a web site. It allows the internet users to access a site without knowing its address.
Several types of referencing exist:
- "Natural" referencing
- Sponsored links (paid referencing)
- The referral program
Natural
Referencing
It refers to all technics that allow registering a web site in various search engines and web directories, free of charge (that is without using promotional tools such as AdWords, on-line advertisement, etc.).
The mechanism behind the natural referencing is focused on the web site itself, its content and on the so-called META tags.
META tags
The META tags are HTML tags which role is to provide information about your web site to the internet search engines.
You can find them in the head part of your web page. In the Keonet application, they can be found in each page's properties, in the «Description» tab.
Below is an example how the META tags appear in the HTML code:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<
meta name="title" content="Welcome on Keonnected to create your own web site" />
<
meta name="description" content="Keonet is a CMS, a Content Management System, which facilitates the creation and management of your personal or commercial web site. Keonnected is available in 3 versions: Std!, Plus! an "all-in-one" solution and the Pro! version which enables you to create a tailored-made web site. You can try our solution for 30 days free of charge." />
<
meta name="keywords" content="site creation; share files; create internet site; free of charge web site; keonnected; content management; hosting; domain name; professional web site; CMS; content management solution, content management system, easy creation of web site web, open-source site" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="author" content="keonnected.com" />
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en" />
<meta name="generator" content="Keonnected"/>
<meta name="cache-control" content="no-cache"/>
<meta name="pragma" content="no-cache"/>
<meta name="expires" content="-1"/>
</head>
The above yellow-highlighted META tags are the ones that you must at least indicate for your web site. As shown in the example above, they can be found on the Keonet application in each page's properties.
Links exchanges
Creating links with other web sites increases the quality of the referencing of your web site by the Google robots engines. It allows as well to generate traffic from your partner's web sites.
Here is how it works:
- On the Internet, search for web sites related to yours and take note of their themes
- Note the PageRank** (on a scale from 0 to 10) provided by Google and focus on sites with a PageRank ranking similar to yours
- Create, on your own web site, a «Links» page or, even better, a «Partners» page
- Mention on this page that you are open to partnership with complementary web sites and leave an e-mail address to contact you
- Write, in this «Links» or «Partners» page, a true, realistic and objective description of your web site
- Create a button (of size 88 x 31 pixels) to link to the partnerships
- Insert this button into the «Links» or «Partners» page
- Contact the potential partners and set up/start the partnerships relations.
** (Web pages ranking tool from Google; registered trademark; also called «PR»)
Paid
Referencing
The paid referencing is a set of web site positioning techniques and methods using paid promotions mechanisms. The most used techniques are the referral program and the sponsored links.
The referral program
On Internet, a referral program is a marketing technique allowing an on-line merchant (seller) to promote its offers on partners web sites (the affiliates), who are paid for the generated traffic and business.
Referral platforms help sellers and affiliates wishing to get in contact together to meet.
The fee will be based on:
- each click (the traffic and potential clients view point)
- the sale only (the business side view point)
Sponsored links
This is a commercial frame available from the search engines, presented at the top of the search results hits. This zone is limited to a small number of advertisers.
2 types of offers:
- Buying keywords or categories,
2 types of payments:
- Cost Per Click (CPC, only when the ad is clicked) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM, number of clicks registered in a web site by the readers, where M is the Roman numeral representation for 1'000)
The most common way to purchase commercial space is through an auction-based system and on the Cost Per Click (CPC). The total cost can greatly vary from a few cents/pennies to a much larger amount: the more bidders for the same keyword, the higher will be the cost per click.
Tips
and
Tricks
...to improve your web site positioning:
- Create your site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
- Create content of high quality that matches the search engines research and ethics charts:
—›
Respect
the HTML
tags <H1>, <H2> (Please read the material contained in the Keonet's article
«Title and sub-title»).
- Name your images with pertinent/ad hoc names and write for each of them a description in their «alt» tags fields (You can do this using the Keonnected HTML-code editing mode, using the "View/Edit source" action from the Edition menu toolbar).
- The META tags (keywords and descriptions) must be present in all pages, be different on each page, must not exceed 250 characters in length and
must summarize the content of the page and
*not* the content of the web site.
- Imagine the words that the internet users would type to find you and use them as keywords in your pages.
You can check the validity and compliance of the keywords and expressions at this web site address :
—›
Adwords.google.com/select/KeyWordSandbox
- To display important information, use text and not images (names, contents, links). Google indexing robots engines do not recognize texts contained or embedded in images, except if you describe the images content using the «alt» HTML tags.
- Create and show visibly a site map of your web site, with links pointing to the important parts of your site. If you site map has more than 100 links, split them on several pages.
- Create external links.
- Check the broken links and correct the code.
- When you delete a page, redirect it to an other page.
- Do not create more than 100 hyperlinks per page and establish links between the pages.
