What to do to rank higher in search engines?
Some of the most important factors when ranking a page or website on a specific keyword is (1) the number of external incoming links to the page, (2) the quality and relevance of the page linking to your site and (3) the anchor text. The more quality and relevant sites link to you the better your ranking for your website and page.
Obviously big business directories and b2b portals like TradeHolding.com B2B Network have thousands of incoming links from other quality websites including trade associations, business magazines, government pages, region specific portals, etc. It was / is our job to drive targeted business traffic to our B2B network and implicitly advertise your company, products and offers. We spent years and a lot of money to advertise our network and reach an everyday growing business audience, currently our network is visited every day by about 12,000 business owners, decision makers, sellers and buyers. Obviously, a simple company presentation website with only 4-5 pages can never dream about a similar traffic, unless your company is a well known brand like Microsoft, BMW or Nokia, but you can actually increase your search engine rankings. Most company presentation websites receive less than 5-10 unique visitors / day but with a well prepared SEO campaign you can actually increase this to a few hundred targeted visitors / day. And, if you can convert just 1-2% of your traffic into customers, this would mean an additional 2-5 sales / day! Can you afford to send these customers to competition?
TradeHolding.com B2B Network has an integrated directory on all of our partner sites, these directories contain links to relevant websites on a categorized environment:
You can add a link to your website from these site sections since 2005 and clever webmaster already used this option to link to their websites. Until now, this was the only section on our websites where we allowed external links to be placed to our network, these pages actually contain only external links to other websites.
Since March 2007, we are testing a new option on 2 partner sites: TradeBoss.com and Middle East Business Directory. We have embedded a link box to the top right corner of company classification pages, these boxes can be rented by companies including a link to their company website. Getting links to your website from these pages obviously have a higher value than the above websites section because these have no outgoing links and the page strength is not divided to many different websites.
How does this work? Imagine that you have a website / page where you are trying to sell crude oil in large qantities. You browse to the relevant category(ies) on Middle East B2B Marketplace: Chemical Companies and / or Crude Oil Companies, click on Add Your Link Here on the top right corner, set the desired anchor text (it should be similar to the page title you are trying to advertise, for example: “ABC Company sells Crude Oil” or “Crude Oil for sale”), page description, personal details, pay for the link and you are ready. The more links to add using similar anchor texts, the better your chances that you will be ranked for that specific term.
Additionally, in 2006, we also launched TradeHolding.org, the Business Links Directory, where you can get free links to your business website.
So, remember: try to concentrate on getting many relevan links to your business website from various relevant sources. This is definitely a must if you intend to be ranked by search engines.