A good way to build up the importance of your website is to get other websites to link to you.  In doing so, here’s some tips:

Finding Quality One-Way Links is Best

Do something on your website that people will want to link to.  Create a compeling article, a glossary, top ten list, faq or make a free tool to help your customer base.  Spend a little time getting the word out on your new content.  Contact blog owners that discus similar stuff, post comments, talk in relevant forums.

Find High PageRank Websites That You Can Write On

Look for websites like blogs where you can post comments to someone’s article.  There’s tons of those sites but you want the 1 out of a hundred where the links back to your website are not marked as “nofollow”.

To help you see the nofollow links easily first get the GreaseMonkey Add-On for Firefox, then the nofollow display greasemonkey script. With this script enabled, all nofollow links in a page show up on a pink background.  This makes it very easy to see good links on a page that you may be able to add to.  The pages with less “followed” links will be stronger pages.Page importance is passed from the link page to you but is divided amongst all the links on the page, both external and internal.

Be creative in finding websites.  You can easily find blogs on lists like the do follow directory but I’d be afraid about using that too much.  Search engines already have the published lists of do follow sites.   They could at their discretion give less importance to these links across the board.  It’s a good idea to just put in the time to search for websites that may want to link to you or offer somewhere for you to put a link.

Don’t Overlook Backlink Anchor Text

I asked marketing expert and Mothers Jewlery specialist, Jeff Moriarty about the importance of backlink text.

If I’m going after the term Chicago Web Design, I assume the best thing to have in the link text is the term I’m going after.  But if I get a link that passes rank from a blog or profile, does that still have some importance?

<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Chicago Web Design</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Web Designer Guy</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Aslan Interactive</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Matt MacDougall</a>
<a href="http://www.aslaninteractive.com">
http://www.aslaninteractive.com</a>

Jeff replies …

Off topic anchor text can still help build up PR, but won’t help as much as having the keyword in the link text…but it does still help.

If my main term was “Chicago Web Design”, I would go after the following terms and this is why.

The following keywords were found using the ‘~’ tool. Put a ‘~’ in front a phrase and do a search in Google. Google will bold everything in the serps it thinks is a synonym of that word. Part of Latent Semantic Indexing. Because these are synonyms, you want to try to rank for them as well.

Chicago Web Designer
Chicago Web Designers
Chicago Website Design
Chicago Web Site Design

The next list of keywords are longer tail keywords that have your main phrase in them. This was found through the Google Sandbox Tool or any other keyword tool. This will still help you rank for your main term, but longer tail terms as well.

Web design in Chicago
Web design Chicago IL
Chicago Website Design

I would never created back links from your company name, it’s just not competitive enough to get a backlink for. Same for the exact URL. You should be able to rank for both of those without any links.

Our hosting company SoftLayer is not a normal dedicated server hosting company. Rather than providing servers, they provide an automated infrastructure. Most of the jobs in hosting can be done by a robot. SoftLayer has just about perfected their use of robots to run their business. If load on a server hits a big spike, I can have another server automatically provisioned and ready to go in a couple hours. Not only that but this new server is connected to my others as if they were sitting next to each other. I can automatically put any Ooperating system on the new server and/or switch operating systems at will, all without the help of a person. With this, SoftLayer becomes the most scalable, flexible hosting provider I’ve worked with.

What happens when there’s problems?

Whereas with other hosting companies, if I have a serious problem that I could fix, I still need to find someone at the hosting company to help. Those rare, serious problems often require someone onsite at the data center to go in front of the server and help you out. Not with so with SoftLayer. Through their unique infrastructure, they can basically offer me direct access to “stand in front of the server” all the time. This is done through redirecting the keyboard, screen and mouse right to my office through a secure, back channel. Since often times I know how to fix a problem, I can get most things fixed before I could even explain what’s wrong to another hosting company. But if I’m on vacation, the SL folks are very knowledgeable to help out others in the company. I really like how they set the expectation up front of paying 3 bucks per incident. Paying 3 dollars to get a problem solved takes the load off of the SL tech support in dealing with much of the mundane stuff most hosts have to. And still it’s a very reasonable change if you have a real need.

How’s the reliability?

I started off in this industry in the late 90’s hosting with RackSpace. They’ve been widely known as the best in the business. I know that the only people with more Redhat Linux engineers than RackSpace is Redhat itself. In the past couple of years I’ve been with SL though, I’ve seen more major infrastructure problems at RackSpace than there have been at SoftLayer.

For several years Aslan hosted our client’s email as part of their hosting package and it seemed like everyone offered email with web hosting. Ours was a basic service and we got plenty of requests (ok, complains) for better features and spam handling. We did what we could with limited time and resources, but basically what our clients saw was what they got. It wasn’t until we upgraded all of our servers about a year ago and saw how little performance we actually gained did we realize how bad trying to manage our own email service was hurting us. The majority of the server resources were going toward processing email which as the MessageLabs report shows was spam.

At Aslan we’re web application developers, and managing email is a full time job that requires dedicated personnel and servers. We decided that we needed to offer a better email solution for both our clients and us. In researching many options we found that Google Gmail for Business fit our needs best. It gives our clients the power of company as big as Google managing their email for FREE! It’s easy to setup an account and configure it in such a way that the people you’re communicating with only see your company’s identity not Google’s. Any new client that needs email we setup on Gmail and we’re working to transferring all of our current clients over as well.

We’ll stick with our strengths and let those better equipped handle all the other stuff.

#3 Can I Find Help if Needed?

There is more RIA work out there now than developers which is bad if you need to pull someone in to help on a project.

I have never been disappointed by the amount of quality information and help the various online communities provide, but if there comes a time when you need to pull someone in to do some development you might be stuck on your own.

#2 Is it Worth the Extra Time/Cost?

The majority of developers are still more efficient in other technologies like js, php, cf, ruby, and .net. If a comparable solution can be developed in one of those technologies by comparison the RIA version will take longer to develop. Do the benefits = cost?

I was first seduced by Flex with how easy it was to prototype an application. Building a HTML layout and design would have personally taken me months, but only took a couple of hours! In Flex Builder I simply arranged the containers and controls, added a view change to each button and then had a great looking and functional prototype. (yea, I’m NOT a designer so the default skin was better than anything I could do.) It took significantly more time to actually building out the application than we originally planned. Basic things we were used to doing in ColdFusion took up to 10 times longer in Flex. We had to learn the Flex/AS methodology and new syntax on the fly and during a lot of sleepless nights. Would all that headache be worth it on your project?

Also, be sure not to underestimate the future maintenance and update costs. Unfortunately we’re not working on Flex everyday so whenever I open up the code I have to remember where everything is and how it works.

Last week I received an RFP (Request For Proposal). The RFP document gave an overview of the client’s business, it’s current web site and the features they are desiring in their redesign. I still have some questions to ask, but it has been much easier to quote. Therefore, I don’t feel I need to pad the quote much to cover the inevitable surprise feature. People looking to hire a web development company can save money by creating a detailed RFP first. The more detailed the RFP the more accurate each quote will be. The other benefit is that if other firms are quoting on the same RFP, then the client will receive an “apples to apples” quote.

If you are looking to hire a web development firm for your next project, here is a good article regarding how to create and RFP document.