* SEO: Search Engine Optimization

Tired of being among the last entries on search engines’ lists ? Feeling like boosting your visits and commissions ? Zlio, and its partner Gnoztik present a series of lessons allowing you to understand and enhance your visibility on search engine’s listings and towards its millions of users. Each week, you will find here a guide explaining different techniques to improve your ranking.

Today, our first lesson is about the mysterious “backlinks” ! Enjoy and feel free to comment.

What’s a backlink ?

Definition of a hypertext link (also called hyperlink)

A hypertext link is a text in a web page on which you can click to go to another web page.
For example, in the following page http://www.my-website.com, when I click on the “Go to Google” link, I get the page http://www.google.com

This is the source code of the 1st page, … < a href = " http://www.google.com "> go to Google < / a > …

• href contains the url (address) of the targeted web page,
• the text displayed is contained between the tags < a ...> and < /a>

To get the source code of a web page with Internet Explorer, click on Display/Source. Once the source code displayed, to get the hypertexts links with Internet Explorer, click on Edition/Search… A dialog box pops up. Fill it with “a href” then validate.

What is a backlink ?

It’s a hypertext link !!! In Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the backlink term is the same thing (or about) as the term hypertext link in HTML.

When a web page (source) is linking to a second page (destination) of another website, the first one is a backlink for the second one. In the previous example, the web page http://www.my-website.com is a backlink for the web page http://www.google.com.

If 10 web pages link to a web page, this one has 10 backlinks. Adding the number of backlinks of each web page of a website, we get the number of backlinks of the website.

How can I get the backlinks of a web page ?

With Google, to get the number of backlinks of the web page http://www.fedex.com/Tracking, you just need to search link:http://www.fedex.com/Tracking (click here to see the result).
Caution, Google also takes in account the internal links (coming from the same website).

With Yahoo!, to get the number of backlinks of the web page http://www.zlio.com (notice it’s only the homepage), you need to type link:http://www.zlio.com (click here to see the result).
Yahoo! also allows you to get all the backlinks of a website by typing, linkdomain:http://www.zlio.com (click here to get the result). Notice that the number of returned results for the two searches is not the same.

Why should I have backlinks ?

The backlinks make you more visible over the Internet. What’s the point to have a website, when nobody visits it ?

The more you will have backlinks, the more ways to access your website you will open. In other words, the more backlinks you have, the more visitors you get.

The 3 main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live) have 85% of the search market over the web.
To determine the rank of a web page for a keyword, they are mostly influenced by the number of backlinks it has. Each backlink is considered as a vote. The more backlinks it has, the most popular it is over the web, the better its rank will be.

Be careful, all the backlinks do not worth the same. Some are more important than others. We will give more details in a further article.

The backlinks with GnoZtiK

The GnoZtiK software provides automaticaly the number of backlinks of all the pages of the Google chart.

The number of backlinks of your web page is shown in the status bar.

In the “Chart” tab of your audits (on the website side), GnoZtiK displays a graphic called “Backlink median”. It shows, for each page of results in Google (from the 1 st to the 10 th ), the mean number of backlinks of the results in the page. A horizontal orange line indicates the number of your backlinks. It is preferable to have this line near the level of the 1 st column (page of the 10 best results in Google).

In the “Url” tab of your audits (on the website side), GnoZtiK provides the number of backlinks of your web page (786 in this example) and between brackets the mean number of backlinks of the whole Google chart (230 in the example). It is recommended to have the number of your backlinks higher than the mean number between brackets.

Next week : How to find good backlinks ?

Dear user,

One week ago Amazon informed us that they no longer wished to have Zlio promote Amazon products in the United States. We were advised through a generic email with immediate effect. For the past week we have endeavored to understand and get to the heart of their concerns – Amazon has remained inflexible. As we have yet to resolve the matter, we feel compelled to inform you of this situation.

Of course Amazon is not the only merchant and we are working hard to have as many products and merchants available for you. Within the next 10 days we expect to announce several new agreements with major merchants in the United States. Strangely enough, we continue to work with Amazon outside the United States.

The unfortunate effect of Amazon’s decision is threefold:

1. Shopkeepers in the United States will no longer be able to add Amazon products to their shops.
2. In 20 days, Zlio will remove all Amazon products from your shop and replace automatically as many as possible with identical products from other merchants.
3. Amazon will no longer pay commission to Zlio for products promoted on you shops and this with effect one week ago. Please contact us if you feel that this has resulted in any significant loss to you.

While we regret Amazon’s decision, we are dedicated to provide our users with the most comprehensive list of products as well as the most competitive group of merchants. To that end, we expect to confirm that Barnes & Noble as well as several other large merchants have joined the Zlio network. Freedom of choice guides us in everything we do.

We apologize if this has caused you any inconvenience. Feel free to reach out to me personally through the comments of this blog if you have any thoughts or recommendations. I look forward to hearing from you.

I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank YOU, Zlio users for all the bright and innovative suggestions you keep sending us.

Keep posting your ideas in the “Contact us / Suggest an idea” section, under the “help” tab to help us improve the Zlio service !

And for a bit of breaking news, starting next week, this blog will offer you the best tips to help promote your ZlioShop through SEO*, so keep watching this spot !

* Search Engine Optimization