Enter The Net

As of December 2009, 38% of U.S. adults age 65 and older go online, a significantly lower rate of internet adoption than the general population (74%) and even the next-oldest group (70% of adults age 50-64 years old go online).

In addition, just 26% of U.S. adults age 65 and older have home broadband access, compared with 56% of adults age 50-64 years old (and 60% of all adults).

Older internet users are also likely to stay in the shallow end of the internet activities pool: email and search. A few pioneers have jumped into the social media deep end, but these seniors are the exception, not the rule.

And while the Pew Internet Project has found that mobile access is closing the gap between African Americans and whites, and mobile users are more likely to participate in social media, just 16% of U.S. adults age 65 and older go online wirelessly, via a laptop or handheld device. By contrast, 55% of all adults connect to the internet wirelessly.

All this could change if more older adults start carrying internet-enabled mobile devices, but for now, the majority of older adults remain offline and in the stationary media majority.

Source: http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2010/January/38-of-adults-age-65-go-online.aspx

by Susannah Fox

Jan 13, 2010

This page is for students of the workshop “Make The Search Engines Love Your Website.”

Most of these links stay on this site. Therefore, they open in this same window. Use your browser’s BACK button to come back to this page.

Special Workshop Links:

• Link to workshop presentation
• Link to a presentation called “12 Things You Can Do To Get Your Website Noticed.” It’s good BASIC review information.
• TOOL: Link Code Generator
• INFO: Tips On How To Find The Best Key Words
• INFO: All About Link Exchanges | Sign Up For The Enter The Net Link Exchange
• INFO: Google Places
• INFO: Google Accounts

Feedback:

If you would like to leave comments, please scroll to the bottom of almost any of the articles. Some tips about comments:

• Fill in the “URI” box to make sure the comment links back to your site. That gets you an incoming link.
• Here is a good place to leave a general comment about the workshop: Make The Search Engines Love Your Website.
• If you want a little thumbnail of your face or your business logo to appear next to your comment, just go to Gravatar and follow the directions. As long as you use the same email address there as you do in the comment, your picture will appear.

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• Design Your Own Website: 20-week course. You leave with a complete WordPress website, all you need to know about how to maintain and market it. Plus, you have the skills to build as many more as you want!

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Contact Me by clicking this Link.

One of the most important factors in organic search engine optimization is incoming links to your site.

Simply put, this means getting other websites to link to yours. These incoming links serve two main functions.

1. The search engines find your site by following links from other sites. In general, you want the search engines to visit your site as often as possible, especially if you have a dynamic site.
2. The search engines credit your site with popularity based on the number and quality of incoming links it has. The core principle behind this is that if the owner of a site is willing to send his/her visitors to you – he/she must like your site. It is a strong vote of popularity.

A Client Link Exchange Page

Of course, incoming links can also just bring traffic to your site, with no help from the search engines at all. People click them.

There is no evidence that a reasonable number of outgoing links on a website causes any problems with the search engines.

Therefore, partnering with like-minded website owners to create a link exchange can be mutually beneficial.

Enter The Net operates a link exchange for its clients. The premise is quite simple. We create a page of links to all of our participating clients. We then place that page on each of their sites.

The end result is that all of our clients are linked to each other. Over the years, this has proven to be very successful. We can check the results of the link exchange by asking the search engines what incoming links it sees for any page of any site.

Here are some examples:

Meridian Natural Medicine Link Exchange Page

Teri Alameda Safety Consulting Link Exchange Page

How to see what incoming links the search engines recognize.
This works for Google and Yahoo.

1. Go to Google or Yahoo.
2. In the search dialog box, type (no quotes, though) “link:http://www.[yoursite.com]“
3. The results will show you who the search engines see as linking to you. Keep in mind that Google is very tight about recognizing incoming links and Yahoo is very loose. Even one or two Google-recognized links can be helpful.

So, try this experiment.

• Leave the Meridian Natural Medicine Link Exchange Page open.
• Open a new tab or window, go to Google, type link:http://www.meridian-nd.com into the search box and click Search.
• See if any of the links listed there appear on her link exchange page. If they do, it shows the power of the link exchange.
• Try the same with Yahoo.

Some people worry about linking to sites they do not know all that well. Enter The Net places a disclaimer at the top of each page. Also, the link exchange page is NEVER part of the main navigation of the site. It has to be linked from the main site in order to be found by the search engines, but that link is usually found in an obscure place.