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Do Link Building Strategies Work?

10 2008 Friday

By Lindsay Glass in Linking Strategies

People always ask me how the syndication of press releases and book-marking your blog in many of the social book-marking sites can possibly generate traffic for your site.

The other day I submitted a press release to thousands of online sources for a client. As part of my regular routine, I then put the release up on their web site. Not 20 minutes later they had a new comment on that press release:

“I found your site on Technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.” So do these strategies work? You bet they do! Below are a few link-building strategies for you to use in your own business to help generate traffic for your site.

1. Social Book-Marking Sites

Social Media book-marking is the strategy used in the story above. It’s also usually the quickest way to get your content read. Use social book-marking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Technorati to bookmark your own blogs. Make sure to write an attention grabbing headline and use appropriate keywords so that people searching for your particular topic and/ or product will be able to find you. As the story above shows, this is a simple way to create a loyal fan base.

2. Comment on Other Blogs in Your Industry

Find relevant successful blogs in your particular niche that you can comment on. If you find a blog that already has a loyal fan base, become a part of their community and you can tap into that fan base. Start leaving comments on the blogs with a link back to your web site (or blog). Engaging with these relevant blogs is a great way to get noticed. It can also lead to valuable links back to your site. Just like with any other conversation, join in and share your opinion; however, make sure you present both you and your company in the best light possible by leaving relevant comments that will actually help others in your niche.

3. Article Syndication Sites

Start writing relevant articles about your niche and syndicate them. There a ton of these article syndication sites out there, some that we use and suggest are http://www.ezinearticles.com, http://www.articlemarketer.com, http://submityourarticle.com, http://www.articlebase.com.

Each of these sites allow you to have a byline at the bottom of your article so if someone reads your article and likes what they see they can visit your site for more information.

Submitting your article to these types of sites does several things. One benefit is that it allows you to get your information out there (through RSS feeds) on thousands of web sites and can lead to your content being referenced in other posts and articles. Also, make sure to always include your web address in your author byline because each time your article is picked up on a site, it provides a link back to your site, thus generating highly targeted traffic to your web site and also raising your search engine rankings through your increased number of link-backs.

Another simple hint: In your byline give the reader a reason to visit your web site. For example, “Want to find more insider secrets to successfully grow your business and increase profits? Check out www.yourwebsitehere.com for a free copy of Top 10 secrets to gaining ridiculous income in 6 months.” (Not to mention if they go and sign-up, then they’re on your mailing list!)

Conclusion:

Remember, if you don’t take the time to tell people about you and your business then no one will ever know what they’re missing!

Known as the “Online Celebrity Producer,” Lindsay Glass helps her clients tell their stories in the online world. Lindsay began freelance writing in 2000 and soon after launched her own PR firm that thrived by offering an in-your-face “Guaranteed PR” that was one of the first of its type in the nation. She is now a founding partiner of DNG Media Group, LLC. For more information, please visit http://www.dngmediagroup.com

Using Internal Linking To Get Better Search Engine Exposure

09 2008 Thursday

By Randy Zlobec in Linking Strategies

Anyone who runs a website should be aware of a few basic search engine linking tactics. Used properly you can interlink your website so that Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines will rate you higher in both page rank and search engine results for your keyword/key phrase niche terms. If you’re unaware of what internal linking means, here’s a basic overview.

Internal linking involves the links on your website that point to other pages on your website. Internal linking is very important because it allows the search engine spiders, those automated bots that scour the Internet looking for information, to find all of the pages on your website. In comparison, external linking are links that are on your website which link out to other websites, and there are specific tactics for those as well. In this article, however, we’re going to cover a few simple tactics and strategies to get your internal linking up to speed.

When you’re developing your website, you will tend to put a whole lot of pages of similar information tailored to a specific niche or subject that you want to convey to your visitors. You probably will have information, news, how-to articles, tips and sales pages, where informed visitors can buy your products or services. Your internal linking structure will not only benefit your visitors, but it will help you rank better with the search engines as well.

Having a good navigation system makes Google and Yahoo happy, and in turn, they will reward because you are doing things to improve the visitors’ website experience. So, for example, if you have an internal linking structure that is seamless, intuitive and allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for, search engines will give you more page rank, index more of your web pages and and return higher search results for user queries.

Why? You have taken the time to help your website visitors have an excellent customer experience. As result, your tactics and strategies should be geared towards giving arriving visitors not only the information that they seek, but have it presented in a way that they will and search engine bots will love.

So how do you accomplish this? There are a few basic tactics, you can use that will increase your internal linking structure right off the bat.

Number 1 - use the rel=”nofollow HTML tag for pages that you don’t want to pass rank to Google. For example, let’s say you had a three-page site. Now, we all know that most people have more than three pages for an entire website; however, this will make it easier to follow.

The first page is your home page which gets 100% of the search engine ranking and love. The second pages are an information or information/sales page, with the third is a checkout page. If you don’t use the nofollow tag on one of the pages, both pages will be passed half of 50% each for the link from the home page. So, they’ll each get 25% of the ranking and love passed through from the spiders. The search engine spiders will naturally give your home page the best page rank and index it first. Say, you want to link to the information/sales page and make sure that a lot of people find it, because the information page is what will sell your product or service. For ranking and indexing purposes, you consider the checkout page as useless, so you don’t care if the search engines find it or not. In fact, you’d prefer it if they didn’t index it all. What do you do?

When you link from your home page, you can do one of two things.

Link to the information page only from the home page. Link to both pages but use the no follow tag to the check out page. In that way, if someone arrives who is already sold on your product, they can go directly to your checkout page and buy the product. However, if it is an uninformed visitor, they can clickthrough to your information/sales page or they click on the indexed Google or Yahoo link that’s been picked up by the spider

Two things happen with scenario #2. You give the customer/visitor the option. Because, the search engine is applying SEO love to one page and not two, the page rank passed will not be 25% and 25% for each page, but 0% for the check out page and 50% for the information page which needs it. You maintain the search engine indexing and page rank for those pages that are important. This is just one thing to consider when setting up your website.

This is just one thing that needs to be considered when setting up your website. Professional SEO firms use this algorithm in order to get specific pages on your website to rank hire and return results in the search engine results pages that are much higher than a other pages like your checkout pages which you don’t care about.

Number 2 - Add extra links in your navigation area or footer area that link to important pages and main sections on your website. This extremely easy tactic is often overlooked by many websites, but it does return very good results for deep linking, and most SEO firms will review your footer links when they you on as a candidate in order to utilize that other form of deep linking. The reason for this is that so many people forget to do it, and many Web designers add really cool buttons, images and all kinds of funky image stuff that do nothing to increase your page rank or your results in a search engines. You should remember that search engines can’t follow image links or links created in JavaScript. So, you want to add simple text links that the robots can follow the indexing your website more fully.

These are only two of the tactics that are covered when you hire a professional, savvy SEO firm to optimize your web layout and linking structure.

Randy Zlobec - RZ Concepts a search engine marketing company specializing in website promotion and internet marketing. http://www.rzconcepts.com

Website Optimization Tips for Link Building and SEO

09 2008 Tuesday

By Jeffrey Smith in Linking Strategies

Since link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO, let’s take a minute to revisit some very important link building and website optimization tactics.

Trust, timing and authority are three metrics that impact the target site for building links. Sites that rank at the helm of search engines (above the fold on the first page) do so because of fundamental characteristics shared across multiple industries, websites and topics.

Sites ranking in the top 10 are there because they (1) either started before others realized the potential for those keywords and have an advantage of time to market / indexing saturation (2) because they understand link popularity and have built a plethora of links from a variety of sites or (3) because they understand the value of a good domain, site architecture and on page optimization.

Not to say that this is the only way, but we are only focusing on three metrics for the sake of argument. I have mentioned before that chronology begets authority, in layman’s terms, if you started years ago optimizing, refining and grooming your site for higher search engine visibility, you understand the layers involved in producing high ranking search engine result pages.

The typical process is, you make a change to a page, you wait for the page to get indexed (typically you may build some links to expedite the process). Then when the page is indexed, you measure the result of your on page adjustments (tweaks to content, titles, tags, and code), you monitor the impact of the inbound links then evaluate how to bump it up another notch.

This process of refinement is an ongoing obsession until the goal is achieved (until you break the top 20) and then you have to wait for time to infer the element of trust to your page which results in the search result creeping its way to the top 10. Based on how well you implemented the previous steps will determine where your page finally stabilizes in the search results.

I am referring to more competitive terms here, long tail key phrases (keywords that have 3 or more keywords combined) can move to the top 10 unchallenged with the right tactic. Balancing your profile of long tail and competitive phrases is imperative for stabilizing traffic and appealing to an entire audience rather than just the tip of the iceberg.

By selecting a range of keywords, creating content and building links back to that content using a variety of keywords and keyword modifiers.

You are essentially priming the pump for what is to come after 30-90 days when those links have had a chance to pass the quality check from search engines and start passing real value. Link building is cumulative, so understanding the law of cycles and when to fertilize the seeds you plant (your keywords) is crucial for harvesting search engine traffic as a result.

In any case, once you are able to measure the impact, you can assess if you (a) need to leverage other pages or parts of your site (such as creating a series of posts or pages on the topic) to get enough traction for the keywords in question or (b) just need more links to give the page buoyancy in search engines.

The idea here is to keep in mind that a natural progression towards a keyword objective is much safer to acquire over time. There is no need to disregard a moderate link velocity (link velocity is the rate in which you gain or lose links to your pages).

The ideal scenario would be to couple links with timely bursts of content with the intention of creating more value topically in the site. More pages equate to additional opportunities to rank for related overlapping keywords that you can interlink (much like wikipedia) to bring each page up in the rankings like the buddy system.

Which leads to the next point, there is a natural phenomenon that occurs over time as words stem across semantically related keywords and synonyms, this is referred to as “keyword stemming”. Ideally this process takes 3-6 months for a given range of keywords as long as a series of fresh or seasoned inbound links are linking to the page in question.

The first objective for SEO is to put the site in order (including site architecture, robots.txt file, .htacess file, remove spider traps and coding errors) in other words groom the on page factors.

The second objective is to create the appropriate content that will eventually mature into the perfect on page topical relevance and mature to an independently ranking page in 3-6 months. Creating content with the objective of future tense expression is part of a layered and tiered optimization strategy and is imperative for either creating 301 redirects eventually or using those pages as anchors for fresh related content (by linking from them to new pages).

The third objective is to build relevance for other pages besides the home page. Creating the appropriate balance of page rank and how page rank flows throughout the site (as a result of navigation, site maps, anchor text and back links).

This step is crucial for developing a site with website authority which is a key ranking factor based on trust, relevance and popularity. A common ratio is 35% of the total inbound links should go to your homepage, the other 65% should be to deep links (pages other than your home page).

The fourth objective for SEO would be to create keyword stemming across a series of predetermined keywords through systematic expression. Start with 10, those 10 turn into 20 or 30, then develop another 20 keywords (to create topical relevance for the topic) and those 20 turn into 50 keywords, etc.

Then in 6 months, as you add new keywords each month the previous round creates keyword stemming to lay the foundation for the next round and the next round of link building and content creation. This is one very successful search engine optimization strategy that uses timing, link diversity and content on a stable platform to produce relevant results based on on page and off page SEO factors unifying harmoniously.

By managing these steps, it is possible with a game plan and series of tiered strategies to acquire multiple traffic bearing keywords across an entire range of phrases that an individual may use to find your website. Instead of relying on a narrow range of keywords to deliver traffic (since you never really know which terms will outperform others until you optimize them). This tactic is based on topical relevance, link diversity, deep links, aging pages and website authority and using a variety of anchor text for link popularity to promote keyword stemming.

This is one of many methods you can use to scale your results to climb over your competition and gain the highest potential relevance score for each page of your website. That is, if you can see beyond the parts an view your website holistically as an interdependent organism capable of scaling to accommodate distinct conversion objectives.

By selecting a range of keywords, creating content and building links back to that content using a variety of keywords and keyword modifiers.

The first objective for SEO is to put the site in order (including site architecture, robots.txt file, .htacess file, remove spider traps and coding errors) in other words groom the on page factors.

One-Way Link Building Using Articles

08 2008 Tuesday

By Richard Day in Linking Strategies

Writing quality articles is one of the best, free ways to build traffic to your website or blog. One-way links pointing to your website or blog is what you need to build your traffic.

One-way links are links that point to your website without your having to put a link on another website. Formerly, people would trade links: “I will link to your website if you link to mine.” Although this works to some extent, they balance each other out and aren’t very effective. In addition, when your site is about health food and you trade links with a site that is about ball bearings, it can do you harm.

Google and other search engines are on the prowl for good content. When they find it, they will send more traffic to a website or blog that produces consistent, quality informative articles.

One point about consistency: Consistency is very important: For example, if you write two to three articles per week, be consistent. Don’t write four articles, and then skip a couple of weeks. If you work hard and put together a large number of articles, don’t post them all at once. . . space them out.

One-way link building is more effective if you write about a topic using a keyword phrase that you are targeting. For example, if you don’t have access to software such as Word Tracker, or Ad Word Analyzer or a number of other analysis tools, you can go to http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ Seobook offers all you need, and it is free. Make sure that you put quotes around your keyword search phrase. For example, look for “one way link building” with quotes rather than one way link building. This will tell the search tool that you are looking for the exact phrase.

Spend some time searching for keyword phrases that show greater than 2000 searches per month and have a total number of results less than 10,000. It is even better if the total number of results is less than 5,000. You are looking for a keyword phrase that is popular enough to be used in searches, but that brings up a reasonable number of results so that your article has a chance of being shown on the first search page. Granted, this will take some time finding the phrase you want to feature, but the results are worth it. Just come as close as you can to these metrics.

Once you have found the particular phrase you want to write about, you need to use the keyword phrase: - In the title of the article, - Three times per one-hundred words, - In the last sentence of your article, - In the link to your article or webpage.

One-way link building can have a tremendous effect on the traffic you receive.

In this article of One-Way Link Building Using Articles, Part 2, let’s consider:

The length of the article
how to use paragraphs
where to publish your article
consistency of article publishing
quality of the articles
how to find the keyword phrase to feature
the keyword density in the article

Article Length:

Your article should be about three to five-hundred words. You need to be sure that you use enough words to give some quality content, but internet surfers have ADD and don’t spend too much time in one place. If your article has to be more than five-hundred words, then it is best to break the article in to one, two or three parts as you see fit. In fact, making your articles short enough to have good content but breaking them up helps you to get more one way links to your site. Two or three articles provides more one way links, of course.

Paragraphs:

Your paragraphs need to be short.

They can actually be as short as one sentence long if you really want to make your point stand out.

Don’t have long blocks of dense writing. People will run from your article rather read it. They want to breeze through your article picking up bite-sized chunks of information…they don’t want have to work hard. It is easier to keep track of where you are on the page too if the paragraphs are short.

Where to publish:

One-way link building is most effective if you publish your article on your own blog first. Get a WordPress blog. The software is free, it is powerful and it is fun to use. There are many plug-ins that are also free to let you customize your blog, too.

After you have posted the article on your own blog, submit your article to:

Digg
Mixx
Onlywire
Reddit
Shoutwire
StumbleUpon
articledashboard.com
ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
isnare.com

These article sites are highly ranked, free sites that will provide one-way links to your site. If you want to spend the time, you can place your articles on a couple hundred other article sites, but the payoff is not as great as just using the sites listed above.

If you decide publish your article to a large number of websites, look for article submission software. It will automate this process to some extent. Or, if you would like, you can go to elance.com or Guru.com and hire someone to submit your articles. For that matter, you can get competent writers to write the articles for you.

If you are marketing online, put your squeeze page URL in the author biography section so that your article drives more traffic to your squeeze, or opt-in page. If you are serious about building one-way links to your site, there are a few professional companies that will submit your article to a large number of sites for a reasonable fee. I use one company, and it saves me hours of work.

One-way link building is one of the best ways you can build traffic to your site - and it is free! Now get to work

Richard Day - helps train and inform internet marketers how to increase website traffic. He employs the use of articles and videos to make it easy to learn the secrets of website promotion. visit http://www.trafficbumper.com to unlock the secrets. Here is a site that can help you with article submission: at http://www.submityourarticle.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=923

How To Create Profitable Back Links For More Web Traffic

07 2008 Thursday

By Carl Davidson in Linking Strategies

Back links are really important in the world of Search Engine Optimization. If you want your site to do well in search engine listing results you have to have a good page ranking. If you want a higher page ranking you’re going to need to create lots and lots of back links.

It takes time and talent to do this but it will be worth it. Google receives 3,000 search inquiries a second. That’s 180,000 per minute. If you want your share of this avalanche of free business, you will need to work hard and work smart.

Back links are simply a link from somewhere else to your site. It sounds easy to create them and it is easy, but you will need thousands of these links and you will need new ones every month. They may only take a minute to create but to create hundreds or thousands take lots of time and talent.

How Many Links Do You Need?

Lots and lots. You need more than the competitor that is ranked number one with Google. If you do that, you will be number one. Let’s take a look at a few areas and see how many we would need to dominate that field. - Top company in “search engine optimization” had 52,100 links - Top company in “web site design” had 54,200 links - Top Company in “custom T-shirts” had 72,000 links - Top Company in “Tiffany Lamps” had 825

As you can see, the more competitive the area, the more links it takes to be number one. Plan to add as many links as you can every month for as long as you stay in business. Remember that your competitors are adding new links every month too, so the number of links you need keeps growing.

Beware Of Short Cuts To Success

As you surf the web, you will see sites that advertise short cuts to link creation. They offer to sell you hundreds of links. As you evaluate these services, realize that the quality of your links is important to your success. The sites you link to must concern themselves with similar topics to your site or they may be disregarded by the search engines. Also, the quality of the linking site is important. If the site is known for spam or porn, you may be seriously penalized search engine rankings just for being associated with it. Buying back links is fraught with danger. Choosing the site you link and actually creating the link to is a much better alternative.

Using Articles To Create Links

Writing informative articles is a great way to create back links. You can use the articles on your site and publish them to article directory sites. Every site that publishes your article will create a back link to your site. Other sites may pick up your article and publish it creating “viral” publishing and more links. You should assign someone to write one or two articles every month without fail or hire an outside source to do this for you.

Using Video To Create Links

Another great way to create links and sell as well is to create video clips that tell your story or sell your product in an interesting way. You can use these clips to sell on your site and you can publish them to video sites like youtube.com, metacafe.com, viddler.com and many others. These get great rankings in the search engines. You should assign someone to write one or two articles every month without fail or hire an outside source to do this for you.

Using Social Networks To Create Links

Social networks like myspace.com are great ways to create quality links. Myspace is one of the most visited sites on the web, so links from it make your site rank as very popular. To create links from social sites, open an account , link to others with similar interests, and make comments that include a link to your site.

Using Blogs To Create Links Blogs want comments from readers. Visit blogs on similar topics to yours and on any popular blogs, leave a comment on a posting. Your comment can contain a link to your site. This should not be just self serving but should continue the dialog. For example, if your site deals with web marketing and you see a blog article on meta tags, you might make a comment like, “excellent article with good points. I also found good meta tag tools at www.yoursite.com” One great way to find good blogs is to set up a Google alert for all keywords you use and you will be notified anytime a post is made with those key words. Then, you simply visit the blog and make a comment.

That Sounds Like A Lot Of Work

It is a huge amount of work but just keep remembering those 180,000 inquiries per second. If you do not have the time to do this kind of work, there are micro ad agencies on the web who can do it for you. Outsourcing this work is very cost effective as it allows you to keep selling and managing while someone else creates the links that drive your site to the top of the inquiry list.

Carl Davidson - This article discusses how to create profitable back links for generating web traffic through content creation. It disucsses using artilces, videos, blogs and social networking to create web traffic and successfully create web traffic though mweb marketing that does not cost time. Many companies outsource this work to firms like ours. Visit http://www.proto-sell.com . This article was produced by Sales And Management Solutions Inc.

5 More Hot Tips For Linking With Other Web Sites

06 2008 Thursday

By admin in Linking Strategies

In this second article, we examine some more things to watch out for when you are creating a link building campaign. Hopefully by the end, you will be in a better position to obtain and maintain good quality backlinks that help launch your site up the search engine rankings.

1. Is The Links Page Indexed By The Search Engines?

If a link on pages is not being read by the search engines, then it is not of much use to you. The further the links page is from the home page, the less likely it is to be indexed. If a page has PR, then you know that it has been indexed (by Google at least), although no PR does not mean that the page has not been indexed. You can conduct your own test by typing cache: followed by the url of the page in question. If the page has been crawled, you should see some results.

2. Should You Be Wary Of 3 Way Links?

Many people feel that direct reciprocal linking has limited value these days. One way around this is the idea of 3 way links; where site A links to site B, and site B links to site C. Site C then links back to site A again. One problem with this is that it is harder to control where exactly your link is going to end up. If as a matter of policy you have decided that relevance if of paramount importance, then 3 way linking may not be for you, Or at least, it may be harder to organise.

3. Association With Particular Sites?

Your decision whether to link or not should be a bit easier having read this article (hopefully). You should have some criteria in mind as to what constitutes a site you want to be associated with. If the site in question meets your criteria, then add a link. Equally, if that site does not meet your criteria, then steer clear.

4. How To Keep Track Of Links Back To Me?

This is perhaps the hardest and in some cases the most time consuming part of your link building process. Obtaining links is a painstaking and time consuming process, and you don’t want to give your work away too lightly. To protect your links and the integrity of your sites, you should check that your link partners are keeping to their side of the bargain and keeping your links live. You could do this by maintaining a spreadsheet of all of the links, and checking them one by one. Ouch! I can suggest an easier way to do this which will save you many hours a week though. I will go into that at the end of this article.

5. What Are The Best Links To Have?

There is no definitive answer the this question. Maybe one way to answer this is the links that deliver the most traffic to you. Or perhaps the links that give the best value to your customers. There is no right answer. One way to find good potential partners is to type in a specific keyword into the search engines, and contact some of the sites that come up at the top of the results. These should be good potential partners.

What you have now are some good ideas for a link building strategy that allows you to make good decisions based on sound principles, and now you should be better placed to make those decisions.

Charlie Cory - You can make your link building life an easier by using tools that save you time and money. Link Checking is a breeze when you have the right tool to help you. This tool can also help you find better link partners. You can try some new link building techniques. These are very successful. Techniques that take the pain away from the link building process.

One Way Linking Strategies Using Link Directories

06 2008 Tuesday

By John Baril in Linking Strategies

Building high quality links to your website is one of the most important things that you can do to improve your search engine rankings. You can think of these links as votes in favor of you website (this is the way the search engines see it). Acquiring high quality links for your site can be very time consuming, however it is a very important thing to do if you want to get great search engine rankings.Before I continue, let me quickly define Link Popularity (link pop) for you. Link Popularity simply refers to the amount and quality of inbound links to your site. There are many free tools available on the internet for checking your link popularity.

How Link Directories Can Help You

Using link directories is one of the best ways to get quality links to your site. Just so you know, a link directory is a web site that has a large collection of links which are organized by topic. People who are searching for a particular type of web site will use links directories as an alternative to doing a search engine query.

There are thousands upon thousands of link directories out there to choose from. I recently typed the keywords: link directories in to Google and received 1,120,000 hits.

When you submit your site to a link directory, it is edited by a human. Your submission will either be accepted or rejected, depending on the quality of you site, and whether it is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. If your site gets accepted, the users of the link directory will consider your site to be credible. Also, the search engines love links that point to your website from quality link directories.

You will want to have your link placed on as many link directories as you can. There are three reasons for doing this. First, you will get targeted traffic to your site when people search the directory for your type of site. Second, you will increase you search engine rankings as your link popularity increases. Third, having links from link directories will help your web site pages to get indexed quickly.

Some Features Of Link Directories

When you submit to a link directory, you are usually given 3 choices that look something like this: o Featured Links o Regular Links o Regular Links With Recipricol The featured links will normally keep your listing towards the top of the list. There is always a charge for featured links (this is one of the ways that link exchanges make their money). The trouble here is that if a lot of people are buying featured links for a particular category, you may still be pushed quite a way down the list. With a lot of link directories, the regular links and the regular links with recipricol are offered for free. When I submit to directories, I always choose regular links and I only choose free ones. Listen, there is such an overwhelming number of link directories out there, that if you start paying for your submissions, you will quickly empty your bank account. There are plenty of free ones to choose from (just type free link directories into Google, and you will be amazed at the numbers). A final note here is always choose the regular link (one way) as opposed to the recipricol option. These days, search engines consider one way links to be more valuable that recipricol links (recipricol links are still OK, but they are not as good as one way links).

Link directories are ranked by Google just like any other web site. The range in page rank will be between 0 and 8. You will want to spread your submissions between all of the page rank values. This will make your links look more natural in the eyes of the search engines.

The Submission Process

There are basically three ways that you can carry out the submission process.

1. Sign in to your favorite search engine and type in “free link directories”. You will get enough hits here to keep you busy with submitting for the rest of your days.

2. Purchase one of the many link directory submission software packages out there. These packages are normally semi-automated and will save you a huge amount of time.

3. You can pay someone to do the submitting for you. There are plenty of web sites that will offer to do your submissions for a fee, but be careful, as some of them are quite spammy. Make sure to do your due diligence first. You should aim to do about 200 to 300 submissions per month.

Good luck with your linking campaign. Remember the importance of using link directories as a key strategy for gaining targeted traffic to your website.

Author: John Baril - I live in Delta, British Columbia, Canada with my wife and 2 young boys. I am a full time Paramedic and I love my career. In my spare time, I may be found flying, hiking, renovating our house or playing sports with the boys. Check out my affiliate marketing website: http://www.wealth-dynamo.com

3 Shocking Ways That Web Masters Reduce Their Link Exchange Results

03 2008 Monday

By Richard Adams in Linking Strategies

Swapping links is still a tremendously popular method of building incoming links to your website and so increasing your visitor numbers.

But there are still an astonishingly large number of ways in which web masters make it difficult for other people to exchange links with them.

And let’s be honest - the easier you make it for other web masters, the more links you will end up with.

So let’s examine some of these ways as examples of tactics you should avoid if at all possible in your campaigns. All three of these examples are things I have seen on live websites in the last week or so, so these are really going on right now.

1) Demanding A Minimum PageRank (PR)

To many web masters, PR is the be all and end all of link swapping. To a certain degree this makes sense but be aware that Google is getting smartrer all the time. If it spots a site with no PR0 sites linking to them then this may well look unnatural.

And Google doesn’t like annatural. It’s one way Google ascertains whether you’re trying to “game the system” and if you get caught you may find yourself delisted from Google altogether.

What’s more, a PR0 site will likely gain Page Rank at the next Google update if it’s a new site, so you would have had a quality link on that site if you were willing to be patient.

Infact, I’ve had sites go from PR0 to PR4 in a single indexing (and plenty of other people have experienced the opposite as their Page Rank vanishes overnight).

So the point is - you’re making decisions based on a highly fluid and flexible quality like Page Rank whihc will be constantly changing. And as a result you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Make the *quality* of the site in question the primary decision-making factor and I think you’ll have a far better long-term strategy.

2) No Blog Links

It’s true that spam blogs (or “splogs”) are rife but equally there is an ever growing number of good-quality blogs with excellent content, high readerships and lots of incoming links.

Excluding blogs altogether rules out exchanges with a huge pool of sites that are perfect for link exhcanges so take off your blinkers.

Indeed, with blogs being accepted into standard search engines and directories *as well as* specialised blog and RSS directories, this can even mean that they offer your site even more that a standard website.

3) No Link Exchange Form

Too many sites still expect web masters to email them to exchange links rathet than filling in a small form on their website. Not only is this frustrating for potential linkers because it’s so slow but emails increasingly get lost in cyberspace or in today’s spam filters and so may not even be received.

So use a contact form which makes life easier for visitors to your site and also ensures you get all the information you need to make a decision about te suitability of potential link partners.

Richard Adams is the creator of an exciting, brand new course on how to build your own website from scratch in 7 days or less with no technical knowledge. Take a look today at Ecommerce Website Design

Link Building 101

03 2008 Monday

By Jason Storm in Linking Strategies

Two of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.

In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.

Before we get started, it’s important to understand the fundamentals…

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. An ‘internal link’ is a link within the same website. An ‘external link’ takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The term ‘backlink’ means when another website links to yours.

There are 4 different types of links:

* URL Link - This is simply a website url that is a link.

* Text Links (aka static links) - This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)

* Image Links - An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

* Dynamic Links - These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have ‘extra codes’ to perform special functions.

(these types of links can appear in many different forms)

It is important to be able to recognize these types of links, even if you are not familiar with web design and programming. You don’t have to memorize the codes, just learn to identify each type of link.

Links provide navigation for human visitors and for ’spiders’ (aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit and ‘index’ your website. This means that they gather information about your site in order to list it in their search results.

When the search engine spiders index your website, they follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It’s important to know that search engines cannot follow ‘dynamic links’ and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says ‘no follow’.

The place where ‘no follow’ is commonly found is in the “meta tags” section of the website. Simply put, meta tags are information that is for the spiders only and is not seen by human visitors. You can see the code for any website in your browser by choosing ‘view source’. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)

If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.

What types of links should you get?

There are 2 types of links that you can get:

* One-way links - A one-way link is when another website links to you and you don’t link back to them.

* Reciprocal links - A reciprocal link is when a website links to you and you link back to them.

One-way links are more valuable in the eyes of the search engines. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, etc.

Also, it’s important to know that you can get links that have ‘no value’ in the eyes of the search engines, but they bring you hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors…

Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the better. However, building links takes time and energy and if you focus on getting ‘high-quality links’, you will get a bigger return on your investment. 50 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective than 1000 ‘low quality links’.

What’s a high quality link? - Links that brings you Page Reputation (which shows the search engines that other related websites consider you to be important), and links that give you PageRank. Sometimes both at once, sometimes not…

To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain links for targeted keywords. For this reason it’s necessary to start with Keyword Research.

If your website is about “bird watching”, the first step is to ‘do keyword research’ and find out which keyword you should aim for. While you could just start getting text links for the keyword phrase “bird watching”, if no one is searching for that - you won’t get any visitors. There’s no sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no one is looking for.

Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you might want to pick a “lower hanging fruit”.

Here is a great free keywords tool. (The numbers you see are searches/day.)

Another important part is making sure your page is optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are focussed on building one way links to your site but the links have anchor text which doesn’t even appear on your page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely assuming that you have some competition for your targeted keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn’t matter).

In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or maybe you are building one way links to your site but they are just url links and not anchor-text links. Another site that has less links than you but better quality (anchor-text) will be likely to rank higher.

Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have anchor text which includes the primary and secondary keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word with their keywords. Their algorithm looks at all the words on your page and how they relate to each other.

So, there’s no sense in building one way links if your content is not worthwhile. You want to optimize your pages for your visitors first. Then, you can go through and “sprinkle” your keywords. Then, go out and get one way links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords, ideally getting most of these links from websites that are related to yours.

Yes, Google also looks at the relationship between your website’s content and the websites that links to you’s content. Fewer links to your business site from other business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more links coming to you from a site about video games..

Don’t make these link building mistakes:

* Don’t spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites with no PR.

* Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. Especially be careful about Site Wide links. If your website only has a few backlinks one day and the next day you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.

* Don’t spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.

* Make sure the links you get are actually worth something, don’t get “No-Follow” links.

Happy Link Building!

Jason Storm is an SEO Expert who consults for small-business owners who want to increase their search engine rankings by using content optimization and one way link building strategies. Visit his website Affordable SEO Services for more info and articles.

SEO Sleuthing and The Importance of Tracking Your Progress

03 2008 Friday

By Jeffrey Smith in Linking Strategies

Sometime you have to go backward in order to move forward. What happens when you hit your keyword ceiling (when you have squeezed the last drop of traffic from your keywords) and the traffic plateaus? Just like an SEO sleuth, you have to dawn your research cap, break out the optimization map and change your SEO method to produce exciting new results.

Charting your progress is an imperative step in the SEO process, yet oftentimes the fear of change and upsetting the balance can be paralyzing to webmasters and bloggers alike as they tend to overlook the transient nature of search engines and their algorithmic stability.

The only consistency is knowing that at any time the search results could become inconsistent and that the very same criteria your ranking strategy is hinged on could shift at any time along with your rankings, so it is better to diversify your tactics, as search engines only call it as they see it.

As new PHD endorsed scripts graduate from the testing servers and are injected into the data centers with great frequency (to see how the SERPs react) it’s almost as if search engineers like to keep you guessing when it comes to sculpting the most relevant result.

Tell tale signs of a new algorithm roll-out for example are when some of your most established rankings take a dip “like Snagglepuss (exit stage left)” and the old peek-a-boo ranking “now you see me, now you don’t” routine makes its debut at the expense of your site’s popularity.

This is where the value of search analytics comes into play. This is what really allows you to delve into the who, what, where, when and how, nuts and bolts of your content which allows you to optimally refine your message to target audience. Things like finding which post had the higher reader engagement, where they went from there, if the calls to action were successful and produced measurable results.

On the flip-side, the simple truth is, some keywords just don’t convert - they are either too broad, too narrow or simply are not the ideal match when people are initiating queries from search engines. So, despite how complicated or simple it is to optimize a phrase, if there is no traffic, you just have to think of it as an exercise (better luck on the next keyword). In any capacity, sometimes you have to cut your losses and just move on.

The only thing stopping you from attaining a high ratio of pre-qualified traffic from search engines is your ability to identify, optimize and funnel the right keywords for your sites content.

Whether it is inspiration, imagination or common sense makes no difference. The fact is, by adding strategic keywords that have a proven track record attached, you can study your analytics / user tracking statistics to introduce topics that further establish your authority in the industry and have a higher degree of engagement to set the stage.

If you spent a fair amount of time using keyword research tools, then you know there are some pretty obscure keywords that manage to coral several thousand online stragglers to the apex of randomness. Whether it converts or not is another topic, but since conversion is all about “setting the right mood to promote action”. If you structure your content accordingly, you can surprise roving visitors who floated in like fruit flies on a whim, with a fulfilling user experience. Conversions starts when you provide something so unique that it makes visitors stop and think “wow” just for a moment to appreciate the concept (which is more than can be said for most one traverses).

The key here is not to offer a bland value proposition, distinction is rewarded with curiosity. So, with this in mind don’t think lack luster, think blockbuster. Some times you have to break your own rules to find something new. If you always stay within the realm of the predictable in your approach or method, then you are doomed to repeat mistakes as well as previous breakthroughs (hence languishing on the premise of previous).

Familiarity can be a crutch that prevents one from reaching their full potential. For example, turning your titles into streamlined calls to action vs. the over SEO’d titles that read like ticker-tape humdrum definitions rather than something you would consider clicking. SEO is one thing, creating emotionally charged content with purpose is another, which is where the “marketing” in internet marketing warrants its definition.

The concept is to relinquish the ordinary and create extraordinary titles to entice the reader’s attention with a distinguished poise to stand out from the crowd in contrast to the other 9 search results on a page. In this instance, if your site is strong enough (as a result of topical authority) all that is required are a few pivotal keywords in the title or body to be returned as a high ranking relevant result. The advantage with this tactic is not about where you are in the fold, but that you create a “click trigger” as opposed to a utilitarian or bland call to action / title.

Likewise, instead of letting your keywords lose potency over time and recede back to the zero point, harvesting a batch of keywords from the past and coupling them with re-optimized titles could evoke a repeat performance in the top 10 and drive additional targeted traffic to your site. Yet, without a stint of investigation or the impulse to act on collected data, you may neglect multiple opportunities to rekindle the top 10 spotlight as a consequence.

Now for the exercise:

Just like waves in the sea, your site is on a voyage which changes every time you add new content. If you chart your results, it is clear that your site is constantly maturing as a result of link aging, gaining more trust, the links that influence you, etc. In order to keep afloat and establish a progressive course, one great exercise is to go back 90 days and act as if you had to re-optimize your site for your main phrases again. Then conduct an analysis for the keywords that were top 10 then (3 months ago) and see how much you have either slipped, advanced or remained buoyant since that time.

The objective is, to gauge how fast your pages fall from grace for your respective range of keywords. As the freshness of a new blog post or page fades, it must be supplemented with solid links or reinvigorated from within the site to remain in the spotlight as a relevant topic for search engines.

After you establish your rate of decline in the SERPs (which should not be more than 20 positions for an authority site for your keywords over a 90 day period) you still have a chance to resuscitate your content and hedge some additional traffic before they teeter off into obscurity.

The entire purpose of this post was (a) don’t overlook resources that are right under your nose and (b) sometimes you have to slow down and smell the flowers to chart the route of your site over time as you can tell where a site is headed, based on where it has been.

Have your rankings skyrocketed? were phrases that were in the 40’s finally evolved into top 10 positions as a result of authority? and how many keywords are you missing the mark on as a result of simply omitting the research. Sometime you have to look back to get a better idea of how to move forward. So perhaps now it’s time to brush off your dusty SEO tools to see where you stand in context to your competition.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

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