Friday, September 12, 2008

Search Engine Friendly Ways to Build Link Popularity

Acquiring relevant backlinks to your website is one of the most important parts of any Search Engine Optimization campaign. The search engine's and especially Google value backlinks to your website as an indicator of your website's importance. If a large number of webmaster's have decided to link to your content then you must be an important information hub in your target keyword marketplace.

Link Popularity Checkerwww.uptimebot.com lists link popularity for all major search engines.
If you can manage to get a large number of links from similar or complimentary websites that are ranked high by the search engine's then your website should also start to climb the search engine rankings and increase the traffic to your site. Of course the quality of links, the anchor text of the links, the total number of links, the content of the page your link is on, how many outbound links are on the page, and the ranking of the page your link is on are all extremely important factors to consider when developing a linking strategy for your business.

When adding your links to resource directories where you have control over your link remember to utilize all the tools you have available to you to get the most out of the backlink to your site.

Place your keywords in img alt tags (if you have an image with your link), link title tag, and in the anchor text for your link. You have to remember that when a search engine visits a site that has a backlink to you that they have no idea what your website is about yet. Of course the search engine spider will make decisions based on it's evaluation of the webpage but you can help them (and yourself) out by applying these simple principles to all backlinks you have control over. If you are submitting to a directory make sure you place your link under a category that has your keywords in the title of the category if possible.

You also have the option of buying links to your website, a strategy that has worked and continues to work now, but the search engine's frown on this practice and have a tendency to black hole websites involved in link farming techniques. It's ok to purchase advertising or to seek out strategic partnerships for reciprocal linking of course but purchasing links for the sole purposes of boosting your search rankings is against Google's Terms of Service.

Trust me when I say Google can tell with pretty good accuracy who is buying their links and who is not. It really isn't that hard to tell and does not require that much analysis to figure out. You can perform this type of analysis for yourself, and you should do this to see what the competition in your market is doing. If you do purchase links make sure these are not the only links back to your site. The search engine's like to see a natural growth to the number and quality of your backlinks. Having a couple of high ranking links and no others is a big red flag. Any site that grows naturally will have a pyramidal distribution of links with the greatest number of links at or near the bottom of the ranking ladder.

So you don't want your site to get black holed but you do want to accelerate the rate at which your website climbs the search engine rankings and hence see the benefits of free targeted traffic to your website. The good news is there are several Search Engine friendly ways to improve your link popularity:

1. Write Articles and have them published

The search engine's love content filled web pages since these pages are providing information not just advertising. Writing articles related to your website topic and having them published on high ranking websites is a great first step to building your link popularity.

You may not have traffic coming to your site yet, but these article sites sure do. If someone likes your article a number of these article publishing sites will allow the user to download the article for use on their site. You are allowed to include a resource box with your article which you would obviously use to place a link to your website. Submit your articles to as many article submission sites as you can, they are hungry for your content.

http://ezinearticles.com

http://goarticles.com

http://searchwarp.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com/

2. Publish a Blog

This is a similar idea to writing articles except that you will have total editorial control of your Blog content. Feel free to weave in a few product and affiliate links where appropriate in your Blog content (something many article sites frown upon). Submit your blog to Blog and Web directories to help build the link popularity for your blog. Make sure you link your blog to your main website so anyone reading your Blog will be able to find you. You can also have your Blog syndicated via RSS to really explode your exposure. Be sure to add a resource box to the end of each article with a link to your website so that anyone syndicating your article via RSS will be able to find you.

http://www.blogger.com the internet's most popular blogging service

http://www.geeklog.net run your own blog on your own website with this free php-mysql package

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ - great listing of sites accepting RSS/Atom feeds, or Blog submissions.

3. Submit to Web Directories

There are literally thousands of Web Directories on the internet that will provide you a link to your site either for free, free with a reciprocal link, or for a fee. The most useful listing to have would be in the DMOZ.org directory which is the largest and most respected web directory on the internet. Getting listed can take 6-9 months if at all so you will definitely have to add some other directory targets to your short term plans.

Yahoo! offers an express paid directory listing for $299 USD a year which may be worth the price for your particular website. There are also a number of Quality Free Web Directories that should be on your to do list. Remember to submit to the most relevant category and preferably one with your keywords in the title and link anchor text.

http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html - excellent listing of free web directories

http://www.dmoz.org the holy grail of free directory listings

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/busexpress.html - information on Yahoo Paid inclusion

4. Purchase links or seek out Link Partners

As long as you are continuing to build your links naturally utilizing the techniques above you can supplement your backlink count with a few carefully purchased links on high traffic sites. This can give you a double benefit of helping you boost your link popularity and also provide you a stream of traffic from the website itself if you have targeted your purchase correctly. If your site is about real estate, consider purchasing links in a real estate directory that has a large amount of traffic.

5. Post in relevant Forums

Search engine's love forums because they are moderated by humans and have a lot of ever-changing content on them. These types of sites are indexed regularly and can be a great place to spread the word about your site and gain link popularity. Every time you post your signature is attached to your posting which should contain a link to your site if you have set it up correctly.

6. Provide valuable original content or tools on your website

Writing articles or having unique tools that people would find valuable on your website are great ways to build up backlinks without having to expend effort. If you provide a great tool on your site for free other webmasters will link up to your site without you having to solicit them. The internet is an information source for most people, so give them what they want.

7. Seek Out Complimentary Link Partners

If you find resources that compliment the services you offer on your website, consider contacting the owner's of these websites and trading links with them. Do not make these judgments based on the site's page rank but rather focus on how relevant the other site's content is to yours.

http://www.reciprocalmanager.com excellent program to manage your links directory

Google Tools (type these into the google search form)

Allinurl: keywords tells you all sites with keywords in their site URL

Allintitle: keywords tells you all sites with keywords in the site title tag

Allinanchor: keywords provides a listing of WebPages that contain keywords in the anchor text of links on those pages

Link: www.competitordomain.com tells you who is linking to competitordomain. These sites may want to link back to your site as well (also works on MSN.com ).

For Yahoo:

Linkdomain: www.competitordomain.com same as link: for Google, MSN


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About the Author

Mike offers professional SEO services including link building services from his site SEO Web Guide.

Bonanza Of Traffic Secrets That Will Create A Stampede Of Visitors

I am sure that if you are reading this article then you probably want more traffic to your site. In this article I am going to go over the best form of traffic generation that you can do for your website.

Now I have tested various sources including ppc, natural search engine listings, ezine advertising and traffic exchanges. The clear winner I found to be article marketing as it converted up to 10 times better than other sources based on my own personal testing.

I am not suggesting that you abandon your other methods of traffic generation at all. However, I recommend that you focus on traffic sources that will give you the best results. I am going to go over the strategy that I use to get laser targeted traffic to my website.

I write articles and submit them to all the major article directories. I think of an attention grabbing title. I then proceed to write the introduction and conclusion first as these are the easiest. After that I make bullet points of all the ideas that I have brainstormed. I then proceed to expand these into paragraphs.

Once I have completed the article I proof read it and check it for any grammatical errors. When I am ready I start submitting it to all the major directories. I include a link to my bio to my squeeze page. If the reader likes what they have read they click through to my squeeze page and subscribe to my newsletter. Based on this I generate 10 to 20 leads a day without spending money advertising.

Are you really interested in driving massive traffic to your website?

Here's the answer:

Secrets Of Article Marketing - Download your free ebook now.

Mark Abrahams is a full time internet marketer who has helped others to earn a living online.

10 Proven Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Web Site or Blog!

Creating traffic just takes a little work and the web does the rest!

1. Provide your visitors with free content, that is, articles or blog posts. Your content will be more attractive to your visitors if it's up-to-date or original. You could also offer people the option to reprint the content in their e-zine, blog, or web site. Remember to add your URL at the end of the articles so people can find you. This further attracts new and returning visitors. In addition, submit your original article to directories such as this one - Ezine Articles!

2. Give people a free subscription to your e-zine. Almost everyone is publishing a e-zine nowadays so it's important to give something extra with the free subscription. You could offer a free gift or advertising when people subscribe. If you do not have an ezine, there is a free program on one of my blogs (see Author Box).

3. Offer a free online directory or page of links to helpful resources like I do with my Newsman's Favorite Links Blog. The directory should be full of interesting ebooks, e-zines, web sites, etc. If people find your directory to be a valuable resource they will visit it over and over (see my Author Box).

4. Give your visitors a free ebook. I give links to these throughout my 15 blogs. I love Free! Some ebook writers even allow you to include your own ad or website URL in the ebook and allow other people to give it away when they get it from you. This is called Viral Marketing. Another way to spread the word about you! Hey, you could even write your own ebook and give it away! There are programs for this as well at My Links Blog.

5. Hold free online classes or seminars. They could be held in your web site's chat room. The idea of "live" information will definitely entice people to visit your web site. You will become known as an expert on the topic. You can even offer courses or classes via email to people who sign up.

6. Give visitors a free entry into your contest or sweepstakes. The prizes should be something of interest or value to your visitors. Most people who enter will continually revisit your web site to get the results. This does not have to be cash. It can be a valuable ebook that you got free from a Viral Marketer.

7. Let visitors download free software. It could be freeware, shareware, demos etc. You could even turn part of your site into a free software directory. If you created the software, include your ad inside and let other people give it away.

8. Offer free online services or utilities from your web site. They could be search engine submitting, copy writing, article proofreading, etc. The service or utility should be helpful to your target audience.

9. Give free consulting to people who visit your web site. You could offer your knowledge via e-mail or by telephone. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive. In fact, you can give them links or ebooks covering their area of interest but sign them up for email to get access to the information.

10. If you have an online Club, give your visitors a free membership. People want to belong to something that benefits them, why not your online club. It could be a game club, video club, music club, writing club, etc. You could also give away a free e-zine for club members only.

These are just 10 great ways to persuade visitors to keep in touch with you and that means a better page rank in the Search Engines!

Yours for success!

About the Author: Jim DeSantis is a veteran Broadcast Journalist providing trusted information on a wide variety of topics. Go to Jim's Newsman's Links for lots of free resources and links to Jim's blogs or Subscribe to Jim's Internet Marketing Blog!

How to Get Search Engine Rankings

The following article is going to give you a few tips to building high search engine rankings. High search engine rankings are very important to internet marketers, if you wish for swarms of free traffic coming to your website on an ongoing basis. How do we to get sought after and coveted high ranking on the search engines?

Building backlinks is the number one greatest tool in acquiring high search rankings. If you do not know what backlinks are, they're links to your site from another site. You can get back links from a variety of sources. The fastest way is to outsource a link building project. I always go through getafreelancer.com.

Backlinks are what affects your search engine rankings the most is because if someone decides to put a link to your site on theirs, it's the equivalent to a popularity vote. The search engines pick up on this. The more popular your website is, the higher they will rank you. Be very careful of websites have the power to decrease your website's page rank if they link to you. There sites which will help you find out about sites which might hurt your ranking. You may consider looking at these sites.

Optimizing your website for targeted keywords is very important as well. The search engines need to know what your site is about in order to display it to searchers. The only way they can do this is by the words that are placed throughout your site. Once you have a list of targeted, and researched keywords place them strategically within your sites and/or blogs. Some places you may need to place the keywords are; Meta tags, the title tag, anchor tags, header tags, bold tags, the URL itself, and webpage names should include the most important keywords, your content should be keyword rich, especially at the top and bottom of the sites

In order for the search engine bots to favor you above other a lot of the other websites, your site needs to have a lot of keyword rich content. Going for roughly 20 pages of article sized content about your niche is a great rule of thumb. What I attempt to do is make a list of 20 of the most targeted keywords that we want our site optimized for. Then, write a keyword-optimized article for each keyword.

Utilize these tips and you should be delighted by your results. We do advocate that all articles will land you on the front page of the search engines. However, past experience has shown us that consistent and diligent application of the previous tips will greatly improve our page rank. Getting a high page ranking is not an easy task, a lot of the time. We have to work on it several times a week, and really need to post something of value, that people want and/or need on a daily basis. My suggestion, start by doing the best you are able to do. Taking into consideration the amount of time, skills/knowledge you have.

My thing is this. Regardless of where your at in the internet search engine world, start from where you are at. Thank you for reading.

Walter Scheu Sr. Th. D. writes article reviews for and about products and/or services etc., which may be seen on the internet. He and his bride run a small family farm in North Carolina. This article is about a affiliate marketing and how they did it, and he knows these tips work well! Hopefully you have found this article informative as well as interesting and desire more information. Please click this link: http://the-winning-affiliate-marketer.com