Monthly Archive for August, 2008

How Link Building Helps Your search engine Ranking

The term “link building” is becoming a common word in online marketing strategies because it directly relates to how popular your website is. But what exactly is “link building”?

Understanding link building

Link building is one tactic that website owners discovered as a way to get their websites to appear in the top results of search engines. The method by which search engines, such as Google, qualify websites was based on their web page rankings, in other words, it’s basically a question of website popularity. In early years, search engines determined this position by the number of “keywords” they have on their website, either on the text itself, the title, etc., which is basically any and all elements on the page.

Naturally, web programmers for the search engines figured out that website owners found a loophole in the existing system and were cramming way too many keywords into their web pages. They then designed the search engines to determine the quality of the website based on the number of links from external websites. Their thinking was, this website must be good or informative which is why many people are providing a link to it.

Theoretically, it was sound in principle. Unfortunately, as with any other good intention, this condition was also abused. Website owners found a way to acquire and set links towards their websites by listing themselves in link farms. Link farms are basically websites with nothing but links to other websites.

Thus, search engines got another overhaul and up to date, this is how they determine the quality of websites – they assigned a quality factor to the links pointing to your websites. Meaning it wasn’t in the number of links that your page has been referred to but in whether these links also have a high quality rating that will enable your website to be in the top pages of the search engines.

How to maximize link building in order to get high web page rankings?

Now that you have a basic comprehension of how link building was developed, what are the things that you need to do to initiate good links to raise your web page ranking?

First, you need to understand the different type of links at your disposal. There are (a) one-way links: inbound and outbound links and (b) two-way links: reciprocal links. Inbound links are those pointing to your website from other websites. This was the original intention of the search engine developers based on the concept that if someone likes your site, they’ll refer or recommend it to others. As such, they get more quality points and are highly recommended if you want to increase your web page ranking. Outbound links are those that you as a website owner point to a website other than yours. It may not increase your link popularity but neither will it decrease it. Reciprocal links, as the name suggests, is a two-way link. You can point to a different website at the same time expecting that website to point to yours. This will be to your advantage if the link pointing to yours has a high quality ranking.

The key is getting links from websites with high quality ranks. Also, getting listed in well-known directories, like Yahoo, is always a plus.

Second, you need to continue to offer creative, interesting and informative content to keep readers coming back for more. If they like your site, you don’t even need to ask them to create a link to your site, they’ll do it of their own volition.

Third, take advantage of your networks, like suppliers or customers. A good relationship with them will always ensure reciprocity with good links as well. You can always create new networks when you come across websites that you yourself find relevant to your business or personal life. You may choose to email the website owner and request a link from their site to yours. Some times, they may expect a reciprocal link, other times none is required. It will also be good if you ask them to visit your website prior to making their decision to know that you are above board with your request.

Who needs it?

If you want qualified traffic to your website, you’ll invest in a link building strategy. The higher your quality of links is, the better page ranking results you’ll get. It means that your website will always be on the first page of search results if you have a high-ranking web page. It usually implies a certain sense of trust in your website and therefore in your products and services as well if you have a lot of quality inbound links to your website. Be aware though that link building is a time-consuming process and its effects may not be seen and felt immediately. Nevertheless, if you persevere and take action based on what was mentioned earlier then expect to see results and a guaranteed increase in traffic in your website.

Including SEO Within Your Internet Marketing Strategies

A very important part of your Internet marketing and site promotion strategy should include search engine marketing so your site can get as much free organic search engine traffic as possible. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a Web page or pages making them search engine friendly where they can be properly identified and scored by the search engines.

SEO makes it possible for your Website or blog to get a great ranking among other sites and uses methods such as on-page optimization and off-page optimization or also called link building a process of increasing the link popularity to your site.

One of the first stages of SEO pivots around targeting keywords and keyword phrases you want to rank for. Once you have done your market research you can optimize your page titles using a few keywords per page.

The most important thing is to write great compelling content that is useful to the people that read it. You don’t want to write for the search engines, make sure you write in a way that will help pre-sell your products and services and lead people over to your Website.

Now, just having a great Website does not mean anything unless your site gets found by people who are looking for what you have to offer. You can only prosper when you get the right people visiting your site i.e. people who are keen on checking out the products and services that you offer. This can only happen if your site is optimized so it can be found and ranked by the search engines.

Search engine optimization differs from the other networking endeavors because the results allow your site to be found by anyone online at any time. By optimizing your WebPages correctly you can expect your pages to rank well once you get a few quality inbound links.

Unlike many online marketing strategies, SEO can actually pay for itself quickly if you have a good product or service that people desire. All SEO strategies are strategies that you can actually do yourself once you know what to do. Many business owners choose to save time by hiring search marketing experts to take care of their search marketing.

Your site can rank well in the major search engines, you just need to either educate yourself so you can learn how the search engines work or you can find a search marketing firm that can help you get your site ranking well in the search engines.

Free Ways to Get Quality Backlinks for Search Engine Optimization

One of the best places to get free reviews is through social networking sites. On social networking sites, people talk about each other all the time. Social networking sites are going to take a bit more work to get reviews because you’re going to have to participate and make your presence known before you can ask other people to review. Another way to do this is to have something to review other than you or your website with a bunch of backlinks.

If you are just trying to sell a product or are trying to get a site link as StumbleUpon, along with a review, this will give you some backlinks to your main site. You can also send reviews to places that are always looking for new product reviews – you can even do this with products that you are not selling.

If you become one of the first people to review a product, this is going to put your site at the top of the list, which will generate good traffic and help with your advertising. If your product is unique, this may give you a product review.

If your product could fit in an envelope, you might think about mass mailing it to several webmasters in your particular niche and requesting that they reviewed. Even better, you could offer that they become sellers of your product as long as they provide you a backlink, like Craigslist.

There are also sites that review websites as their main focus. You can submit your website for a review and get a backlink. The only problem with this is that you are not guaranteed that you are going to get a positive review. For example, if your layout is less than stellar, they will probably say that. This means that you might get one-way backlink, but it might not be in your favor, so be careful there. This is a risk you are going to take when you submit to website domain review sites, so make sure you trust that your own website is truly of good quality.

You can also utilize bloggers as part of the process for reviews. However, you are likely going to have to review the bloggers website, too. There are several ways to do this, but most likely you will have to do an even exchange. However, this is still a great way to generate some pre-backlinks. To do this, you establish your own blog under your domain so that you can do some social networking within blog communities.

If you are new to the Internet, it might seem like it is a very large task to get free unforced backlinks to your site. Natural backlinks are very important to give you a solid reputation with search engines, but as with inexperienced jobseekers, you, too, are not going to have the qualifications to attract someone who is interested in you. Nonetheless, the Catch-22 of that is that you are going to have to get those qualifications (in this case, backlinks) to establish the working reputation you need.

What do you do, then, Say that you were in a very tight job market and that market was only looking for experienced people; however, you do not have those qualifications. You might get the qualifications by volunteering or doing an internship. This is similar to what you are going to have to do to get some truly valuable backlinks that will count towards your reputation. You’ll have to do some legwork and seek out backlinks just as you would job or volunteer opportunities if you were a newbie in the job market looking for experience.

Spotting a Backlink Lead

Search engines will ignore backlinks that look like spam. In fact, this has become such a problem for search engines and blog communities alike that most automatically put the attribute rel=nofollow in their templates to keep commentators from spamming just to try to get backlinks.

Unfortunately, this also stops people who are genuinely marketing their products via commentary. To this end, many communities have found that switching back to dofollow from nofollow as the attribute is best, then, someone in that site specifically takes care of the spam. This means that those commentators who contribute significantly to the community have their backlinks. These sites are called dofollow sites, as compared to nofollow sites.

Where You Get Started

Even though you know people are willing to give you a head start in the backlink market, though, this doesn not actually tell you where to go. These people do not want to advertise that they are willing to give backlinks and therefore attract spammers. Therefore, you are going to have to do some research and find out which websites will give you proper credit as long as you do the work on your end. This will help keep you from wasting valuable time on people who do not want to give you the time of day.

Just as you would not go to an employer who is not hiring anyway, thus wasting your time, you want to focus on websites that are already ready to work with you. These will give you backlinks for just a small amount of effort. These websites have established a dofollow attribute back into their community forums and websites.

However, if you have to actually go to every referral and ask them whether or not they are legitimate dofollow sites, it is going to take you forever. However, with the Internet, you can network your way into multiple referrals in a fraction of the time. One of the great ways to do this is through forums and bulletin boards. These places will give you information on websites that allow legitimate commentary or contribution to a community, along with backlinks. These places often post lists of sites and forums that accept legitimate backlinks, and they can provide you with an instant marketing contact referral list as well.