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Welcome to Marketing
4
money
A free resource dedicated to
the serious
online marketer
by
CKasso
How to properly set up a linking strategy
A very neglected
part of many webmasters search engine, and in general promotion strategy, is
called linking.
Before we get
started, to better understand linking I suggest you download the following
toolbars and install them in your Browser:
Alexa
Toolbar
Google Toolbar
They are free and
will help you better understand many of our discussions, not to mention how
much they will help your overall marketing efforts by providing much needed
information.
What exactly, is linking?
Linking is when
another website, anywhere on the web, decides to put up a link pointing back
at your site. This could be for a variety of reasons such as they are
promoting one of your products, suggesting you take a look at something,
advertising etc etc. Internal linking is when your pages within your website
link to each other.
The search engines
will look very positively on this, and assume since someone, or even better,
many are linking back to your site, your site must be an authority or at least
a quality site on your subject. The result of this is a higher ranking in the
search engine listing. After all, the search engines want to provide good
quality, relevant search results
to their users.
As always, there are
a few webmasters that will go too far and ruin a good thing. Unfortunately, this is all
too common on the web. One such example of this is called a link farm. Smart marketers
realized the benefit of linking and set up automated linking programs.
Marketers and website owners could sign up for this service, and they did in
droves, they would then supply a link to their site and agree to link back to
all the other sites. They would then be given a page with hundreds of links
from each of the other members. All they had to do was add this page to their
site and voilá, they had hundreds of links.
Only problem was, the search engines realized
that these links meant nothing. Their sole purpose was to trick the search
engines.
That's a no no.
The owners of these sites had nothing in common
with each other, worse yet, the websites had nothing in common. What business
does a link
to a fishing site have on a page that teaches guitar lessons? Nothing.
So the engineers created new algorithms to ensure
that the links were quality links that were linking because they had something
in common. Also the algorithms looked for similar links on many different
sites, written exactly the same. These sites were now being penalized for
trying to manipulate search engine rankings. Not something you would want to
happen to your site and very difficult to talk your way out of.
Rule of thumb when linking and in doing any
SEO(search engine optimization) in general:
If you are honest and do your job with integrity,
you will succeed. If it looks fishy or funny to you, it will look fishy or
funny to the search engines.
There are hundreds of smart engineers working
around the clock to ensure the integrity of the search results.
You may fool them for a while, but when they
figure it out your site is out of the listings and you can kiss hundreds, even
thousands of free visitors a month goodbye!!!
It's not worth it, when SEO is so easy...
So what's the best way to link?
First thing to do is
decide who you want to link to, and who you want linking back to you.
To do this, consider your own site. Use the keywords that you have determined
describe the content of your site best, than do a search in Yahoo or Google,
for example, using those keywords and see who the top websites are.
These are the sites
you want to trade links with.
Look at the Alexa
Ranking to make sure that these sites are getting a fair amount of traffic and
use the Google toolbar to view the PR(pagerank).
General guidelines in choosing the sites best for
linking:
1. Make sure they have relevant or complimentary information to
the content on your site, without being in direct competition with you.
2. Choose sites that have a PR of 4 or
better. Sometimes 3 is OK.
3. Make sure their links page is not a link
farm. i.e. hundreds of irrelevant links on one page. The best link sites will
have separate categories and no more than 20-25 links per page.
4. They will have a link to their links page
on their home page that is easy to find.
Once you have
identified the sites that you want to link to, create a personal email for
each requesting a link trade. I will emphasize "personal" email, because it is
very important. These sites are at the top of the listings because they care
about their sites and are not about to trade links with automated software!
It is a good idea
and also proper netiquette to put their link up on your site before even
contacting them. Then in your email let them now that you have already set up
their link, provide them with the URL of their link and offer to change its
content or wording to their liking.
This shows that you
are professional and courteous, and it makes it easier for them to agree to
the link exchange.
Also let them know
that you will leave their link up for no more than 2 weeks if they do not
reply. Follow up with them at least twice, and if you do not get a reply then
promptly remove their link after two weeks.
That's about it!
Keep doing this until you have as many quality links as you like.
Good News
There are some
Quality Automated linking systems that you can use that are not link farms. If
you took my advice earlier and purchased
AddWeb
Website Promoter,
you are in luck. This is the linking system I use
and so do many other webmasters.
They have a linking
system set up that allows you to request and trade links with other members
using a search tool showing only relevant sites. That's not the best part
though, once you have been approved for lets say 20 or 25 trades, and there
are thousands of members, you simply click one button and it builds the entire
link page for you!
Then it
automatically goes out and checks to see that your link is on their site. If
it is not they automatically end them an email requesting they post it. Each
time you use
AddWeb
Website Promoter,
you can check your link status and apply for more links.
Check it out
Here...
Have fun linking and
remember, It's very important to your overall success and to your search
engine ranking, so do it right!
Good Luck in this Marketing Jungle!
CKasso |
