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March 2002 Search Engine Tips
Link Popularity
It's time for me to get tough. I'm going
to rant and rave a little bit here. When are people going to wake up? I
was leading a TeleSeminar last month with nearly 600 people on the line.
I must have spent fifteen minutes hammering home the value of link
popularity to search engine rankings. I suggested that everyone on the
line start a link strategy / link trade program. I gave them a place to
gather at http://www.GreatInternetMarketing.com/forums
free discussion board. I told them that I could get them started with
links from all my high traffic sites. Guess
how many people took me up on the offer.......3 people!!!! Was
everyone else asleep? Do they all want to fight out search engine
rankings the hard way? Can they not put a link on their websites? I
don't know what the problem is, but I can't understand why people would
turn their backs on the most simple and stable way to give themselves
boosts in the search engine rankings. LINK
STRATEGIES There are two major
area to address with regard to link strategies: 1.
Inbound links 2. Outbound links Inbound
links Almost all the major
search engines are using link popularity in their determination of which
sites get high rankings when someone is searching for a particular
topic. It should be your goal
to get as many "good" links as possible coming "in"
to your site. What is a good link? Well any link coming in to your site
is good or at least neutral and you just might get some traffic from the
link no matter where it is. A better link is from a high traffic site
that is very popular as far as links go. The best incoming link is from
a site where the link coming into your site has the same keyword in it
as the keyword being searched for in the search engine that is looking
at all this. I have over 1000 links
coming into http://www.antion.com
and that has helped keep me high in the rankings for some time. Now
though the search engines are getting smarter and they want to see more
relevant links instead of just any old link, so I even have to start
tweaking my system so that my link trade program makes this more clear
i.e., I want the people linking to me to use certain keywords in the
link itself. I'll be working on this over the next couple months. Here
are 4 ways to get inbound links: 1.
Have a good site.-- If you make sure you have an excellent site with
lots of usable info on your topic, people will naturally link to you and
ask for nothing in return. My high content sites show up at all kinds of
places that I never heard of simply because the people visiting liked
what I had to offer and wanted to share it as a service to their
visitors. 2. Provide content.
-- If you provide content for another website, you usually can get a
link back to your site. Usually the content is in the form of an article,
but it could be statistics, photos, graphics, free downloads or whatever
you have to offer. I aggressively provide articles for whoever wants
them in exchange for the link back to my website. I've gotten many full
fee speaking engagements where someone read my article on another
website, liked what they read, clicked over to my site, called me and
hired me. IMMEDIATE MONEY IN THE BANK IS EVEN BETTER THAN LINK
POPULARITY. 3. Multiple sites.
-- You can trade links between sites that you control. For best results
it's important to have them on different servers (web hosts) in
different geographical areas. Don't worry if they are on the same
server. Link them anyway.
NOTE: Having sites in different geographical areas is helpful in
other ways. If one of the companies you are using has a major crash or
virus or if there is a major disruption in Internet traffic in a
particular part of the world, you are not totally out of business.
Remember the old "all the eggs in one basket" adage. 4.
Associate programs. -- Certain associate program software packages
use links to your domain name. For instance, if you belonged to my
associate program to sell "ButtCamps" or "Wake 'em
Up" training materials you might have a link on your site that has
your associate number in it. It might look something like
http://www.antion.com/t.cgi/22222/buttcamp.htm These
links add up to my incoming link popularity even if you never sell
anything, so the link is still valuable to me. Outbound
links It never used to matter how many links were
leaving your site because anyone can make a link to anyone else's site.
They were pretty meaningless to the search engines . . . .until now. Search
engines are continually trying to find ways to give better search
results to searchers. This is because they want the searcher to come
back over and over again. One parameter that is now being
used to help rate a site is on the "quality" of the site's
outbound links. If the outbound links go to pages in other websites that
have the same keyword, then the site looks like a great resource for the
searcher so it gets a boost in the rankings.
Example:
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Searcher is searching for information on horses
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Site A has 100 links going to other webpages on
other websites that have the word horse in them.
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Site B has 5 links to other horse pages
Results: Site A gets a boost in the final search
results as compared to Site B (Note: this doesn't mean they are ranked
number one. It just means they get a boost on the link parameter which
is just one of the criteria a search engine uses when deciding what
sites get high rankings.) Additional Note:
Although it's doubtful that they do, Site A might own / control the
other 100 sites they are linked to which keeps all the business in the
family. Double Edged Sword Having
outbound links going to other similar websites is a double edged
sword. On one hand you are providing a service to your visitor,
but on the other they could leave and forget about you. This has been
one of the arguments about linking to other sites. Here
are some ways to use links to your greatest advantage with the least
risk. Keep in mind you are looking for a net gain of visitors and
business so if you have to give up a little to get more, then it's a
good idea to do it. (Temporarily
back to my Rant) It takes someone with at least a half of a
brain to understand the above concept. Many people want to sit in their
little sparcely visited website and protect everything to the point that
no one ever sees or hears of them and they eventually give up claiming
the the Internet didn't work for them . . . Well no s_ _ _ Sherlock. OK
back to Mr. Professional E Marketer Here's some smart
moves to get your net gain in visitors:
-
Outbound links should not
be prominently displayed on your home page. they should be displayed
on a "Links"/"resource" page. You want the first
shot at the visitor.
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Outbound links to any site
not under your control should be made to open in a "new
window." That way your website is still running in the
background and most people will come back through your site before
they can leave.
SUPERTRICK
-
Locate a bunch of sites
that have the same keyword as you are trying to promote. You do this
by searching the major search engines on that keyword and jot down
or copy and past the link to those sites in your word processor.
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Create a page on your site
that has some text about your topic and also links to the sites you
found. Keep each page to maybe 25 links or so because search engines
will ban you for giant link farms.
-
Upload these pages to your
site as "hidden" pages. Hidden pages are pages that reside
on your website, but aren't linked to the main site. Many people
don't even grasp the fact that you can do this, but you can. It's
like having a house with lots of rooms in it and a garden shed on
your property. The house is like the main part of your site with
lots of rooms (pages) all linked together. The garden shed still
belongs to you and resides on your property, but it is not linked to
the main house.
-
Submit these hidden pages
to the major search engines
The idea is that the search engines will see these pages
as belonging to your website and they will see the outbound links that
are going to related sites. The search engine will think that you are a
great resource for the searcher, but the searcher will never see the
page and thus, won't click out of your site.
So get busy formulating your link strategy. If you need
some help with text for the link trade part of your strategy visit
http://www.antion.com/linktrade.htm
and
http://www.antion.com/linktradeinstructions.htm
Warning: Keep in
mind that some of this text will change as I tweak the instructions to
the user to include keywords in their link text. I have not done this
yet. Most of the other text, however, will stay the same.
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