Business Articles
Linking - good, bad or indifferent - you decide!
Over the past 5 years I have built my own collection of websites, and also been involved in improving or repairing countless others. One of the most important things and budding (or existing) webmaster has to consider is the source of their traffic - where will you actually be getting visitors FROM? You can pay for traffic through a vast array of sources, but the easiest source of actual visitors is by ranking well in the search engines. Ranking well, but ranking for the keywords which are RELEVANT to your site - if you sell dog kennels, ranking at #1 in google for "beach pebbles" may return a couple of visitors, but those visitors are immediately going to leave your site in search of a site that pertains to beach pebbles.
The search engine war is fought on 2 fronts - the first being what is actually ON your site, and this I will cover in a seperate article. The second front is your links, the clickable bits of text on other peoples sites which lead to you. Put these clickable links in the right places, and real live humans will find them and click them. Even better than this, a search engine spider will also find you, and therefore realize that you exist. The more links to you they find, the more important they think your site must be.
Thats the simple bit over with. Now, when you try to cultivate links all over the web, you need some knowledge about where to put those links, and what information to put IN the links. So, first off lets tackle the WHERE:
Sticking with the dog kennel analogy, the main sites you must target to get a link pointing back to your website, MUST be relevant to dog kennels in some way, shape or form. A relevant link will carry a lot more weight and respect with a search engine spider than a link from a site selling ice cream. There are certain notable exceptions from this rule - e.g. a listing in www.dmoz.org will be worth probably 100 assorted other links purely based on the fact that dmoz is seen as an authority site on ALL subjects. But for the most part, you need to find sites of a similar nature to yours. The most common method of getting links, is to offer a LINK EXCHANGE. In other words, I'll point to you if you point back. This is effective to a degree, but increasingly the search engine spiders are becoming more sophisticated, and are spotting these link trades and down-valuing the link as a result. The logic of this being that if your site has unique, original content, people will link to you naturally without requiring anything in return. Another method of building links is to submit articles (such as this one) to relevant sites who will publish your article alongside a link.
When evauluating the potential of a link, you must look at three things - 1 - is the site displaying my link rlevant to my subject matter? 2 - Is the site displaying my link visible to the search engines? and 3 - Does the site displaying my link employ any "dodgy" techniques to gain placements in the search engines?
1 is self explanatory and you can tell this pretty quickly onec you arrive at a site. 2 can be discovered by doing a quick search in your favourite search engine for the website in question (normally a search for site:www.whatever.com will return all pages the engine has in its index from a given site). 3 is more difficult to detect. The problem being that if a site is trying to cheat the search engines and gets found out, you can be found guilty by association and take a hit in your own search engine positioning as a result. "Dodgy" techniques include cloaking (making a page which is visible to search engines but not to humans), doorway pages (pages crammed full of keywords which again do not show to human visitors), link farming (linking to absolutely any site which will link back, regardless of whether that link is relevant or not) and invisible text (text in the same colour as the background to hide all the keywords which are on a page - see a site with a huge blank gap at the bottom of every page - thats probably invisible text). There are many other techniques, but these are the ones which are most commonly employed. If you see these, be very wary before agreeing to a link exchange.
Now the IN part - what do you need to put into your actual link? this is actually very very simple. If your site is the dog kennel one, why not just use "dog kennel" as your link text (the text which people can actually click to come through to your site). Get enough of these, and your site will rank #1 for "dog kennel" pretty soon, However, using exactly the same text on every single link can also get you into trouble - to a search engine spider, this makes the link look less "natural" and could lead to a penalising, or reduction in the weighting of those links. The easiest way, if you are manually placing links, is to choose 4 or 5 keyword phrases and rotate each phrase for each request. Even placing "kennels for dogs" is enough to get around this problem - the keywords are slightly different and still pertain to the same subject matter, and therefore look much mroe naturally acheived. As for the txt which goes underneath your link (the description of your site), this should be targetted towards human visitors - if you think along those lines, the text will provide enough keywords to improve the relvancy of your link to a search engine, and will also improve your chances of a human click-through from the site where your link is placed.
Source: Tony Blacker Logon.info
About the author:
Tony Blacker is a search engine specialist, working in particular on link exchanges. His link exchange site provides a quick and easy solution to busy webmasters who wish to provide a valuable link directory to their visitors whilst also improving their own visibility and rankings in search engine placements.
All articles reproduced with permission from This Is Your Business