The Great Expert Blog

How to Link In the first part I looked at Link Exchange generally. Now I’ll take you through the fun part of actually obtaining useful relevant backlinks. If you are convinced about the benefits of linking, the question in your mind must be - “Yes, but how do I go about obtaining incoming or backlinks?”. There are various ways you can go about this, depending on whether you are seeking pure backlinks - the best kind; or whether you are prepared to settle for reciprocal links - the most common; or whether you want to do someone a favor and give them free publicity by unilaterally placing an outbound link on your site without one in return - the easiest to do - just to it.

One Way Backlinks

A backlink can only be obtained if there is website that carries your link without one in return. This happens when your site is linked in an article, directory, by request, or cited as an authority or resource site by another due to its superior content.

Content

When a website has fresh, unique, informative and interesting content, when it is a recognized resource in as given area, other sites will naturally link to it if only to raise the profile of their own. For you as the webmaster, there is the double bonus of not having to communicate with the linking site. In practice, the context in which your link is carried would in all likelihood be complimentary to you further raising your profile.

The search engines in order to improve the relevance of their SERPs are constantly on the lookout for such sites. Websites that achieve consistently high search positions do so because of the content aspect of their sites.

Articles

Writing and syndicating articles is probably the most effective way to obtain one way inbound links. In recent months this has become all the rage as blogging has taken on force of its own. The idea behind all this frenzied literary activity is not a new enlightenment, but the opportunity for people like you to plaster their website links in as many places as possible. One guy claimed to have had an article he wrote carried by 17000 websites, ezines, article directories etc. This would have greatly boosted his “link popularity”, organic targeted traffic, and overall business prospects - assume just 1% of the visitors and readers of all those websites and ezines clicked on his link - lots of traffic!

Directories

These days there are lots and lots of website directories on every theme imaginable. While they vary in the way they operate, they all have the effect of creating one way incoming links to your site, which as we have seen is both a source of direct organic traffic as well as a boon to your search engine defined link popularity.

The more significant the directory the more beneficial the link from them will be. A basic objective for seasoned webmasters is to get their sites indexed by and included in the DMOZ, and Yahoo! directories. These are the two major online website directories, and inclusion in either would be of greater benefit than inclusion in many of the smaller ones.

Request

These days, most webmasters will only consider a reciprocal link exchange. However, there are still a few webmasters who would consider a one way outbound link if they considered it beneficial to their own visitors, depending on the nature of their website. These will typically be personalized sites, intranets, or non- directory information sources.

Peruse such sites carefully to assess fit, and if satisfied that the website complements your own, contact the webmaster as politely as possible and request that they carry your link as well. Invite them to visit your site to make their own assessment, and do not be put off if they request a reciprocal link in return. However you will get the occasional webmaster who will not object to a one way link. Give it a shot - what’s to lose?

Reciprocal Links

As the term suggests, reciprocal links are a mutual exchange of links with another website. They constitute the vast majority of links found on the internet, and are established by mutual arrangement.

So how do I get websites to link with me?

Identifying Link Partners

The first thing is to identify websites that would make suitable link partners. These are sites that complement your own, and therefore have a similar visitor profile to the type you are looking for. For instance a website selling health food might link up with a website about physical fitness. Be creative about your choices; set up a spread sheet to keep track of your approaches.

Visit the top 10 or 20 sites ranked in Google and Yahoo! for your keywords and do some research on their link partners. You will find not only do they have several link partners, but partners that are quality sites for their content, linking strategy, aesthetic appeal and so on. These are the sites you should target for a link exchange request.

Note : The major search engines are reducing the number of links they’ll show for each site, to cut down on search engine spamming. You may thus find a specialized tool is necessary. A good one for his purpose would be SEO Elite which is a complete reciprocal links exchange management tool.

Assess the sites you short-list for their relevance and complementarities to your own. Ensure that they are quality sites (if they are link partners of the top ten sites in your niche they generally will be, but take nothing for granted).

Assess them for:

Linking Website - this is the specific website linking to the rival websites in your niche that you are benchmarking. In order to find all of the websites that link to them you can do a couple of things. The most common way is to go to Google and enter this search criteria: link:www.targetedwebsite.com. Once you do this Google will return a large list of websites that link to targetedwebsite.com. As noted above, you’ll get a larger list by going to Yahoo! and entering link:http:// targetedwebsite.com.

Note: that for Yahoo you must include http://

Anchor Text used - is the actual text used within the link linking to the specified website. For example, the anchor text in the following link would be “health food”. Health food website

Page Rank -is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage linking to targetedwebsite.com. In order to see the Google Page Rank, you’ll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free from: http://toolbar.google.com

Link Popularity -is the number of links that are pointing to each of the webpages pointing to targetedwebsite.com. The more the merrier. You can find their Google link popularity by entering this search command into Google: link:www.targetedwebsite.com then counting the total number of results that are shown OR you could go to a website like www.linkpopularity.com to find each link partners link popularity much more quickly.

Page Title - is the title of the page that is linking to targetedwebsite.com. Does it contain the main keyword(s) for your niche? If so, you should note the url (web address) of those pages. You’ll want to approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.

* Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook.

Number of Outbound Links - is the number of links located on the webpage linking to targetedwebsite.com. The fewer links there are located on the page, the more a link from them would increase your ranking.

Once we’ve collected all of the information, we now can see targetedwebsite.com’s linking strategy. We’ll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the main keywords/phrases in the page title, the percentage of websites that contain the main keywords in the actual anchor text linking to targetedwebsite.com.

You’ll have to do this for the top 10-20 websites in your keyword niche in order to properly establish the most beneficial websites to seek link exchanges with.

The most beneficial sites will be those that:

Allow you to specify the anchor text that will be used in their link to your website.

Websites with a PR OF 4 or more - don’t get too hung up on page rank though.

Websites that will preferably carry your link in a relevant page. Failing that, a website that has a well-organized links page with a visible and hopefully prominent link in the navigation bar, so that visitors can find it easily.

Should the website use a special links page, then ensure that it carries no more than 30 links, otherwise the PR benefit from that links page will be so diluted as make it worthless. Also, there’ll be too many links competing with yours to get any significant traffic boost.

Making Your Link Request

Now that you have established the websites you want to link with, you need go out and actually ask them. How you do this will determine whether your linking campaign will be effective or not; it would be a great pity to do all the work above only to mess it up with a shoddy links exchange request.

Firstly, websites that are worth linking to receive hundreds of link requests. In order to get your request any attention, prepare well so that it stands out from the crowd. You want to show the webmaster that you have taken the time to peruse his website and that your links exchange request is well considered. You need to convince him/her that your website would make a good fit with their own, that it is interesting and his/her own visitors would find it useful and beneficial. You also want to make it as easy as possible for them to link up with your site.

When you write the links exchange request letter, personalize it by using the webmaster’s first name if you can find it on his/her site, make sure you have specified the website’s name, and note and comply with any instructions the website may have for exchanging links e.g. a web-based form, a code to cut and paste on to your site and so on. Failing to do so would not just be irritating; it shows that you have not really browsed the site.

Be creative and bold with your email subject header. Being timid and using a generic subject header like “Link Request” will probably see your email deleted unread. Explicitly state which page you’d like your link carried on and why. Oftentimes, interestingly, you’ll get your links request approved without a corresponding links exchanged. Some webmasters will consider either that it may not make sense for them to have their link on your site, or that your site is a valuable enough addition to their site without a link in return. Most time though a reciprocal exchange will result.

Do not balk at approaching your competitors. Since no two business entities are identical, it is possible for competing websites to carry each others links and still benefit from the total traffic carried by all. Imagine sites that sell unique and therefore hard to find gift items. While obvious competitors, if a browser fails to find what they’re looking for on one site, they may find it on the other, and vice-versa.

Page Rank

A word about Page Rank. PR is a measure of a website’s significance derived and used by certain search engines chiefly Google. While a positive indicator, you should not get too hung up on it when identifying link partners. PR is gained and lost often (every 3 months or so) so current PR is no indicator of future trends. Further, PR is largely an indicator of link popularity, is obscure in its derivation, and does not tell you how suitable a website is as a link partner. Use it as an indicative measure rather than a deciding factor.

Google PR increases as your link popularity does. Do not worry that your own new website will have a low PR. This will invariably increase with more links. More important for the new website is building links with quality websites many of which will have low PR anyway, but websites that have the type of traffic your site needs.

Summary

The process of building links with other websites is time-consuming at the best of times, and if done correctly can get quite tedious. However, since it requires communication with other webmasters, it has the potential to be engaging and absorbing. Approach it confidently if you are satisfied with your own site, remembering that even a link that brings you just 5 visitors a day will add up to over 8000 over 5 years.

Every backlink is worth taking time over, and just like your website itself, is never really finished - they will require tweaking every so often.

Enjoy

Your success on the internet is directly related to how many other sites are linking back to yours. The goal of every webmaster is to get more inbound links. I have listed three simple steps below to automate and multiply the process. Once the process is started you will be getting inbound links while you sleep.

Number One:

Write Articles. It is hard work to write a quality article but you will find it to be a long term strategy for building inbound links that will pay off for years to come in both link popularity and traffic to your website. You may not consider yourself an expert on a particular subject, but if you have a website I’ll bet you are an expert on the subject you have chosen for that website. Write an article on the theme of your website and submit it to the various article directories on the internet. Believe it or not, you are an expert. You just haven’t realized it yet.

Your article will be published with a link pointing to your site. Make sure that the text link has the keywords in it you have carefully chosen. For example, your keywords here .

You may experience a feeding frenzy on your article. Why? Simply because webmasters are constantly looking for content. Webmasters are busy designing sites and are able to save time by using expert content from other people. They often create websites with thousands of pages and are in need of content for those sites. And they know where the directories are that will contain your article. Every time your article is picked up by a webmaster, it will result in a link back to your site. In the first few days after I submitted my first article it got pick up and posted 400 times! I was shocked. You will be too!

Number Two:

Signup at a link exchange coop. A link exchange coop can give you more backlinks in a few minutes work than you could ever generate by yourself. You are utilizing a network of thousands of other websites. And that’s what the internet is, a huge network. Take advantage of the power of networking. There are many link exchanges. One well known link exchange coop is: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/?s=4380. Depending on the size and pagerank of your site, you could earn 1000 inbound links or more my adding a few lines of code to your website. Do some research and find the one that will bring the greatest benefit to your site.

Number Three:

Automate the reciprocal linking process by utilizing reciprocal linking software. Do not spend hours upon hours emailing webmasters and posting reciprocal links to your site. Simple buy a reciprocal link script, set it up at your website and it will process the links, add them to your website and then it will monitor to make sure each webmaster has posted your link to his/her website. This will free up your time to do something more important like writing articles. To find inexpensive software to automate the reciprocal linking process, simply go to eBay and type in the search phrase ‘reciprocal linking popularity software’.

Rather than doing things the same old way, try these three steps. They will save you countless hours. By using these time savers you will be much more efficient in getting backlinks and you will also get hundreds, maybe even thousands more than you ever thought possible.

To know more about search engine optimization, online marketing and link building. visit thewebmarketingblog.com .

For PART 1 Click here.

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. Let’s look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both of your site’s business prospects - and both of your sites’ link popularity.

Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd.

When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on.

Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It’s a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don’t sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it’s time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.

Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way - make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!

Do not get penalized or even banned from the search engines find out how not to get banned by your links.

In my last article we talked about why we needed links to your website, in this article we will cover some dos and don’ts.

Thanks to Google and now most of the other search engines there is now a new kind of spam, these are link farms.

Because the search engines now look at link popularity every website designer and promoter went out to get links to there sites, the easy way to do this is to join a linking site, this looked an easy task, but Google then said you will get penalized or even banned if your found to have a link farm.

Website designers and promoters jumped and panicked at this and some stopped all links that pointed out, this was a bit drastic.

The big question is what is a link farm? Or what is now known as Stuffing?

Lets pretend your website sales gold, go with me here Im on a role. You join a linking service and get 1000s of links on your links page and so you have 1000s of links pointing to your website, cool your shore to get to number one now.

If Google now comes to your site and sees 1000s of links, they now will look to see if they are relevant to your site, which sales gold. If your links are for dog food and windows you have a link farm or stuffing.

Only have links like Gold Cleaning, Gold rings, things relevant to your website else you could be penalized or even banned.

You can still have 1000s of links but all must be relevant. Remember to have a link from your main site to the links page.

I hope you found this article of some help. Have fun and play nice.

Linking strategies play a major role in a website’s link popularity. And linking alone carries a heavy load for a webmaster’s work. However, funny as it may seem, linking strategies are a way to please the search engine gods!

For quite a time, many webmasters do reciprocal link exchanges. By exchanging links, webmasters think that the search engines would count the resulting incoming links as a popularity vote.

But because the search engines never divulge any information about how they count a website’s link popularity, webmasters are simply trying to figure out what the search engines want and consider in their algorhythms.

With that in mind, you might think that the webmasters are simply doing a lot of guess work! But mind you, many webmasters are doing analytical strategies to decipher the hidden codes of the search engines. Unfortunately, the search engines also keep changing their algorhythms, thereby, making the webmasters continually chase the unknowns - keeping the chase alive.

It is now speculated that probably reciprocal links are dead. That probably search engines simply consider one-way incoming links only. In effect, some webmasters are also trying to device another strategy called triangular links. They claim that with triangular links, the search engines would consider the link as more natural than a reciprocal link.

Although there may be some wisdom in the concept of triangular links, there are also more chances that some webmasters can cheat other webmasters too. As always, while we are still in this world, evil can still be around the corner.

Whether webmasters are making considerations between reciprocal links or one-way links, it should be noted that it is a lot better to have some incoming links than nothing at all. And by having that, everything can still boil down to the original content of a site - thereby validating the claims of other webmasters that “Content is King!”

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Internet marketing strategy consultations is also available at http://www.internetmarketingconsultant.biz

Online forums are a great place to meet people, learn things and, most importantly, build traffic for your web site. You can build heaps of traffic to your site by just following these few, simple guidelines.

Help People Every Chance You Get

Whenever someone posts a question to the forum, answer it. Challenge yourself to see how many people you can help in an hour or try and see if you can be the first person to answer.

Be honest and offer real advice. Don’t just post a quick line asking them to call you for help. People who use forums want answers - TODAY. They’re banking on having anywhere from 5 to 500 people on the forum ready to answer their question.

The better your answer, the more likely they’ll click over to your web site!

Answering questions will help you to build a reputation for yourself as the expert in your field. The more information you give away, the more you prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Don’t be afraid to give a lot of information away. You might feel that you risk losing work this way but, really, you risk losing work by failing to prove that you know your business.

Be Friendly Towards Everyone, Even if You Disagree With Them

Heated arguments are commonplace in forums - learn how to express your opinions without being rude or insulting.

When someone disagrees with you, present your views and then, as Dr Stephen Covey says, agree to disagree, agreeably. Agree that you feel differently about the subject and then agree not to argue about it any more.

Eventually, people will come to know you as “the nice person that knows a lot about …”. That sort of reputation can earn you lots of traffic as well as lots of sales!

Contribute to the Forum as Much as Possible

Whenever you come across something you think will be useful to other members of the forum, post it. Let everyone know how you found it, where it came from and write a short summary of what they’ll find if they follow the link or download the article.

This might sound like a lot of work but, in most cases, it’s really easy.

You establish yourself as the professional in your industry. This really helps people feel confident about doing business with you. Confidence equals clicks and clicks equals Sales!

Use a Compelling Signature

A signature is the space at the end of every post where you can provide your personal information like a name, email address and web site address. You usually just have to configure it once and then it will automatically be added to every post you make.

People often use signatures to “advertise” themselves. The key here is to make it short and compelling.

For example, “We create web sites” is short, but not compelling. You probably won’t get any clicks with such a boring signature.

Offer a solution to a problem or pique their curiosity with a question-based link. Make people curious or excited about what they’ll find if they click on your link.

Here are 2 good examples:

“Are you losing sales because of these 10 critical web site mistakes?”

“Discover the secrets of online marketing with my free course”

As long as what you’re offering is relevant to the forum or discussion, you’ll find a lot of people clicking through to find out more.

Link Back to Your Own Web Site

Whenever you post something, try and find a helpful way to link back to your web site. For example, if someone asks a question on how to finance their start-up company, give them a tip or two, and then link to an article on your web site for more information.

This is called in-context linking and is, by far, the best way to build your web site’s traffic and search engine ranking.

This works because search engines like Google decide how important your web site is by how many different web sites link to it! Essentially, by being active on forums, you’re voting for your own web site in a very effective & ethical way. Bonus

By following these simple steps, you’ll soon find hordes of people clicking through to your site to learn more about what you do and how you can help them.

Link popularity is becoming the latest “in-thing” to get your website ranking well with the Search Engines.

Getting links to your website is critical but there are some guidelines that should be followed for successful Reciprocal Linking. In addition, a lot of website owners are becoming particularly choosey as to who they link with, and they cannot be blamed for this. Linking to good quality websites is paramount.

So where does that leave the website owner with a low to average Google Page Ranking?

We will presume for just a moment that your website has an overall Google Page Ranking of between 0 and 3 (out of a possible 10). How can you improve this so that you have a better chance of getting good quality reciprocal links?

Link exchange is not the only thing that helps increase your Website Page Ranking. It is a combination of a number of factors, such as :

* Great relevant content. * Designed to keep the visitor interested and informed. * Meta Tags should be well optimized. * Keyword density * Frequently updating the content.

There is a lot of free information regarding page ranking - just put “google page ranking” in the Google search bar for more details on this topic.

Back to Linking!

Developing a good Links Page on your website takes a lot of effort to start off, especially if you are doing it manually and not using a Link Program.

You need to plan and organize your time so that you can evaluate possible link partners thoroughly. You should check their website to ensure it is of high quality, providing relative information and products to your website theme.

There are a few schools of thought regarding linking to “competitor” websites, some feel it is not a good thing.

However, personally I don’t believe it to be detrimental as long as your website offers top quality information and products. After all a little bit of competition helps keep us on our toes. Whether shopping online or offline, people usually browse for bargains or the best quality before making a purchase.

This of course, works both ways as your site is also listed on competitor sites. So having a good balance of both competitor sites and related sites is the best answer.

Planning your links page is important in that you need to determine how you want it to look, what categories you will have and the size and positioning of the links. Will you just have text links or will you accept banner links?

It is good practice to have the Link menu button placed in a prominent position on your home page. This is also a point to remember when evaluating possible link partners - on some website you can spend ages searching for the Link button and the Link pages.

There is also the practice of placing extremely good beneficial links on other pages of your website. For example:

If your site is promoting health products you may very well want to place a banner ad on your homepage for say a health magazine.

In most cases you will be required to place a link on your website first prior to requesting a link exchange. Once you have placed the link, send an email advising that you have visited their site and believe a link exchange would be beneficial to both parties. Mention something about the site that impressed you, this way they will know you have actually visited their website. Endeavor to get a name to address the email to if at all possible.

Of course, many sites today have everything set up with forms that enable you to just fill in your website details including the reciprocal link address. This does make the job much easier, but it is good business practice to send a confirmation email advising that their link is listed on your site and that you look forward to a reciprocal linking arrangement.

This last step can be beneficial at a later date in that you may want to approach them in the future with a joint venture proposition for example. Linking is more than just swapping site information, it can be the first step to a profitable business partnership.

A couple of important points to remember :

* Check all the links regularly to ensure they are working. * Check that your link is still listed on the partner site.

As your Link Pages grow, it will probably become necessary to use a Link Managing Program or Service, there are a number of very good ones available, some with a free trial period.

Happy Linking!