The Basics
You have probably been to a site that had a section called a “Guestbook”. Many sites ask you to “sign their guestbook”, and many of these guestbooks also permit HTML code in the guestbook comments, meaning you or I or anyone can visit guestbooks on web sites all day long and systematically create links back to our sites from hundreds of other site’s guestbooks.
Naturally, some web marketers (probably the ones that think exit pop-ups are useful) think that by signing guestbooks and adding links by the hundreds they will improve their link popularity scores at search engines. Before you get excited and do a Google search on the phrase “sign our guestbook” (1.9 million BTW) and head off like a link monkey, here’s my take on the whether guestbook links are valid, ignored, or penalized, and if they have any impact on the success of a web site’s link popularity. (more…)
Motivation Is Key
What is the motivation for one site owner to link to another site?
The fundamental design of the web allows for any document to link to and to be linked from any other document. This is how the web’s inventors intended it when the hypertext protocol was first developed long ago, before most of us had ever heard of the Internet.
Initially developed as a way to help researchers interlink related documents from computers all over the world, the web was soon discovered by those more interested in commerce, and several years later, here we are. It’s interesting to me that nearly every commercially related web development since its founding has been in some way related to the link (that is, an attempt to find new ways for one site to be linked to another). Banner ads are, at their core, just a link from one site to another. So are text ads in newsletters, buttons, badges, icons, etc. A paid search engine listing or optimized search result is nothing more than a link. Your coveted Yahoo! text listing, that banner that gets you one percent click-through, and even that email newsletter sponsorship — no matter how you spin it — are all links. Anything to be clicked on that shuttles people from one place to another while online constitutes a link. (more…)
More More More…
You know you should have more links pointing to your site, but you’re not sure what the best approach is to pursue them. One of my favorite approaches is to use the search results for terms that are important for my site.
I do a search at Google for a two or three word phrase that I wish I was ranked first for. Then, instead of treating all those other sites listed in the results like they were competitors, I think of them as potential link partners. Chances are not every site linked in those search results is a true competitor of your business. Those sites are competing with yours only for the search terms, not products and services. (more…)
Hi Jill,
I’m pretty new to this sort of thing and there’s a LOT of info out
there so I’m hoping your newsletter can help me out. My site comes up
great on MSN and ok on some other sites, but I’m having a hard time
getting it on Google. I’ve been spending my days trying to get
reciprocal links with good (high PageRank) Websites so hopefully that
will help in the coming weeks.
I guess a quick question I would have (2 actually) is:
Roughly how long after someone adds me to their link page should it come up in a Google reverse link search? I’ve been on a few other sites for about a week now but the Google backlinks only show me on one site. (more…)
To get good traffic, your website needs to be popular, to be popular, your website needs links, to get links, your website needs to be popular….Before you groan in defeat, let me explain. Now everyone agrees that link popularity is critical for your website’s visibility, traffic, and thus success. It is something you need to have. As I pondered the ways of establishing and improving one’s “popularity”, eventually all come back to one central issue–your website must be designed to be popular.
Link popularity is a basically the measure of links pointing to your website and is meant to be a measure of the best websites. Theoretically those websites that have the most links pointing to them must be important and thus worth the visit. Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks out there that have created programs to “boost” your popularity artificially and all they have done is create spam and muddy the picture. The search engines and directories are keeping a close eye on these programs. (more…)
Worth Your Time?
“Link popularity” is the one of newest buzzword in the Internet community and is something the search engine optimizers (SEOs) are discussing nonstop. For those unsure of what it means, link popularity essentially describes how popular your website is, based on the number of links from other sites, that point to yours. It is a bit more complicated than that but, for this article that simple definition should suffice.
YES
It is all about the mighty search engines! The search engines in their quest to produce meaningful and productive results for their users are using this particular property of your website to help filter and organize the massive amount of websites in their databases. So to have you website be “visible” to the search engines and thus their users, you need to work on getting inbound links. It is something you can do yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Either way, it is a “must do” promotional technique. (more…)
As with any language, one needs to learn it one word at a time. With the rapid growth of the Internet, a whole new set of terms and definitions have arisen. To be successful, a webmaster needs to be able to speak the “language.” Below is a listing of some of the major terms and definitions used when describing the process and important of link building.
Search Engine: A computerized index of the web pages; creating a searchable database. Examples are AltaVista, Google. (more…)
You have no doubt been bombarded with emails from all manner of marketing ‘gurus’, including most of the big names, telling you to hurry up and get in on the “once in a lifetime” marketing opportunity of owning a long domain name of up to 65 characters.
Apparently the main attraction is that you can now stuff your domain name with relevant keywords for your site, and by doing so, increase your site’s ranking in the search engines.
The way most are talking, you’d be forgiven for thinking that owning a long keyword-rich domain is the key to bringing heavy traffic to your site! (more…)
Link building is all about traffic–trying to get more targeted traffic so you can get more visitors and/or sales.
Now everyone talks about your traffic increasing when you make improvements to your link popularity via reciprocal linking and through general link building, but rarely has anyone every discussed how you can tell. You need to have a reliable way to measure your website traffic. Sounds simple enough, but it really is not.
There are tons of free and paid services (see links below) you can use to measure your traffic. But before you start searching the web, check with your web hosting company and see if you have access to your server logs-if so should provide the best overall picture for your website. When I compare the traffic reports from my server logs and those from a free service I subscribe to, I get very different results. (more…)
Zeus
If you have spent any time on the web, you must have come across a website that uses Zeus to build its link directory. It seems to be everywhere. Zeus offers a free and paid version, but the majority I have come across have the free version-you can tell by the banner ads.
Another way you might have come across a Zeus directory is by getting an email asking for a link exchange. “Dear Sir/Madam: Wow, what a great site, lets link….” or “Hi I recently visited your site…”
Saving time and energy is something everyone looks for when doing any project either on-line or off. Why take 20 hours when it can be done in 2 with help? For a successful website, one needs to build links and this takes time. Thus Zeus and other programs have been developed to automate this process. (more…)
