Linking Strategies for Newbies

One of the most crucial mistakes I made when I first started Internet Marketing was not completely understand the importance of proper back linking, anchor tags, keywords and the title tag. The most important things to search engines is providing relevancy to search results using keywords in the anchor tags and back links. Back links to your website has become one of the most or if not important aspects to better Search Engine Result Positioning (SERP) using your keywords in your anchor tags.

One of the most common mistakes that I personally made with my website was in the title was:

Title: Succeed Online with ES-Solution

The problem with that title was; What does that have to do with my website and keywords? Search Engines base a lot of importance on the keywords and the anchor tag contained in the back link. Additionally, I submitted my website to many directories and search engines using that title. What I am telling the search engines? That my most important keyword or keyword phrase is “Succeed Online with ES-Solution.” How many possible searchs do you believe would have that exact phrase or keywords? Zero.

My rankings for my keyword phrase “Internet Marketing eBooks” were even more horrible!

Steps to avoiding this same mistake:

Step 1: Never using a descriptive title
Step 2: Choose the most relevant Keywords for your Title
Step 3: Create back links using the appropriate anchor tag.

My actions:

1. I changed my title to “Internet Marketing eBooks”. Another important idea behind your title and keywords is that the search engines will shift around your keywords to make more phrases. I only have 3 Keywords but using different combination, I have 3 good keyword pharses:

(1) Internet Marketing eBooks (2) Marketing eBooks (3) Internet Marketing

2. And I began re-submiting my website to directories and search engines with the proper title (anchor tag): “Internet Marketing eBooks”

My results:

(1) I have several back links with the anchor text “Internet Marketing eBooks”, but unfortunately I still have some of the old back links with the anchor text “Succeed on with ES-Solution” dropping my overall relevancy to 54% when it should be 100%.

(2) I have managed to achieve the number one ranking as of 6 December 2005 for the keyword phrase “Internet Marketing eBooks” in MSN and the number two ranking in Yahoo.

Article Source: http://www.upublish.info

About the Author:Erich Sweaney has been marketing online since 1999, and is the owner of ES-Solution. Internet Marketing eBooks SEO Friendly Directory

Organic SEO And Link Building

Organic SEO or search engine optimization is a slow and steady process. Achieving top rankings takes time and link building is a big part of that effort. If you are to have a successful web site and obtain high search engine rankings you will need quality relevant web sites linking to your web site. The amount and quality of links you need will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword phrases for which you are optimizing. More web masters are focusing on quantity and getting several links fast. This is bad because it can be seen as manipulating the search engines. Check the guidelines for the search engine you are trying to optimize for, this will give you a good idea of what and what not to do.

When obtaining links from other sites focus on the quality of the link. Is the page on topic and relevant to your site? What is the position of the link? Is it off to the side with a bunch of other sites? Does it look natural and like it belongs there? What is the anchor text of the link? These are the questions you need to ask yourself when optimizing off site links. Reciprocal links have some value, but with software that automates the process it seems to have gotten out of hand. Plus do you really want a link on these low quality directory pages? How much value do they add by linking to you?

There are some easy ways to get permanent one way links. Directories are the best first step and may be all you need if your key word term is not competitive. They can also be a good source of relevant traffic. Directories are a human edited trusted link source, look for directories that have a good reputation and are well established. If you can, get listed in a niche directory to increase your relevance.

Companies whose products you use or sell are a good source of links if you can get them. The company whose shopping cart I use has a link to me and all I had to do was ask. Maybe offer a testimonial in exchange for a link back to your web site.

Writing articles is another good way to get incoming links, plus you will gain traffic. There are several free web sites that you can submit articles to. The links are valuable on article pages because there are usually very few links on the page, plus the article will be relevant to your product or service offering. Write a press release to announce your business, new service offerings, or any news that is important. You may end up getting several links, plus press releases are usually available for a long time on the internet.

Do you want to know the best way to obtain inbound links to your web site? Build a web page this is so great, people will just want to link to it. Sounds easy, we all wish it were that simple. Frequently asked questions or tips pages are good candidates for natural links, if they are useful. Giving useful information is probably the best way to obtain organic links. Don’t be afraid to give away some information. We created a common SEO mistakes page to provide useful tips, information and help potential clients. When your potential client has enough information to make an informed decision they will be ready buy your product or service. Other web sites want to link to good information; that is why it is call the World Wide Web. Don’t be a dead end, if you know of a great site let others know about it.

Keep your link building slow, steady and from a variety of sources and keep repeating those steps.

John Tourloukis is the founder of Fast PC Networks an internet consulting and organic SEO company.

Linking out is good

Many websites I come across don't have a single link to another website. Ask the webmaster why not, and the answer you get is simple enough: "If I link to other websites people might leave my site." At this point I break the news that site visitors will leave your site. And there's nothing you can do about this.

Site visitors won't leave your site because you provide links to external sites. They'll leave for one of two reasons:

They've found what they were looking for and no longer have a reason to stay on your website They can't find the information they're looking for and leave to seek it elsewhere "OK, so site visitors are going to leave my site. But why should I hunt around for websites to link to?" I can think of four reasons why linking out is good for you and will ultimately increase traffic to your website:

Proof there's a real organisation behind the website

One of the best ways to prove your organisation really exists is to link to other websites that reference you. Any website willing to mention your organisation is in effect providing a reference for you. Just 52.8% of web users believe online information to have credibility (source: http://ccp.ucla.edu/pdf/UCLA-Internet-Report-Year-Three.pdf) and four in five users say that being able to trust the information on a site is very important to them in deciding to visit a website (source: http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/news/1_TOC.htm).

Links about your organisation can include:Press articles Affiliation listings Professional association membership details Awards your organisation has won Articles published by a member of your organisation Directory listings (such as Yahoo! or the Open directory) Anyone can put up a website making whatever kind of claims they want to. Have a look at the fantastic Christian women's wrestling website at http://www.jesus21.com/poppydixon/sports/cww.html. It's got quite a lot of information about them and lots of photos. And it's 100% fake.

Backs up your arguments

Ensure that all statements about your organisation are backed up by third party websites. For example, if you sell toys it's very easy to make a statement such as, "We're the number one online toy seller in the country!" Anyone can make this statement, so prove that it is true by linking to an external website showing a list of the top online toy sellers last year.Most of the time your site visitors probably won't follow these links, but that doesn't matter - the important thing is that you've shown evidence to back up the claims you're making.

Benefit to your site visitors

The Internet is designed for users to flow through it from one website to the next - don't make your website the last one in the flow. If you know of websites that you find really useful, and you think your site visitors might too, be sure to link to them. By offering a range of useful links you may even come across as an industry expert and someone who really knows their stuff.When providing links make sure you do so at appropriate times. Don't relegate external links to a links page - site visitors aren't so likely to visit this page as a links page doesn't immediately address their needs. Instead, provide links as and when they're appropriate to the content of each page.For example, if you run an accountancy firm you may wish to link to a website that has an up-to-date reference guide about new tax laws in the field of accounting. You don't have the time to provide that kind of regularly updated information on your website but your site visitors would find it really useful. Help out your site visitors and they'll hold your organisation in a positive light.

Search engine benefits

One of the ways search engines try to work out what your website is about is by analysing its inbound and outbound links. The more confidence a search engine has of what your website's about, all other things being equal, the higher search engine ranking you'll achieve. By providing outbound links to related sites you actually help the search engines analyse your site and therefore help your search ranking.Jon Ricerca did a mini-analysis to see if outbound links affect search engine rankings and his results were pretty conclusive: web pages with more outbound links generally achieved higher search rankings (see http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/search-engine-optimisation/number-links.shtml). Be warned though, an inbound link is worth far more than an outbound link so do not link to your competitor's websites!

Don't be afraid to link out. Your site visitors will appreciate you introducing them to useful websites, you can increase your credibility and you can achieve a higher search engine ranking. So check your favourites folder and if you think your site visitors would benefit from any of the websites there be sure to include them in an appropriate place on your site.

This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy (Webcredible - www.webcredible.co.uk) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

Powerful and Effective Link Building

One of the most powerful aspects of Search Engine Optimization is link building. Proper link building for the purpose of rankings uses Targeting Links. Targeting Links are one of the most effective approaches, as the links pass PageRank, and are already proven to rank your competitors. The “Old School” terminology for this approach is called “Stealing your competitors rankings”.

Top SEO Companies use this method when developing top-tier marketing strategies for their clients and even their own websites. It is also the most time consuming approach to link building, but it is one of the most powerful methods of producing results.

Define your keyword targets: Each and every link you build needs to have a keyword target when using this approach. Target a single keyword first. See who’s ranking in the top ten on your favorite Search Engine (SE) for this keyword or keyword phrase. All of those sites contain your link targets. The sites that link to them, their backlinks, are more powerful than any link that is built for the sole purpose of link popularity. These are targeted links and have much more power to rank websites. Now the keyword that these sites rank for is the Anchor Text that you want to use on your link on these targeted websites.

Now that we have your keyword target, we need to consider whether the link is really a quality link, or a spam site. Determining this is harder for the layman than the experienced marketer as some sites that show in the backlinks are obvious spammers or websites that are trying to make a buck from Pay Per Click advertising. As a general rule these have low or no PageRank (PageRank 0/10), and always have a ton of ads first. Ignore these links, as they will be temporary or detrimental to this process. Finding the quality websites in your competitors backlinks is very important. You need to weed out the garbage.

Choose the websites that have some PageRank and appear to be quality sites, if you find some sites in common when checking backlinks on multiple competitors, then those are the important links, and you should do whatever you have to do to get a link from it. Consider a reciprocal if all else fails.

Now the hard part, how do you get your link on their page next to your competitor? How can you get the link to you without returning it? Since everyone is so link popularity aware, you need to present a quality proposal to the webmaster to gain a link. You need to be a quality addition for the webmaster to want to add the link. Nowadays, it’s rare that any site will give a link without returning one. In 1999 before the Link Popularity Search Engines, this was not the case, webmasters linked to whoever they wanted to and paid no attention to reciprocal link exchanges. So how can we get a link without returning one?

Here’s a smart approach. For any link that you are targeting, you really need to try and attempt to offer the webmaster a real reason on why he should add the link. Proving that your website is a valuable resource and one-of-a-kind, is a possible way to still get a free link, and a free targeted link is a powerful link. One-way links are important for any site as it is the model of the Authority Domains. These sites have hundreds to thousands of one-way links, and very few if any reciprocal links. So you should try through whatever methods of one-way link building that you want to use, to get these targeted links without reciprocating. But a reciprocal link is better than no link.

Combine this method with blind link building (random reciprocals links), press releases and even article writing (like this one) and your site will achieve better rankings, better traffic and if your site is truly effective…it will prosper.

Alan Rabinowitz is the CEO of a prominent NYC http://www.seoimage.com/ SEO Company, SEO Image. Visit SEO Image for more information on http://www.seoimage.com/search-engine-optimization.html Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and Link Building.

Article Source: www.ArticlesBase.com

Link Popularity Tool

Link popularity tools are widely used by various webmasters to judge their internet presence. Even the web crawlers or search engines are using the effective popularity tools to measure the rankings of the various websites. You can also use the latest tools such as link popularity software, online optimizers and prowlers to boost up the page ranking of your website(s). By using these tools, you would certainly gain a greater number of targeted traffic as well as business contacts.

First of all lets us discuss the basics of link popularity. A website is always ranked on the basis of its link popularity. And link popularity is nothing but measuring the number of quality links on your website. Your website can support certain links—inbound outbound and reciprocal links— with other websites in the forms of text link, banners or advertisements. The more quality links you have, the more popular is your website. So, a good link popularity tool or software would drastically increase your page rank provided by the major search engines.

So using link popularity tool is a must for you these days. They help you increase the targeted traffic on your websites. The smart software are even capable of finding out the right links for you. The right links are the ones that are related to your website. For example: if you have a perfume website then the website providing information on perfumes will be made to link to your website by these software.

Apart from this, they also track your link popularity regularly. This further helps you take the apt steps for improving on your links and the top page rank do not seem far any more.

Links if placed properly can bring the most of the internet traffic to your website(s). But how can you find out which ones are the right software for you? Simply, pick a link popularity tool that helps you place your links at the proper places. These software are adept at finding out the websites with good page ranks for you. They find the websites that are related to your websites only. This means that no useless link will be added to your link directory and your link popularity will increase smoothly.

The more quality links you have on your website, the more traffic your site will find. The link popularity tools are one of the most important ways to improve your website ratings in the top search engines. In fact some technical experts hold the view that you should not imagine a good rating by the search engines without having a good network of links.

These tools are easy-to-install and can be installed on every type of operating systems. Adding more to the benefits of these advanced tools, they can also help you link to your competitors. Some software in the market ensures you to link up with the best competitors in the market. After adding a link to the website, the link popularity tools automatically send an email for reciprocal link request.

You also get the complete reports of quality links with the help of these link popularity tools. You will get to know with whom you are having the links. This way, you can utilize the link popularity tools to enhance the performance of your website.

Article Source: http://www.submitarticledirectory.com

7 Free Search Engine Optimization and Writing Tools

Traffic. Everyone wants free traffic, and what better way to get it than optimizing your site?

There are some very simple things that you can do to optimize your site. If you want to get more from your website, then implement these strategies, use these tools, and make your website spider food for the search engines.

Below are some of the best sites I have found for optimizing my sites.

1. Check your site.

Before you start tweaking your site, you need to make sure that it's either in Google or not banned by Google. The truth is, you want to optimize your site for Google, which is now the number one search engine in the world. It won't do you any good to optimize your site if Google won't accept it.

Use this tool to check your site.

Google Banned - http://www.googlebanned.com

2. Toolkits

If you can find the tools you need in a collection, this will save you a lot of time, as well as frustration because you will know exactly what you need to do to properly optimize your site.

You'll want to check different aspects of your site like page rank, metatag information, and links. Nothing will drive your potential customers away faster than broken links.

This site, in addition to offering a forum on search engine optimization, also offers a nice collection of tools for helping you optimize your site.

SEO Chat - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools

These two sites also offer search engine optimization tools. It's really a matter of preference, as well as what tools you need to optimize your site.

Add Me - http://www.addme.com

Evrsoft - http://www.evrsoft.com

3. SEO Software

You can also use software to help you optimize your site. Where software will help you the most is to actually help you optimize your site for the keywords you are trying to target. It's a waste of time to optimize your site if you haven't optimized for the right keywords.
This is the software I use, and it's free. It works for both MAC and PC, and it has some of the best documentation I've ever seen on search engine optimization because it's written for the average person. It also includes a basic search engine optimization training course, a 50 page manual, and excellent, step by step directions for preparing your website for the search engines.

Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com

4. ROR Generator/Robots Text Generator A what?

ROR is similar to a robots.txt file in that it gives information about your site. The difference is that an ROR file is in XML format.

You can use this generator to create an ROR file for your site, and then paste a button to the main page of your website. When the search engines spider your site, they'll spider this file and have a better description of what your site is about.

I would also recommend that you create a robots.txt file because this will tell the search engines what not to spider on your site. If you own a members' area, or you sell anything, you don't want the search engines spidering your download pages.

ROR Generator - http://www.rorweb.com/rorgenerator.php

Robots Text Generator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-creator/simple-robots-creator.php

5. Site Map

A site map is not only a great tool for letting your customers know where everything is located on your site, it can also help you with the search engines.
By creating a site map, you will have an index of all the pages on your website. When the search engines spider your site, they'll find all of the pages. This will help you with your rankings.
Creating a site map, especially if you have hundreds, or even thousands of pages on your site, can be very time consuming. This generator will speed up the process.

Spider Map Creator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/spider-map/creator.php

6. XML Site Generator

Google is now offering webmasters a chance to submit an XML site map.
An XML sitemap is a search engine friendly sitemap of your site. This isn't written for your visitors though. It's written for the search engines so that they can find all of the pages on your website.
Even if you include a sitemap on your site for your visitors, I would still recommend that you use an XML sitemap. This can speed the process of getting your site indexed by Google. This is an easy way to make sure that all of your pages get indexed.
Creating a sitemap is easy. You can use the generator listed below. Once you've created your sitemap, submit it to Google.

XML Site Maps - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php

Submit your sitemap to Google - https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

7. Linking

There's been a lot of talk about linking because linking is one of the most important strategies for getting high ranking in the search engines.
The more links you have pointing back to your site, the higher the page rank you will get, as well as creating a way for others to find you. You can use this strategy to get referrals from other sites, which is free traffic. It's targeted, and you are being recommended by another site.
Before building your linking strategy though, you should check your popularity. See who you are linked to first.

Link Popularity Checker - http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm

Once you have checked your link popularity, begin by building links back to your site. Below are two sites that offer directories you can submit your site to.

Directory Manager - http://www.123promotion.co.uk/directorymanager/

Free directories that don't require a link back - http://www.directoriezsubmission.com/free-web-directories.htm

Linking can drive a lot of traffic to your site. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be. You'll also get a lot more traffic.

It may be a good idea to hire some one to build links for you if you have no time. You can get your site submitted to web directories by http://www.rcplinks.com

Before you start to market, complete your site. Optimize it for the search engines, and use these tools to help you get higher rankings.

Jinger Jarrett will show you how to use the most effective "White Hat" search engine optimization strategies to build traffic and sales to your site. You can get her free ebook, "Search Engine Secrets", when you visit http://www.jingerjarrett.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jinger_Jarrett