The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly about Linking

Your link strategy is very important aspect of your Internet Marketing program. The quality of your inbound links is more important than the quantity. It is important to build a good list of well-balanced links pointing to your site. Diversification is the key. Try not to concentrate all of your efforts on a single method. A few methods should be avoided wherever possible because they either offer you no benefit or your page may be penalized by the search engines. The Good Links Directory Links: Directories are a very important source of links. Obviously, some directory listings are more important than others and some directories are hardly worth the effort. Start with the major Internet directories and move to general topic directories as well as niche directories. Consider paying for inclusion in one or two of the seriously large directories like the Yahoo directory and Business.com. Reciprocal Links: Try and secure reciprocal links with websites that are related to your field. However don't base your entire link building efforts on this one tactic alone. One Way Inbound Links: These are the most important kind of links. An inbound link that is one way will appear that your site is an expert on a particular subject. The more relevant and the more important that search engines deem the linking site to be the higher score they give that particular link. Press Release Links: Writing and submitting a press release can provide good links. Article Links: Writing and submitting articles to article directories can produce a large number of links. You can submit one article to many directories but each directory. Community Links: Join forums and include your link in your signature. Post useful comments on blogs and include your link and your business name. You should never spam blogs or forums and only include links. This is rude and cost the website owner money to remove your spam from their blog or forum. The Bad Links FFA Sites: A Free-For-All page, is one that allows anybody to post any link they like on the page. Typically they are not only useless to your cause, because the search engines ignore them, but they will not generate any traffic but may attract spammers to your doors. Link Farms: A link farm is a page that contains an excessively large number of links. It is unlikely that a link farm will yield much benefit and most search engines will ignore the link. Off Topic: Off topic links are incoming links from websites that have nothing to do with your website. They may offer very slight weight with some search engines. This appears in the bad link section because they offer very little positive benefit and your time would best be used establishing links with relevant websites. Unindexable: Links that cannot be indexed by search engines are completely useless. A search engine spider must be able to follow the link to find your page and provide you with any benefit for that link. Avoid any page that offers to display your link in a frame, or to a website that uses the noindex or nofollow robots.txt tags. Conclusion: Collect links from as many sources using as many tactics as possible and use keyword variants in your anchor text. By following these guidelines you should be able to improve your search engine rankings. For more information or help please visit A Working Website

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at D 2007

Gates & Jobs on Their Relationship

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs onstage at D5, talk about the greatest misunderstandings about their relationship. (May 31)

Why A Blog?

Search Engine Marketing is the answer. Although it is important to continually produce quality content, the blog its self is not as important as the boost it gives my business website. Blogger.com has an Alexa traffic ranking of 15 and because this Blog is published on a blogger.com domain name it is given a high search engine placement score. The content is considered to be highly relevant to my business website and the search engines reward my website with a higher placement score because it is linked to my website. This in return drives more qualified traffic to my website resulting in an increased Visitor Conversion Rate. Remember to consider the search engines point of view when you build your incoming links. Try and get high quality incoming links. Just a side note: I have found that if your sites job is to collect qualified leads; your visitors are more likely to fill out a short request form rather than a long request form. The longer the form is the more taxing on the visitor to fill out so they are less inclined to do so. Case study, Bell Insurance has short forms consisting of 9 user responses and long forms consisting of 47 user responses on their website. The short form is used 98% of the time. This means that a Bell Insurance Agent must call the user and get that extra information, but it is a qualified lead none the less and results in more policies sold. Their website makes money for the company. So the bottom line is, if you have a well designed and well written website that guides your visitor through the buying process, it will result in more sales for your company. Good luck and start a blog or two. P.S. I almost forgot; submit your blog to the search engines so they know about the incoming link.