Category Archives: RSS / Link Popularity
The Power of Text Links
Links drive direct traffic to your website. Links directly increase your websites rankings. Link building is the art of attracting links that you want. Anybody can engage in link building. Links come from anywhere that you want them to come from.
Links can come from
Blog posts
Press releases
Text links
Links from websites related to your website
Tip: Your inbound link profile is extremely important. You need to understand what your link profile should look like. You need to build a natural inbound link profile. It used to be about the quantity of links. However, the search engines have recently added filters that discount unnatural links.
A natural profile link includes your domain name and a variety of links that directly relate to your website. These links vary in nature. For example, dont have the same link over and over. Have synonyms of the link instead. This is more natural and shows that you didnt just go for quantity.
Tip: Permanent links equal equity. Equity is built based upon links that you have over time. So websites that have had links for several years have more power than newer links from newer websites. The key is to not ever stop obtaining inbound links.
Tip: Links that are in the text copy carry more weight than links that are simply on the page.
Tip: Obtain theme related links. Obtain links from websites that relate to yours.
Tip: Build links that you can control. Otherwise, you might incur an over optimization penalty.
Tip: Set up your own Blog. Put the Blog under your domain name. Write interesting posts so people will link to your Blog. Comment on other Blogs. These will build deep links. Deep links point to other pages on your website besides your homepage.
Tip: Its more important to have a higher percentage of deep links.
Using Link Bait To Attract Massive Free Traffic
Here is a technique I have long used to attract massive free traffic to some of my websites. Recently, more and more people are discussing this largely intuitive technique, and giving it a variety of names. The name I most embrace is “link bait.”
“Link bait” is anything that you put on your site that encourages others to link to your site, and then drive massive amounts of free traffic to your site by telling others about it. It’s some feature that by it’s very nature makes others reference your site and want to tell others about it.
Examples of this could be a service that they need to visit your site to access, or an outstanding article that they have to visit your site to read, or even some type of list that they need to visit your site to access.
Examples of link bait that I can think of (actual and hypothetical)… things that would cause other webmasters, publishers, and just people in general to send you traffic include:
– The site http://formatit.com/ has a software utility that formats emails for free. This is where I format all of my ezines and emails to a max of 65 characters per line 😉
– The site http://selfpromotion.com/ has a program that allows you to semi-automatically submit your sites to all of the major and minor search engines and directories for free.
– A site that has a listing of all the major blog directories.
– A site that has a listing of all the major places to “ping” when posting to your blog.
– A recipe conversion chart on a cooking site.
– A chart showing calories burned during various exercises.
– A listing (with hot links) and maybe reviews of major internet marketing forums.
– A list of 100 top rated directories to submit your ezine articles to.
– A list of the 100 most popular baby names.
– A list of foods considered aphrodisiacs… and why they work.
… you get the idea!
If you can incorporate something similar to the above on your blog or site, then after the word gets out, it will be natural for people to link to you. They’ll feel good linking to and telling others about your site. People enjoy appearing “in the know.”
You should do some brainstorming today, and see what ideas you can come up with for link bait to add to you site and then tell the world about.
As I said, it can even be an article. For example, an article on how to really optimize a website, 20 top traffic generation methods, some type of webmaster tricks, etc.
As an example, I recently wrote an article, which I expanded into an ebook called “20 Insider Techniques Of A Super Affiliate.” I recently decided to post these techniques as a 20-part series to my blog at http://WillieCrawford.com/blog/
Once people start referring to this series, it will attract traffic to my blog for a very long time. The key then is to have links in my blog’s navigation that make it easy to locate this series even months from now!
Go ahead… do some brainstorming, and then put some link bait on your site. Then tell a few others and ask them to help spread the word. After all, link bait only works if the word gets out. Once it does, the flow of traffic will become unstoppable.
Link Building That Works
There are several different ways to build links for traffic and for search engine rankings. Matt Cutts describes the best links as links which are given freely by authoritative sources that are trusted by visitors and Google themselves. (to paraphrase)
So the following tactics will get you those kinds of links:
1. Linkbaiting ‘ writing controversial, wise, witty, valuable, or otherwise good content that gets other people talking about you on their sites, linking back to your post.
2. Press Releases ‘ This may seem counter-intuitive since most people think press release syndication is only about “placing” links where you want them across a large network. But think of it this way: PRWeb.com has a trackback feature where bloggers can do a trackback to your release and get a valuable link back to their site in the process. They talk up your release and your release gets more traffic, link popularity, which sends you more traffic from the release including more link popularity by having a release that actually ranks.
Link Buying
Text Link Brokers and Text Link Ads (both .com) are the best places to buy advertising. I say advertising because you shouldn’t be buying links just for pagerank. I get more traffic than you do and my pagerank sucks. Plus if Google finds out you are buying links solely to manipulate their rankings, they will zap you.
(I know this is stupid. How can Google know the difference between you buying a link on a site for traffic and buying it to manipulate their link popularity algorithm? It’s a ridiculous argument to say they know why I bought a link. Google doesn’t know your reasoning for buying advertising other than you want more exposure. Keep it that way by not talking about “buying links” and instead call it advertising. That’s really what it is.)
Don’t buy links for pagerank. Here’s another reason:
You should be buying ads for traffic directly from the site you are buying from. Search engine rankings are a side effect of good advertising, not the reason for it.
Authoritative Directories
There are directories you must be listed in if you are serious about your online business. And they cost money. Sorry, but you can play the “free” game for years before you see any serious traffic from free link building alone.
You can gain a lot by submitting to Yahoo Directory, Best of the Web, What You Seek and other human edited paid directories. Google trusts the sites they find there and so do the visitors who use these directories to search.
You can circumvent any paid linking and advertising and still succeed. But I’m willing to bet you don’t want to wait as long as it is going to take to get the results you are looking for by going to totally free link building route.