Tag Archives: link

Reciprocal link sharing does not work

That might sound a bit dramatic but no, it does not. I’ve been doing some research (during the early hours of the morning) and I’m amazed at the number of websites out there adopting the most insane techniques in order to climb SERPs.

I must admit, I was intrigued by the methods at first. I mean, who wouldn’t like to get a week’s work done in a few minutes? 🙂 But you know what they say, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

The biggest monster of all is the promise of instantaneous link share with thousands of quality websites. This basically involves joining a poorly code shabby directory which is copied many times over thousands of different domains. There’s several things wrong with that:

1. These pages offer no quality content what-so-ever, so they’ll never be highly regarded by SEs.

2. The number of outgoing links on each page means your site will get a minuscule tiny small fraction of absolute nothing – it really isn’t much…

3. The same pages are duplicated over and over again around the web and are promptly ignored and penalized by SEs.

Now, if you’re a SEO expert you will know that apart from being a gross waste of time, it’s extremely unlikely that any of the above will harm your site’s reputation. A webmaster has no control over external links to his website(s), and for that reason his website(s) will not be penalized by the SEs, contrary to popular belief. In fact, these techniques may well fool small search engines* and quickly push a website up the ladder on SERPs.

Having said that, here’s the big whopper….

4. The most common requirement for these link-share wonders is that, of course, you place yet another copy of the directory and its thousands of badly coded content-less pages under your website.

This is a huge problem and is where many people go wrong. And here’s why:

* Adding thousands of pages to your website overnight will dramatically affect your content’s keyword density. SEs like Google don’t only examine an individual page, they also analyse the website as a whole in order to determine its ‘theme’.

* Whereas incoming links cannot harm your websites(s) reputation, outgoing links can destroy it – very quickly. A link to a page is seen seen as a ‘vote of confidence’ to that page and its content from the website linking into it. Linking into bad neighbourhoods and low quality websites will damage your reputation – (ie.: SERPs rankings).

This all sounds very depressing… so what can you do?

The most effect form of link sharing is and will always be one-way incoming links. And the best way to get that is by having quality content. And the best quality content should be found on your website.

Although traditional methods can be time consuming, you simply cannot go wrong. One week of quality content publishing is worth a million times more than every automatic FFA link directory that has ever existed ever.

* Small search engines – Anything other than Google, Yahoo, MSN and the likes…

Link Building: Create a chain reaction!

No doubt you’ve heard of word-of-mouth advertising, whereby products or companies get a boost when people talk positively about them. The online equivalent of this kind of advertising is link building. What does it mean? Link building involves getting other websites to link to your site. It is similar to having your friend recommend a good doctor or restaurant; it carries more weight than an address listed in the yellow pages. If a viewer comes to your site through a link from another site, it obviously has more significance than if the person just stumbled across it.

Another particularly good reason for link building is for better search engine listings. In recent times, links have become increasingly important to search engines because they see them as an approval of your site by other websites. What better endorsement can there be than a positive referral! Take the case of your dentist or hairdresser – I bet you chose them primarily because of references from friends and relatives. Same is the case with your website – the more sites that provide links to it, the more popular it is!

How do you go about it? We’ve listed below some steps that will help you in the task of link building:

o Create a plan – You guessed right! The first step is to set a goal and prepare a plan. How many links do you want? Set a realistic goal for the number of links you want. When you are making the plan, set your target higher than your actual goal – about 4-5 times more. We are saying this because not all sites that you approach will want to trade links. You could get quite a number of refusals.

o Make your site worth their time – Content, content, content! That is the constant mantra you have to repeat to yourself. If your site has no worthwhile content to read, no one will be interested in linking to it. Examples of linkable content include how-to articles, product reviews, tools, tips, FAQs and so on. Make it relevant to what your site is about. For example, if you are an online beauty supply store, write articles on beauty tips, hair care, clothes and accessories. You can bet that you will get links from several websites catering to these needs.

o Look for quality link partners – How would you go about doing this? There are many ways to find link partners, but the easiest way is to use Open Directory and Yahoo. These directories are difficult to get listed in, so finding a potential link partner here will ensure that those are good sites for linking to.

o Organize your findings – Once you have made a list of potential link partners, get organized. Keep track of the full name of the site owner or Webmaster, the email address, the homepage URL, the URL of the page where you think your link belongs and why you think it belongs there and the date of the initial request letter.

o Contact the potential site – Once you have garnered all the necessary information, send an e-mail customized to each site requesting that you trade links. In your request, mention why your link belongs on their site and provide a sample link and description.

o Check for links and follow-up – Link building takes time. Check to see if anyone has linked to your site after a month. Follow up with each site that hasn’t linked to you yet.

Link building takes time. But if you keep at it, you are sure to reap the benefits of this simple, easy-to-do advertisement for your business website.

Link Building Through Press Release Traffic Tactics

Even though hundreds of thousands of people have submitted press releases online over the years, and continue to do so, I find a lot of website owners ignore this bountiful link building and traffic generation method. Still, the people who do press releases often do them wrong. In this article I will talk about doing them right while getting you to try this tactic to show what it will do for your business.

And the big cardinal sin is not doing them regularly. If your business is truly a mover and a shaker in your niche, you should have plenty of things to talk about each month.

For instance, you update your product or service. Send a release. You hire new staff. Send a release. You launch a new product. Definitely, send a release!

There are a lot more reasons to alert news junkies, reporters, media outlets, and your possible customers to changes, updates, and significant progress in your business.

That is, if you have something worth talking about. This immediately eliminates a lot of business models I see flying around like Adsense sites, but I’ve even seen people syndicate press releases for those sites!

What Happens When You Do A Press Release?

At PRWeb.com, depending on the service you order, your release goes out on “the wire.” That’s just PR lingo for their network. Now, if you just do a free release or donate $10, don’t expect much. You get what you pay for.

We use the $250 optimized press release service from PRWeb with great results. You’ll hit Google and Yahoo news along with the entire site network on emedia newswire.

That’s great and it generates a lot of traffic depending on the topic. But what’s even greater is the amount of sheer linkage it generates for your sites. I’m talking thousands, not hundreds of links.

With PRWeb’s SEO release service, you get to link to your site or any page within your site every 100 words or so. Been wanting more recognition from search engines for the keyword “weight loss?” Link that in your press release and your best keyword is an anchor link that goes to hundreds and thousands of places all over the web.

Yeah, maybe you’ve heard this before. But have you done it? Did you doubt the power of it and blow it off? Big mistake.

People don’t submit online press releases for ego’s sake. They do it because it drives links, traffic, and better rankings. If it didn’t, why would there be so darn many repeat offenders at PRWeb who submit regular releases at $250+ a pop?

Last trick. After you submit your release you can write about it on your blog and make a trackback to the hosted release on PRWeb. Then you get an immediate link back to your site from one of the bigger sites on the net.

Find other press releases related to your topic and do a post mentioning a few and trackback all of them to get more authority links with the stroke of some keys and the click of a button.

This stuff is so easy people think it doesn’t work. Well, it sure does. And guess what? PRWeb isn’t the only game in town!

Test it and then leverage your reach across all the major PR networks and watch your branding, traffic, links, and rankings soar!