Posts Tagged ‘external links’

If you have a website or blog, then you probably heard about backlinks and SEO. Backlinks are incoming links to your website received from another web node. As more backlinks a website has, as more its popularity and authority grows in comparison to other similar web pages or sites. Backlinks are also known as inbound links, incoming links (IBL), inlinks and inward links.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has to evaluate and determine the website reputation and relevance. For example, if a website was penalized by Google for promoting illegal or immoral content and that website links to your website or vice versa, your website will be become less popular, being ignored by search engines.

It doesn’t make sense to receive backlinks from web pages that link back to a large number of different websites. You should rather try to get backlinks from websites with PR 0 or no PR, because their popularity might increase over time. Besides this, every link directed towards your website matters, because it represents a favorable vote from Google. To evaluate the quality of a backlink, you should consider its popularity, Page Rank and authority.

How to get backlinks to your website? Well, there are several ways to do it. It’s highly recommended to opt for web pages and directories that link back to your website without asking you to do the same. It’s an excellent way to get links without offering anything or at least without providing links on your website.

It is always important to get backlinks from pages with a high Page Rank. However, try to have as many backlinks as possible because every vote matters. Try to provide something on your website that people will want to link to. This way, you’ll increase the popularity of your website.

The most important is to make sure you have high quality content. No one will visit your website if there’s nothing interesting to read about. Also, participate to online discussions and join social networks, forums and other communities. If possible, buy links on pages with a high Page Rank.

Another important aspect is anchor text and webpage content congruency, which represents the textual form seen by Internet users. It is essential to find a relevant keyword for your website and use it in the website URLs. For example, if your website is about pharmaceutical products, you should build backlinks using the word “pharmacies”. If you get enough links that you beat the competition, you’ll achieve a higher position in search engines.

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What is a backlink strategy? This is simply a description of the strategy a website owner follows to get other websites to link back to his website. The popular misconception is that as far as this goes the more the better. There are countless SEO ‘experts’ running around charging customers huge sums of money to get thousands of links back to their websites.

The theory goes like this: Google likes links. Google was built on the premise that a website with more links to it must be an important site, it must be an authority otherwise all those other websites would not be linking to it. So getting more and more links is good, right?

Right and wrong. Google is not quite that stupid to only take a look at the number of incoming links to a website to decide whether it will be ranked on the first page of search results or the last. Google does not have such a simplistic view. It does not rate all links as equal. Otherwise it would have been quite easy to set up thousands of pages with backlinks to your own website and thereby get to the top of Google search results very quickly.

The truth is that Google has a way to decide which links will count heavily towards a site’s ranking in search results and which links can basically be discarded. If you think about it, you will soon realize it makes a lot of sense.

How does Google do this? The answer once again makes a lot of sense. Suppose you had a website about dogs. Everything about dogs, what they like, what they don’t like, what to feed them and when. So you get the local vet to link to your site from his, and you link back to him. Down the road is another guy also with a website about dogs. His articles about dogs are so good that he gets the American Dog Owner’s Association to link back to his website. Which website do you think Google would list first in search results? Why?

Suppose further that you notice his site is listed above yours, so you buy links from all the shops in town back to your website. All of them create special pages with no other content but the link to your website.

What do you think will happen? The correct answer is: nothing. Google will still rank the other guy on top, because the one link to his website is a) from an authoritative website that may have thousands of other websites linking to them and b) the content of his website is related to the content on that other website.

To get quality backlinks to your site is not easy. That is why so many people still fall for the “10 000 quality links” trick. You might have to write to 50 website owners and ask them to look at your website content to get one good backlink in the end. Should it be from a authoritative website that one link might make a big difference though.

And if the articles are really good, they will be picked up by other websites and you could end up with a lot of quality links back to your site. This process is known as article marketing.  This makes for a much better backlink strategy than simply buying thousands of useless links.

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When we spend our money on article marketing, we focus on two things: 1) Persuading the consumers of the article to visit our site; 2) obtaining some “link juice” for the page of our site linked in our anchor text (i.e. SEO).  After all, we want to get “the most bang for our buck” when it comes to content syndication.  Particularly when we outsource to a professional web writing service, we hope to recoup the expense as quickly as possible.  That makes sense, in so far as we take it.

However, there is one thing that we sometimes forget in our enthusiasm of driving traffic and external links directly to our site’s pages.  For our articles to be truly effective, they need to be found by readers and considered worthy by the search engine algorithms.

We must face a harsh reality: Our newly submitted article is not the only new addition to A1Articles or EzineArticles today.  Indeed, it probably isn’t even the only article being posted that day that deals with our topic, although nobody has written as cleverly as we have of course.  So how do we make our article stand out from the massive amount of new content published on the web each day?

We, you and I, are fully aware of the standard tips for article marketing submissions:

*  Make sure your title is descriptive and memorable.
*  Tag the article with keywords that are popular and that are actually used in the article.
*  If the article directory offers and opportunity to provide your own synopsis (as does EzineArticles), spend the time to write in well and make it inviting.

All of those tips are important; none should be ignored.  We have to take another step, add another recommendation to our standard list in order for the major search engines to provide our article with the respect that we know it deserves.  After all, most of our potential readers will find our article by means of a search engine.  Only then can they be emotionally moved by our prose.  Only then will they follow the link to our site.  Only then will they repeated buy our product and service.  Only then will we become as wealthy as King Midas as we sit around in our pajamas, working from home only fifteen minutes a day.  Oops, I think I may have read a bit too much hype from the make money from home scams.  I offer you my sincere regrets for getting carried away.

How do we really earn respect from the search engines for our articles?  External links.  Lots and lots of external links.  And…how do we get those links?

We need to dedicate a portion of our article marketing strategy to building links for our articles, themselves.  Yes, that may mean somewhat fewer links to our site, but the advantage is that the links that we do have pointing to our site will become more potent.

You can settle on your own ratio, but most of us should probably assign about 20% to 35% of our article marketing content to providing external links directly to our previously published articles.  For example, every once in a while, post an article on A1Articles that contains links to some of your content on EzineArticles and GoArticles.  Use an ArticleDashboard submission to pass a little link love to a brilliant piece you have published on ArticleVista. 

If this sounds as if it might complicate your overall strategy, your record keeping and your approach to writing, you’re right!  Consequently, many Internet marketers outsource all of this to a well trained company that really understands writing, submissions, keywords and search engine optimization.  Then we can just sit around in our pajamas and count our money.

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When we spend our money on article marketing, we concentrate on two things: 1) Cleverly enticing the readers of our brilliant prose to visit our business’s website; 2) doing a bit of search engine optimization for the page on our website to which we link.  We naturally want to get the most for our money that we spend on article writing and distribution.  Particularly when we outsource to a betterweb writing service, we want to make sure that we do more than merely recover our investment.  That hope is understandable, but is it wise in the long term?

Sometimes our enthusiasm for generating external links to our website’s pages and our hopes that our readers will take the bait and click through to our site gets in the way of a rather important detail.  For our articles to be truly effective, they need to be found by readers and considered worthy by the search engine algorithms.

Face facts, our new article isn’t the only one being posted on EzineArticles or GoArticles on any given day.  Indeed, it probably isn’t even the only article being posted that day that deals with our topic, although nobody has written as cleverly as we have of course.  So how do we insure that our article rises to the attention of the readership above all of that clearly inferior competition?

Yeah, I know the standard writing and submission tips:

*  Use a descriptive title and, if possible, make it “catchy.”
*  Tag the article with keywords that are popular and that are actually used in the article.
*  If the article directory offers and opportunity to provide your own synopsis (as does EzineArticles), spend the time to write in well and make it inviting.

All of those tips are important; none should be ignored.  What we really need, though, is for the search engines to give our articles some much deserved respect.  After all, most of our potential readers will find our article by means of a search engine.  Only then can they be emotionally moved by our prose.  Only then will they follow the link to our site.  Only then will they repeated buy our product and service.  Only then will we become as wealthy as King Midas as we sit around in our pajamas, working from home only fifteen minutes a day.  Okay, I got carried away a bit by the marketing hype.  I offer you my sincere regrets for getting carried away.

How do we really earn respect from the search engines for our articles?  External links.  Lots and lots of external links.  How do we get those wonderful external links?  Well, we either sit back and wait for them to magically appear, or…

We have to actively assign a part of our article marketing plan to building links for our articles, themselves.  Granted that will reduce the number of links we have the time to provide for our business’s site, but the trade is that linking to our articles that do lead to our site become more powerful.

You can settle on your own ratio, but most of us should probably assign about 20% to 35% of our article marketing content to providing external links directly to our previously published articles.  For example, every once in a while, submit content to A1Articles that contains links to some of your content on EzineArticles and EverydayArticles.  Use an EzineArticles article to link directly to a master work that have have posted to ArticleVista. 

If this sounds as if it might complicate your record keeping and your approach to writing, you’re right!  Consequently, many Internet marketers outsource all of this to a well trained company that really understands writing, submissions, keywords and search engine optimization.  That outsourcing approach leave us plenty of time to sit around home in our pajamas counting our money.

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