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Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. HighPowerSites is the easiest do-it-yourself website builder on the web. No programming or design skill required. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with HighPowerSites.com at: http://www.highpowersites.com
November 10, 2007
Alright….I have seen and heard enough about people trying their hardest to get included in DMOZ. Some people spend a lot of time worrying about their submissions and waiting to see if they are going to get in. I want to tell everyone that they could be doing better things with their time.
Now don’t get me wrong when I say that you shouldn’t waste your time with DMOZ. It is a good directory and can help you in the long run. If you own a website or work for one, you only need to submit your site once. After you do that, sit back and wait to see if you will get included. If you are not aware of the time it takes to get indexed, then please let me make you aware! It can take up to one year to get included in their index. Not everyone that submits will get included in the first place. There have been rumors that some DMOZ editors do not even look at some of the submission that they receive. This means that your website could be one that just gets thrown out without any consideration. Does this seem fair to you?? I know it makes me mad and I lose the respect I once had for DMOZ. I came across a forum posting that had a DMOZ editor say that some of them pick and choose the sites that they want to review. Now, when you look at their policy, it states that the editor ‘will’ review your site. Nowhere does it say ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’.
Now that I have shown some of you that you might not even get considered in the directory, I will show you what you can do about it. Instead of sitting there worrying about your submission, why don’t you just go to other directories and submit there. There are so many directories out there that can give you the same exact result as DMOZ. If you start submitting to these directories, please only submit manually. Do NOT use automated software because they are frowned upon in the search engines and in the good directories. If you do submissions everyday, then by the time you get in DMOZ, if you do, you will have many quality links to your site and your Page Rank will be a lot better. If you don’t want to wait for all these directories to include your site, then there are directories that you can pay for inclusion, like yahoo and business.com. But if I were you, then I would take the time to get my site in as many good directories as I could to maximize your linking campaign.
So all in all, please do submit to DMOZ, but don’t wait there or worry about them not putting you in. You have at least 3 months to wait for something to happen, if they even review your site, so make something of your time and get your linking campaign going with quality directories. There are many list out there on the web that will give you some good starts and you can take it from there. DMOZ is losing its credibility as a good directory because of the statements of some of their editors, so don’t worry about them and be proactive in your link popularity campaigns!
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Author is the current owner and operator of Overdrive Electronics and Overdrive Auctions and is certified for SE Optimization and online marketing techniques.
There are a number of link building strategies online today, some that are more effective than others.
I personally have found that writing articles and submitting them to the online article directories is one of the most effective ways to build high-quality back links to my site.
How does it work?
Basically when you write an article and submit it to an online directory, several things occur.
1) Once the article directory accepts your article, they publish it to their article directory. Your link has been embedded in your article or in the bio box the article directory gives you.
2) Other web sites that are looking for much-coveted ?fresh content? see your article and copy it to their web site, leaving your link intact.
3) Some article directories use an RSS feed to automatically send your articles to a number of subscribed web sites, all of which receive your article and upload it into their web site via an automated method.
4) Ezine and newsletter editors find your article and use your article, link intact, in their ezine or newsletter, giving you added exposure.
5) When the search engines spider the various websites that now have your link, you are credited with having many quality back links to your site, something that goes a long way in determining where your page will rank in their search engine results.
Helpful hint:
When you are building your link, create an html ?live link? and anchor that live link with one of your web site?s keyword phrases. This is called a ?text link? and the search engines use this to help rank you higher in the search results for that specific keyword phrase.
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To read more about how to start an online business, click here and download my free book: 15 Steps to Internet Success
Sean Mize is a successful offline and online entrepreneur and marketer, and has written extensively on the topic of online business creation and success.
October 29, 2007
Adding a blog to your domain can be a great way to score inbound links. You?ll want to write things that truly connect with people, and that also result in a direct, specific and quantifiable action ? like a link, a Delicious social bookmark, or a vote at news aggregation site Digg.
Each link, bookmark and vote you earn has a tendency to create others, depending on how well your copy offers something of real value to the reader. Check later for how well you did, and keep at it.
So here?s the 5 keys to writing blog posts that attract links:
1. Post Titles
A really great headline hints at a reward for the reader so they are willing to read the rest. Your post title is the first crucial step to getting a link to your post, but only if you follow up with content that matches your headline promise.
2. Lists
It?s a blogosphere favorite for good reason ? ?list? content works, in large part due to the attention-grabbing power of the headline. Any time you make a list that gives a number of reasons, secrets, types, or ways to do something will work because people like quickly digestible content.
3. ?How To? Articles
It?s no secret that ?how to? articles and blog posts are some of the most sought after, linked to, and bookmarked content online. People want useful information, and they?ll reward you by promoting it to others when you provide it.
4. Link Out
To get link love, you gotta give link love. So link out to other bloggers as much as possible. Don?t worry about losing readers. The counter-intuitive rule of the Internet (to quote blogger Dave Winer) is the more you send them away the more they come back.
5. Persistence
You may work hard on an article or resource that you?re just positive will spread like wildfire, and yet hear nothing but lonely crickets chirping upon release. Just keep at it. Put your audience first with everything you write, and success will come.
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Brian Clark is the founder of http://www.tubetorial.com which provides free video tutorials that help you start a profitable Internet home business. He also writes about online copywriting that works at his blog Copyblogger.com
Copyright 2006 Brian Clark
October 27, 2007
Link popularity is a very important part for your search engine rankings.
The link popularity greatly influences the way that search engines rank your website. Google for example has something called a Page rank which they assign to each website and to each individual web page. The page rank in turn affects the position that your website will rank in the search engine results for any particular keyword or key phrase.
Link popularity is normally used as a term that describes the number of links as well as the quality of links that lead to your website from quality websites that relevant to your site content wise. Although Google has recently start placing less importance on inbound links due to link farms and paid link networks, inbound links are still considered to be of the upmost importance for search engines when ranking a website and its link popularity.
The search engines view an inbound link as some form of testimonial which shows that a specific website has some form of quality content worth linking to. In recent times we have seen the strong growth of blogs and blog networks. Due to the strong habit of bloggers to link to one and other, many blogs have been able to reach very good rankings.
The webmasters of e-commerce sites quickly saw the trend and jumped on the band wagon so as to increase their link popularity. Unfortunately due the large number of webmasters and marketers having abused blogs by link spamming them, the search engines are now frequently skeptical when it comes to inbound links from blogs.
For those of you that are new to the Page rank system, the easiest way to check the page rank for any website is by downloading the Google toolbar for either Internet Explorer or for Firefox. After installing either one, you will be able to see a small box in your browser which indicates the Google Page rank for any website that you visit.
Step 1 ? Finding relevant and highly ranked websites
The best way for raising your link popularity is by getting an inbound link from a website which is ranked well and has content that is relevant to your website or that complements it somehow.
I advice all my readers to stay well clear from link exchanges, networks and link farms. History shows us that the search engines find out about this in the end (especially Google) and this can lead to dramatic actions from their side. The punishment can include even deletion of your website from their search engine and will ruin your link popularity.
Once your website is banned from one of the major search engines it can be a very long process to get re-included. It does happen frequently that a website is not allowed to be re-included in the search engine which is a nightmare for any website as it seriously reduces the potential traffic volume that a website could attract.
This might be a good time to warn you about shady search engine optimization firms with a bulk of them coming from India. These search engine optimization firms promise top 10 Google and Yahoo rankings and lots of other promises which seem to be good to be true. These firms often use black hat SEO tricks to increase the ranking of their client?s websites.
The problem is that they will not give you the top 10 ranking most likely and secondly once the search engine finds out, you will be more than likely deleted from the search engine results.
Frequently if you ask these firms about this they will tell you that everything they do is completely legal and that they will do miracles for your link popularity.
Those words won?t help you very much though once they have done their damage and managed to get you delisted from the search engines. You won?t hear back from them once that occurs and all your efforts in regards to link popularity will have been a waste of time.
Just work on your link popularity yourself and start slowly. Search for sites which clearly are sites with similar content and high page rank or look for sites that are affiliated with government websites or educational websites as the search engines seem to hold those links in the highest regards.
2) Requesting an inbound link
Obviously the other site their webmaster needs to be made aware of your site so that they can consider linking to your website.
The easiest way to do this and hopefully improve your link popularity is through sending an email to the webmaster or website owner with a request for a link.
It?s very important to customize each email and for the email not look like a generic email as people really hate that. You will find that the positive reply percentage is much higher this way compared to some standard email which you send out.
We have created a few tips for creating this link request email which should lead to higher link popularity.
? Try obtaining the email address of the relevant person rather than sending it to info@example.com as your email might end up in the spam or delete box.
? Be careful what you write in the email and the subject title as certain words link exchange might trigger a spam filter or possibly takes away the interest of the recipient to read the email.
? Be straight forward on what you are asking for from the other person and try to list some positive reasons on why the link would be beneficial to both parties.
? Try to include some personalized items in the email which shows that you have read through their website and that you really are interested in dealing with them. This will certainly lead to an increase in link popularity in the long run.
? It?s more than normal that you will be required to give a link back. If you are the one initiating the contact then you should place a link on your site which links to their site first. This will show a sign of trust and will most likely lead to a backlink to your site.
If however they do not reply after some time you should remove the link to their site as it will have no benefit to your link popularity efforts.
For the remainder of the tips and advice please visit the authors website where the article continues. The remaining section of the article can be found here: Link Popularity
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James has been a long time member of the SEO and Search Engine Marketing community and is a regular contributor to the free marketing advice site: Explainsall.com
October 3, 2007
The pertinent question here would be whether links that redirect visitors away from your site are useful to you. The answer is an obvious ?No.? After all, you will be marketing your services through your site and you won?t want any of your visitors going over to the neighbors to meet their needs. Once you get a visitor, your goal should be to keep them at your site, all the while enticing them to call you by providing them useful information and drawing them in to your services.
Reel in Your Visitor
Remember a visitor at your site is looking for information about property they wish to invest in or rent. This will probably be the biggest investment they will be making in their lifetime, so they need all the assurance they can get. Sending them to other sites will put you at a disadvantage because you will leave them under the impression that you do not have all the answers to their questions. Outbound links from your site will carry visitor away who will, at the most, thank you for your help in finding a better site that offers solutions to their problem/question.
Getting Your Own Information
Every realtor site offers services such as mortgage calculators, financial calculators and information about other mortgage loan sites. There are other links to sites with information about the facilities offered by the local community that the visitor is interested in. These local facilities might be public transportation services, educational institutions and hospitals - among others. They may never return to you for their needs.
Looking for information on localities is well served by the many search engines already up and running. Your site has to answer specific questions about the properties of interest to the visitor. The best way would be to do your own research and collect information from the visitor in order to call them. Assisting them through the house hunting and buying process will prove to be an added advantage.
Interactive Sites Gather Information
Making your site interactive for the visitor by incorporating search-engine like features - without leading them out of your Website - is a good idea. The site should convince the visitor that they are welcome to call on you for any assistance required. Your services should be well defined on your site. This will be the first convincing point for any visitor.
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WC Liu is the founder of www.BuyHomeChecklist.com, a Home Checking information site for home purchasing. He can be reached at wcliu@dcpsvc.com
September 12, 2007
By now you should have realized that it is a very, very, VERY good thing to be ranked highly in the search engines. So, how do you go about doing this? You get a bunch of links with your targeted keywords in them to point to your site. So, how do you do that?
Well, the old fashioned way is to email the owners of different sites that are related to yours and ask to exchange links. You then have to wait for them to get back to you and approve their link on your site before you get your link on theirs. This is what the search engines want you to do, it is what is called the ‘honest’ way of getting links to your site.
If you really don’t care about being honest and just want the search engine ranking, you can actually go out and purchase links to your website. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this method. The biggest advantage of purchasing links is that they are guaranteed to be there, with the link text that you specify. Some of the better companies that are selling links will rotate the link text and description for each site that your link appears on, making it look more natural. You can also control which sites are linking to you, so that only those sites that are related to yours will have links on them. These are also one-way links, which can rank much count for a lot more ‘points’ with the search engines.
The downside of purchasing links is that it is not exactly something that search engines and other webmasters like you to do. If you tell someone that you have purchased links to your website they will probably turn you in, and the search engines will ban your site.
So, purchasing links will help you with your search engines, ranking, but that is only if nobody finds out that you are doing it. There is a definite risk involved in doing this, but it might be worth it. Personally, I would rather write articles and submit them to article directories. Yes, it takes time to propagate the articles, the links are still one-way links and it is a more natural model for getting links.
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Christopher Shireman has been researching ways to make money online since 2004. He was made financially free in 2006 by using a combination of Adsense and affiliate marketing techniques. To find out more information about how he made money onlyine, go to http://beattherichjerk.com
August 31, 2007
The idea behind the popularity ranking algorithms is that, by linking to a page, you imply that that page deserves attention. Search engines use links to determine the authority of pages in topics described by the link anchor text. The problem is that every link is considered as a positive endorsement with no regard to the real intention of the linking person. There is no effective way for a search engine to distinguish between positive and negative endorsements in links yet.
The earliest web-like development by Tim Berners-Lee - the Enquire program – allowed the usage of various types of relationships between documents, such as similar-to, part-of, or made-by. However in his later work on the World Wide Web and HTML Tim Berners-Lee has abandoned multiple-types of relationships for simplicity. Flat links with no relationship information have been used ever since.
This article was originally published at Trust Problem in the Link-Based Popularity Ranking.
Link Abuse
The absence of this feature has been widely exploited by people trying to manipulate search engines results since the introduction of the link-based popularity ranking. The most notable examples are link farms, which used to flourish just a couple years ago. Search engines had realized the problem of abuse and started penalizing link farms and sites that link to them. But still with the anchor text and the host page’s own authority being the only parameters used to evaluate the link impact, there exist many other ways to manipulate rankings. By using anchor text large web-users communities can perform the infamous Google-bombing: see ‘miserable failure’ search results in Google. And this can be employed against other search engines as well, e.g. ‘друг народа’ (‘people’s friend’) query in the Russian major search engine Yandex.ru returns V.Putin’s bio on the top of the results
Adding Semantics Info into Link Markup
The problem lies in the very nature of HTML. Designed as a document structure markup language it is ineffective for describing the semantics of a document. Some extensions had to be introduced into the link markup to make it able to reflect the nature of the relationship to the linked document. One example is the rev attribute. This attribute is used in the VoteLinks microformat proposed by the Technorati.com to allow users to express their opinion about linked blogs. The rev attribute in the VoteLinks format can have the following values: ‘vote-for’, ‘vote-abstain’ and ‘vote-against’, thus reflecting positive, neutral and negative opinions. This makes it possible to augment or reduce the authority of the linked document respectively.
The rel attributes values such as ‘friend’, ‘colleague’, ‘sibling’, ‘neighbor’ or ‘spouse’ allow a different approach, reflecting the nature of the relationships between two documents, rather than the opinion. This approach is also used by Technorati.com and might have certain value within a community of bloggers.
None of these approaches is currently used by any major search engine. The rel attribute value ‘nofollow’ is the only one to be taken into account by Google, MSN and Yahoo. This value is intended to show that the linking person is not certain about his approval of the linked document. The search engine crawlers are supposed not to follow such links, but many webmasters report that actually they still do. However it is possible that such links do not propagate authority.
Possible Impact of Trust Links
What if search engines were able to determine the trust or distrust nature of a link? Would the existing ranking be significantly different? Currently inbound links show the measure of attention to a certain page. Therefore even those pages which are linked to express distrust or even disgust might be ranked higher than positively endorsed pages for the same query.There is another approach that would have to be reconsidered. Now if page A links to page B, it propagates a fraction of its authority value to B. If there is a reciprocal link, some authority can be returned to A, so that both pages benefit from the mutual trust. But consider now that a highly ranked page A distrusts page B. Page B also adds a distrust link to A in revenge. Should we decrease the ranking of A because a distrusted page B also negatively links to it? Or should we stop considering any opinion from B?
To determine the effect of the search engines’ ability to distinguish between positive and negative opinions in web links Paolo Massa and Conor Hayes have conducted an experiment using the linkage data from the Epinions.com website. Epinions.com is a web community where users can write their opinions on movies, books, goods and services. It is also possible to rate to use other users’ reviews, thus expressing trust or distrust. In the experiment’s model, users are considered as web pages, while their ratings are seen as incoming links. The 20 top ranked users were sorted by their total number of ratings (positive and negative) and by the number of the positive rankings only. The total number of rankings shows the attention to the user, which is similar to the link popularity of a web page. Using statistical methods P. Massa and C. Hayes have determined the alignment factor between the attention ranking and the trust ranking. The value is 0.8 and it should be noted that since people tend to assign positive ranking more frequently than negative (often a disappointed user would simply not rate ate at all) – the actual alignment value can be even less.
However trust linking would be ineffective in the web. The introduction of trust/distrust linking would create wide opportunities for abuse, and not just from gray spammers. Any highly-ranked website would be able to destroy authority of any less ranked competitor with a power of a single link! While in relatively small communities of bloggers (Technorati.com) or reviewers (Epinions.com) such wars can be prevented by human moderation, the existing technology still doesn’t allow search engines to perform a similar task in the Web.
References:
- Massa, P. and Hayes, C. 2005, ‘Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority’. Istituto Trentino di Cultura.
- Ntoulas, A., Cho, J., Cho, H.K., et al. 2004, ‘A Study On The Evolution Of The Web’. University of California.
Get more useful information on web promotion at our SEO and Web Marketing Study.
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Oleg Ishenko, MCSE, MCDBA, BSc Telecommunication industry business management.
SEOResearcher.com
August 27, 2007
Link baiting with web content can really just come down to the good old fashioned publicity stunt.
When properly planned, targeted, and executed, publicity sought for publicity?s sake can be an incredible force. It can turn an idea into a business and give a fading star a fresh chance to brave the media glare.
From Howard?s Stern?s Union Square give-away of 500 free satellite radios to commemorate his switch to Sirius, to the Britney and Madonna kiss at the MTV Music Awards, to the Janet Jackson ?wardrobe malfunction,? publicity stunts create attention.
But stunts are hard to control, and sometimes the after-effects can be mixed or downright nasty. Here?s an example of an engineered maneuver that had the exact opposite effect from what was intended.
Elvis Presley laid the groundwork for the modern celebrity publicity stunt by joining the U.S. Army on March 24, 1958. It wasn?t his stunt, though. Despite the lack of a war, he was drafted for a two year tour of duty in Germany until he was honorably discharged in 1960.
Presley?s peacetime draft was a conservative political move to protect the country from the corrupting influence of his music, and it had exactly the opposite effect. Here?s how Alan Levy’s book Operation Elvis describes the move:
By pretending he was just like anybody else, the Army had demonstrated to the world The Importance of Being Elvis.
Thanks to a political miscalculation, Elvis became more famous than ever, and publicists ever since have worked this angle to amplify the importance of being [insert celebrity client name here]. The irony is, before leaving for Germany, Elvis had already agreed to make nearly ten years of really bad movies, which would help send his career ? all decked out in bejeweled white jumpsuits ? on a one-way trip to Vegas.
What can Elvis teach you about link building?
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Brian Clark is the founder of http://www.tubetorial.com which provides free Internet Marketing video tutorials for effective online business. He also writes about online copywriting techniques at his blog Copyblogger.com
Copyright 2006 Brian Clark
August 18, 2007
Some points to note before starting
1. Budget : How much you are willing to spend on submissions?
2. Purpose : Just increase to Page Rank or to drive traffic to your site or both? Or is it for prestige and brand awareness? Most directories wont give you decent traffic, even big and popular directories Yahoo! or Business.com or Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory may not increase your sites traffic.
3. Planning : The most important part of your link building campaign. You need to spend a lot of time knowing which paid directory to submit to and how to submit your site to, what anchor text and meta tags and keywords to use and the niche or market you are looking for.
Some general points to note when submitting to directories
1. Make sure you read the Terms of Service (TOS).
2. Always submit to the correct category (if not possible, something similar)
3. Make sure your description is correct without any spelling mistakes
4. I would not encourage reciprocal links (or 2 way links) at all. Too troublesome and may work against you if the directory is sandboxed by Google. If you must, try linking to big directories or reputable ones.
5. Vary your descirption you submit to directories a bit so that it will look natural to visitors and Search Engines. And remember to add some keywords into your description.
6. Choose a local or a regional directory if possible, as these will at least give you a better amount of traffic as well as PR.
7. Niche directories are better : They are targeted and usually have less links listed just like a local or regional directory.
Free Directory
Why not? Its free so just submit to them even if they are PR0. Every bit helps and you will not know whether in the future their PR will rise and can help your improve your PR as well. Just try to avoid link farms (directory with tons and tons of links per page) as they are useless and seldom get indexed by Search Engines at all. Also ensure that they have static text links because some dynamic links(especially those which looks like session ids) or ‘weird’ links won’t push PR to their listed sites.
Paid Directory
Depending on how much you are willing to spend, you can even have links to your site from PR9 directories. My suggestion in choosing which directory is as below:
1. PR Value : Check the PR of the directory and the category in which you want to submit your site to using Google’s toolbar.
2. Static Links : Make sure they provide static links, which can help you in improving your sites PR better. Do a search on Google (site:www.directory.com) and see whether their category pages and listings are indexed.
3. Number of links per page : The less the merrier. In my opinion, the optimal is 10 links per page. Sometimes smaller directories (and thus less links) with a decent PR can help more than a big directory (and thus tons of links) with a high PR.
4. Featured or sponsored links : Its good to be on top, because Search Engine spiders will crawl from the top to the bottom.
5. Correct category : Make sure you are submiting to the correct category. And make sure the category you have chosen isn’t crowded or populated with too many links or it will be less effective. If your first choice category is too popular, try some other category that is similar and has less links on it.
6. Do a backlink search for the directory you want to submit to. For Google, try (link:www.directory.com) and see the number of links they have. From the results, you can see the number of links to that directory and it will give you a rough indication of how well this directory is doing and whether they can maintain their PR.
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Boon Leong is the admin for Simple Sites. A forum/directory promoting the use of simple layouts & designs to create elegant & stylish sites for the web.
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