Importance of Incoming Links

Most of us trying to optimize our sites for search engine traffic know one of the single most important ways to get our sites listed higher on search engines is through obtaining incoming links. For Google, the quality of the website providing the incoming link is also important. It’s very important to get incoming links from high page rank (PR) web pages. Most search engine optimization ( SEO )articles mention this importance. However, many search engine optimization articles do not go into specifics about how to obtain these links.

Avoid Excessive Link Exchanges

A simple way is to have a link exchange whereby websites swap text links from their index or other pages in an attempt to build links. This system used to work very well in the past until Google decided that it didn’t like websites exchanging links simply to perform better in Google’s search algorithm. Google’s position now is that link exchanges are alright as long as they are not excessive. It is unclear how Google defines ‘excessive’.

An alternative approach to building incoming links apart from simple link exchange is to have an A-B-C link exchange. In this scenario site A links to site B. Site C links to site A in exchange for the link to site B. It is widely held that Google’s algorithm is aware of this situation and accounts for it. 

Obtaining One-Way Incoming Links

The vastly superior way is to have one-way incoming links. One-way links are links which point to your site without you having to link back to their site or set of sites. This is clearly the superior method for building incoming links. However, this method may take a long period of time as external websites find your web pages useful and link in to them. No matter the quality of your content it takes time to build natural links in. Such natural links may come from web directories or sites related to your topic which find your website useful and link to your site without being asked.

This SEO article is written specifically to address the problem of building one-way links to your website. By taking some short-cuts it’s easy to get high Page Rank websites to provide one-way links to your website. One of the simplest and easiest ways to gain incoming links is by taking advantage of social bookmark sites. These social bookmark sites include high page rank social bookmark sites such as ma.gnolia.com, simpy.com, furl.net, and del.icio.us.

It’s free to signup and start using these various bookmark sites. Most of them will require that you install their icon into your web browser toolbar. Once installed, simply click the bookmark icon when you’re on any web page which you’d like to have bookmarked. Ideally you may wish to bookmark all the web pages of your site. You can use these bookmark sites to create a URL containing all your own website links.

Once you have the URLs containing your websites then submit these URLs to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines of your choosing. Place links to these URLs on your own websites or on other sites such as within blog comments.

Once these newly created bookmark webpage URLs get indexed and search engines crawl them then your websites will benefit from having quality one-way links.

Importance of Anchor Text

Always remember that the anchor text used to link to your site is extremely important as search engines such as Google attribute the anchor text to your website. The anchor text is simply the hot-linked words that refer to your website. If for example you operate a car dealership then for anchor text you may choose something like “cars for sale” or “buy cars”. It’s good to use adjectives sometimes when choosing anchor text. Continuing with the example above you may choose anchor text such as “autos for sale” or “buy automobiles”. It’s a good idea to vary the anchor text and not use the same anchor text for all incoming links. Keep this in mind when naming your websites as you manage your bookmarks.

Kaitlin Pike of the Web 2.0 Expo wrote about when less means more in your soc-med efforts. She said:

The theme for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo New York is the Power of Less. The Power of Less doesn’t just mean making do with fewer staff and a smaller budget. It means that constraints drive creativity, whether in business models, design paradigms, or platforms. It means the power of the small screen, the thin client, the streamlined interface. It might mean the power of small teams, or even going solo.”

read the complete article at http://blog.web2expo.com/2009/11/employing-the-power-of-less/

Good reading in  this article by Meryl Evans “32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business.”

Facebook’s not just for keeping tabs on friends and filling out quizzes — it can also be used as a highly effective business tool. It’s great for marketing your products, landing gigs and connecting with your customers.

Here are 32 ways to use Facebook in your business. Here are just a few

Combine Facebook with other social media tools like Twitter. For example, when someone asks question on Twitter, you can respond in detail in a blog post and link to it from Facebook.

Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your blog or speaker at your event.

Market your products by posting discounts and package deals.

Read up on Facebook Beacon to see if it might be useful for you.

Start a group or fan page for product, brand or business. Unless you or your business is already a household name, a group is usually the better choice.

Update your group or fan page on a regular basis with helpful information and answers to questions.

Join network, industry and alumni groups related to your business.

Fill out your profile completely to earn trust.

Share useful articles and links to presentation and valuable resources that interest customers and prospects on your wall, to establish credibility.

IMAGE by ScoreChicago.files.wordpress.com/

In the early part of 2009, the PEW Internet & American Life Project released Adults and Social Network Websites , a December 2008 tracking survey that finds more than four-fold increase since 2005 (8-35%) in adult American internet users that actually have an online social networking site profile. That is compared to 65% online American teens use those same social networks.

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on a social networking site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now,1 according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. (Since adults make up a larger portion of the U.S. population than teens do, the 35% proportion represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens2 who use online social networks.3)

Source: PEW Internet & American Life Internet Project, Adults and Social Networking Use

To read more click here

I found a nice, but basic PowerPoint presentation given to Cisco Systems by Michael Brito from http://www.britopian.com/.

They participated in a learning series that trains employees about the basics of Web 2.0.  The class was about social bookmarking, tagging and labels.

Since today is sort of a slow news day, being Friday and everything, I thought that I would mention 10 or more items that are useful tips for bloggers and marketers alike.

Legit News Photos for Free. Om Malik has the scoop on PicApp, where you can get legit news photos for free. It’s an interesting service, but I actually prefer to use something like the Voxant, a service that actually pays you for views of the latest news. I like free stuff, who doesn’t, right? Well, it’s even better if they pay you. Here’s sample content from today from Voxant, about the Republicans who have been instructed to blog, blog, blog:

In an interesting post, Louis Gray says that “The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out.”.

Henry Blodget asks if Facebook is hot today and going to be dead tomorrow, like AOL. I guess Henry forgot about the post that I wrote a while back, saying that AOL is really going to be TMZ, which is hot now.

There is not much time left to sign up for evernote for free. downloadsquad has all the scoop about it.

TechCrunch talked about how mytopia, the new casual gaming network works with all sorts of other stuff. Monday it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets, says TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld.

According to Cnet, Google wants to fill in the TV white spaces. Google is “planning a conference call with journalists on Monday to discuss a company filing with the FCC regarding the use of unused portions of the TV spectrum band, known as white spaces.”

OK, well, that’s not quite the number of updates that I thought I would make today, but five is quite enough. So, to fill up some additional space on this post (bold, right?) let’s again see what Voxant has to offer today:

Eric Lander has a great blog post about Sphinn. If you have not heard of Sphinn.com, Sphinn is a “News, Discussion Forums & Networking for Search & Internet Marketing Professionals” site. It’s Danny Sullivan’s social networking site for internet marketing professionals.

Since Eric has written a great post and has pointed to my activity on Sphinn, I thought that I would respond to his blog post and make some observations about Eric’s post, about Sphinn, and, more importantly, point out that the typical search engine marketer does not understand social networking.

Eric points to some interesting statistics. I agree that these statistics are a few weeks old. Nevertheless, they definitely get the point across. Let’s look at the statistics of Sphinn that Eric has collected:

Registered Users: 12,410
Users with 5+ Submissions: 750
Users with 2+ Comments: ~1,300
Users with 1+ Sphinn: 6,259

To be honest with you, Eric, I have to say that I’m not surprised at all with the numbers. Really. You have to understand that the majority of the people who are members of Sphinn are internet marketers, SEOs, Online Marketers, or whatever you want to call them. What they are not is social networkers. Yes, you heard me correctly, the majority of Sphinners (Sphinn members) are not social networkers. Frankly, I would say that the majority of the users on Sphinn “don’t get it”. They do not understand that to build your own personal social network you have to add friends. You have to submit stuff. You have to comment. You have to be active. Yes, you have to vote on stuff.

Unless I’m entirely off base here, and I know I could be – I believe that five submissions would classify a casual user of the network, not a leader.

No, Eric, you’re absolutely not off-base here. You are correct. I would actually say that those Sphinn users who have only submitted 5 things are not even casual users. They are probably search engine marketers who have just “jumped on the bandwagon” and become a member of Sphinn because others in their industry are members there. I would not even all those people casual users, they’re just registered users. That’s it.

Bill Hartzer, The Sphinnmaster
Bill Hartzer (bhartzer) has cast 10,427 Sphinns. The next active user, Maki (DoshDosh) has 5,108 Sphinns. That’s 48.9% of the actvity of Bill. In other words, Bill’s out there giving our Sphinns like candy on Halloween. Stopping short of accusing Bill of just sphinning everything he sees, I’ll say this… Bill has 1 comment for every 100 sphinns cast. Continuing the comparison, DoshDosh has nearly 5 comments per 100 sphinns cast. aimclear, Sphinn’s third most active user produces nearly 12 commens per 100 sphinns.

I’m sorry Bill, I just don’t see how you can vote for that many items without providing more commentary. I’m certainly open to your response though. Am I just assuming too much on the numbers?

Thanks for bringing this up. Yes, really. I’m very glad that you have pointed out that I am active. Obviously very active. Take a look at how many friends I have on Sphinn. I have to admit that I visit every single day (sometimes more than once a day) and look at the Sphinn home page. And yes, I don’t have any problem with Sphinning (or voting) on everything on the home page. I actually use the Sphinn home page as one of my personal news sources. It’s a great way to keep up with what’s really going on in the industry.

Let’s take a look at another reason why I am so active on Sphinn. I love being active. In fact, voting is a part of being active in the social networking communities. Part of being active means that you vote on your friends’ stuff. And oh yeah, have you seen the “who Sphunn this” link on the Sphinn pages?

Wow, that’s a link back to your profile. In fact, those are links back to your profile. I guess you could actually say that there are probably 10,427 links back to my profile page on Sphinn.

Regarding the comments? Well, let me just say that you probably have never met me in person. I do admit, though, that I really need to start commenting more. Could you consider this blog post one large comment. Perhaps. Take a look, though at how many others are commenting. Some are just more talkative than others.

Is there enough data?

Sphinn is a new social networking community. There is enough data to make some pretty broad assumptions here. In fact, although Sphinn’s goal is to be a social networking community for search marketers and SEM topics, you have to realize what they community is made up of. A social network is only as good as its user base. Sphinn is made up search engine marketers. Search engine marketers are search engine marketers, They know PPC, they know SEO, they know how to get links to sites. Search engine marketers, the majority of Sphinn users, are not social networking experts. The typical search engine marketer does not understand social media. And the numbers really show it. The majority of Sphinn users are not active. Friends’ stats are not available, but I would imagine that most Sphinn users have not added a lot of friends to their network.

Is there enough data? Yes. Is Sphinn the typical social networking community? Absolutely not. It’s a great community of search engine marketers. The typical Internet Marketer does not understand social networking. And that is not a bad thing.