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Search Engine Optimization becomes second nature to experienced web businesses and developers. But where do the complete novices turn? This website solves that problem. "What Is Search Engine Optimization? should definitely be the first stop |
Links Are Like Gold
You need to spend time on links
Good inbound links are worth their weight in Gold, it's as simple as that. There are plenty around but they can be hard to get hold of and also expensive. You ideally need to get other associated websites to link to yours. This ranges from very easy to very hard to do depending on the subject area of your site.
A good place to start (as markus mentioned here), is with directories. There are plenty around so use lists like those he mentioned to fine the better ones, make sure that you choose directories with some decent homepage PR (5 or more). Don't pay more than $50, and don't pay annually reccuring fees - its just not nessesary, there are plenty of one-time payment directories.
Submit your site with a different title and a deifferent description to each directory, take time to get it right - thats the key, choose wisely and then make the most of each directory.
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Exchange Links
Swap links, you can email site owners and ask them to "exchange links" with you, in this case you link to them and they link back to you, this is called reciprocal linking.
Its a good way to start, but don't use this technique too much, reciprocal links are often time consuming to arrange and are easy for search engines to spot - more effective reciprocal links are three-way reciprocals. In this example someone links to you and you link to a third website, this third website then completes the chain by linking to the first site (the one that links to you). Don't kill yourself trying to make these arrangements, if it's not easy then its not worth it. And whatever you do - don't send SPAM saying "Please swap links with me!"
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Speculate To Accumulate - Buy Links
Buy links; there are many link buying sites around, one of the better ones is Text-Link-Ads. Set a monthly budget and make sure that you have some effective way to track the results of your link buying, at the very least count how many referrals you get from the links, and better still count how many conversions into sales you get!
Buy wisely, don't just buy whats available, wait until you find exactly waht you need, don't buy many links in one go, make a plan, and buget well. Watching carefully how your income varies with each link that you buy, and don't get impatient. It can often take months for results to start to come through, so plan long term, and budget long term.
- Don't buy anything that you can't sustain long term.
- Don't buy from non-related websites.
- Don't buy in large quanties.
- Don't buy for the sake of a link, buy contextual links that will also drive traffic.
- Don't buy just because it's cheap.
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Investigate Alternative Ways To Get Links
Buy reviews and other links. You can now pay for people to review and talk about your site in their blogs, check out Review Me. This has the advantage of being a one off rather than a monthly payment, but be prepared for criticism as well as praise for your new website.
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Natural Linking Structures
Vary your anchor text, and the link destination. Make sure that each and every link that you buy varies in some way. Think about what someone other than yourself may say if they were setting up the link, use this as the text part of your link and don't always link to your homepage, deep-link into your website.
This is important because search engines generally try to filter out "unnatural" links, they like to focus on "natural" linking. Specifically this means links that are not "arranged", they like to rely on people who link because they like the content of what they are linking to, and not because someone (you) wants to promote it.
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And Back To Great Content
And finally; "Link Bait". Link bait is very good unique content, if your website contains something very good, very important or very interesting you will find that interested people will automatically link to it.
Try to create this sort of content and people will link to it. Link baiting is perhaps the hardest work but its definitely the most effective (and cheapest!).
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A Note About your Outgoing Links: Link Rot and Dead Links
You don't want dead links on your website, dead links are a sign of abandonment or a lasck of care and attention. Link rot is the tendancy for links to die; if you create a page with 100 outbound links, over time with changing domains and website structures, moving pages and the like the links will point to non-existing pages.
A missing page is signified on the World Wide Web by a 404 error code, you should periodically use a link checker to check your pages and locate dead link (those that return a 404 error).
Here is a good free link checker.
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