Website owners and webmasters who are trying to improve their search engine ranking by trading links with other sites should beware of being cheated. Beware of link cheating. What is link cheating?

Link cheating is when the other party in a link exchange does not live up to the bargain and does not add your link to his site. Link cheating can happen when you add someone else’s link on your site first, then submit your link info, and assume that they will reciprocate and add your link to their site. What often happens is they don’t add your link. And you end up with a one-way link, giving a link and getting none in return, improving someone else’s search engine ranking and not yours. Link cheating. Even worse, you end up wasting a lot of your valuable webmaster time and energy for nothing. And, often, you won’t even know it. You may not know you are the victim of link cheating or may not find out your link was never added to the other site until weeks or months later! Because link cheaters don’t email you telling you your link has been added to their site and they don’t email you telling you they have decided not to add your link (for whatever reason). They will just take advantage of the one-way benefit of you linking to them. Link cheating.

How can you protect yourself from link cheating? As a webmaster, protecting yourself from link cheating is very time consuming and frustrating. Of course, you can check every site you linked to and see if your link has been added to that site. This is very time consuming, even with a "link checker" tool, and you may not find your link even if it is there! Or, if you don’t find your link you can follow up with a polite email. And, if you don’t get a response within a week or two, you can remove their link from your website. Unfortunately, by then you’ve been promoting the other site(s) for a month or more and getting zero in return. Link cheating.

Link cheating costs trusting webmasters, trying to build their website ranking, a lot of time and a lot of irritation. A lot of time adding links, submitting links, checking links and, ultimately, a lot of irritation removing links which don’t reciprocate. One website owner became so fed up with link cheating (20 times in 2 weeks) that he changed his reciprocal link policy. DestinyFinders.com no longer will add a link to their site unless their link is added first, and confirmed to them by email. They promise to then add your link provided it is deemed suitable and acceptable. And they will no longer be a victim of link cheating, by avoiding sites who force you to use those automated you-go-first-but-we-don’t-have-to-reciprocate link management programs. Many of these are good programs but they are being abused by bad webmasters.

As for the link cheaters, in the interest of internet honesty and fair play, webmasters who offer a reciprocal link exchange should abide by the agreement. If someone links to you you should honor the link exchange and reciprocate. That means adding the other party’s link to your site. Or, if you have decided not to reciprocate at least have the professional courtesy to email the other party stating that their link has not been accepted.

Link cheating is reaching epidemic proportions and appears to be on the rise. And there appears to be no easy cure. But here’s some good advice for website owners and webmasters who wish to trade links … beware … be aware … and don’t cheat.

Maya Pinion is a freelance writer and contributing editor for News4Net. DestinyFinders.com is credited with coining the term "link cheating".

What is link popularity?

Link Popularity is simply the total number of pages that link to your website. Most search engines, including Google, consider that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote of confidence for the other page. Therefore, the likelihood of you being the best source of information for their searchers is directly linked to the number of votes you have. It is therefore safe to assume that the higher the number of pages linking to your website, the higher you will be ranked on the search engines. Link popularity has become a critical success factor for search engine optimization within popular search engines.

How does link popularity work?

Good link popularity is important because it can boost your rankings within search engines, increasing the number of visitors to your website. There are 3 important factors to keep in mind:

Relevancy

An incoming link is considered to be relevant if it relates to your web page. For example, if you sell office furniture online, relevant incoming links could include: furniture manufacturers, interior designers, competitors in other states or countries, etc.

Keywords

Keywords make the relevancy of your site obvious to the search engines. Make sure that incoming links contain the keywords that best describe your site. For example: Brisbane Office Furniture Sales.

Quality

The quality of links is just as important as the number of links. Only high ranking websites can influence your visibility within search engines. You will be penalized for suspicious looking links from unrelated web pages or too many links from low ranking web pages.

How can I discover my link popularity?

Our Link Popularity Checker: http://www.kintek.com.au/tools/link-popularity-checker.php will show a summary of your link popularity in the four most popular search engines. Alternatively, another easy way to find this out is to type link: followed by your full web address with no spaces, into a search engine and you will receive a list of web sites currently pointing to you.

How can I improve my link popularity?

A few quick tips:

Talk to your suppliers and other related industry partners and arrange to cross link.

Analyse the incoming links you already have and make sure they contain the keywords that best describe your site.

Examine the link popularity of your well ranked competition. Once you discover who’s linking to them, find out if you can get a link to your website as well.

Don’t forget - content is king. Link popularity is only useful if your website already provides relevant, keyword rich, information.

Talita operates a family web development firm based in sunny Brisbane, Australia. She enjoys sharing her knowledge and expertise in web design, ecommerce, email marketing and search engine optimisation. Visit her business website, Kintek: http://www.kintek.com.au/

Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning By Dave Davies, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc.

There are two main advantages to non-reciprocal links as opposed to reciprocal links. The first is that these links will hold more weight, as they aren’t reciprocated (the search engines can detect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage is that they don’t have to be monitored as closely as reciprocal links. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethical webmasters who will take links down or use other tactics to insure that the search engines don’t see the links pages. You have to be aware of these events so that you can remove their links from your site if warranted however with non-reciprocal links you don’t have to be as concerned as you’re not linking to them.

These are far from the only benefits of non-reciprocal link building but they are two of the most beneficial for your site and for you as its webmaster. But how do you get something for nothing? Why would someone want to link to you in exchange for no links back? Keep in mind the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In short, you’re not going to get something for nothing but it’s well worth the "something" you’ll have to put in.

So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search engine positioning campaign … but how do you do it? There are a number of tactics that will work. Here are a few of the more successful:

Write Good Content
It’s shocking but some people will actually link to your site because it is a valuable resource that their visitors may find interesting or useful. The search engines initially gave incoming links value based on the belief that sites with incoming links tended to be sites that others find worth linking to. People actually linked to sites simply because they found the content useful. Believe it or not this practice still exists today.

If you have a quality site with great content, preferably updated regularly, others in your industry should naturally link to you. It’s also appropriate to ask other webmasters to link to your site either through direct contact or by posting a page on your site, which provides images and/or link details. If you get even one link out of your efforts it was worth the 5 or so minutes it should take to put up the page.

Directory Listings
Provided that you’re willing to invest a bit of time and money, directory listings are probably the easiest way to get non-reciprocal links. Provided that you’re site has some value to it and is not offensive, most directories will list it though usually there is a "review fee" involved.

There are the well know directories such as the Yahoo! Directory however you may find that the price tag for a guaranteed review from Yahoo! at $299 to be a bit more than you wanted to spend for a single listing. Another "major player" in the directory world is the Open Directory Project (or DMOZ) however you may find that with volunteer editors, your site can take many months to get listed, if at all.

Fortunately there are many "secondary" directories and there are also literally thousands of topic-specific directories that can provide valuable listings. In fact, topic-specific directory listings can in many ways be considered more valuable in that the link to your site is entirely relevant and also, you should get some quality targeted traffic from your listing provided that the directory itself ranks well.

How much you should pay for a specific listing is debatable depending on the industry, the value of the link, etc. however topical directory listings are usually somewhere around $30-$100/yr in the majority of cases. If your link will be placed on a page with a good PageRank and will fewer than 50 or so other sites it is worth considering.

Article Submissions
As you’re reading this article you should certainly be able to infer that I personally am a fan of writing articles as a form of non-reciprocal link building. Articles provide perhaps the best of all worlds in that they provide valuable and entirely relevant links and also can be a great source of targeted traffic.

That said, articles are also the most time consuming of link building efforts. One must consider the time it takes to write the article, find sites to publish it and also the submission of the articles to all these sites. As a tip, when you find sites you wish to submit your article to add them to a folder in your "Favorites" (or "Bookmarks" for those of us using Firefox). If you decide to publish more articles in the future (and you probably will) it’s certainly helpful to start with a list of the places you’re submitting to rather than having to find them all again down the road.

When you’re writing your article there are a few considerations that you should make. One of the biggest benefits of articles as a link building measure is that the links are relevant in that they are about the topic of your site. Why not insure that your titles and content are written such that they add further weight for your targeted keywords. If you look at the title of this article "Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning" you’ll notice that the phrase "search engine positioning" (our main targeted phrase) is present. Additionally the phrase is repeated periodically in the content area. This will add relevancy to this article and our targeted phrase. If you look in the credits below you’ll notice that the anchor text linking to our site is "Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning" (assuming that the site on which you are reading this article allowed for HTML submissions otherwise the link should simply be the http format). This will add additional relevancy tying that phrase to our site.

Because the Beanstalk website is still in the sandbox on Google it is unable to rank for this highly competitive phrase however you may notice that currently the #11 ranking page is one of our articles. This alone should demonstrate that these articles can pick up relevancy. Once Beanstalk is out of the sandbox on Google we will have many highly relevancy links that are strong enough to rank #11 on their own. You can do the same provided that you treat writing your articles the same as your content. It must contain your targeted keywords and it must read well.

Additionally, you are going to want to search for many related websites to submit to. You can visit the search engines themselves to find related sites (in our case we would run a search such as "search engine positioning articles submit") or you can use a program like PR Prowler to find the links and also insure a minimum PageRank on the sites you are submitting to.

If you decide to publish more than one article I would further recommend that you add to your list with each submission. Take a few minutes before you submit and find an additional 5+ sites to submit your articles to. You’ll find your link popularity and rankings will reward you for it.

Summary
Of course there are many additional tactics you can use to get non-reciprocal links including paid links, press releases, etc. however those noted above are the ones which will produce the most consistently over time and while they can be time consuming, are well worth the effort.

I wish you the very best of luck in developing your non-reciprocal links and in increasing your search engine positioning. It will take time; it will take energy; but done right it will be very rewarding.

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines. To keep informed about what going on in the SEO world you may also want to visit the newly created SEO blog on the Beanstalk website.

Yes, it can be done. Here are 7 ways that a site can acheive
increased link popularity without having to exchange links:

Directory Submissions - Submit to the Open Directory and other
sites like JoeAnt and Gimpsy. These are all human reviewed
directories, therefore search engines will consider that your
site must be of pretty good quality to be listed in them. Submission
to these sites is free, but there can be quite a wait to get
reviewed, since editors are unpaid volunteers. In addition to
a link popularity boost, a listing in Open Directory will get
your site listed in the other Open Directory powered sites
like Google’s web Directory, AOL’s web directory and many others.

Tips For Directory Submissions:

Editor Check - Is there an editor for your desired category?
If not, consider applying. For Open Directory, this can
give you the power to add your site much more quickly.

Link Title - Don’t try any tricks to get keywords in your title
if they are not in your company name. This will get your listing
edited if the listing is approved or rejected outright. The
title must be your official website or company name.

Description - Again, don’t try to insert extra keywords here,
it could backfire and your description will be edited or your
listing rejected. The description should be short and concise.
Just tell what your website offers and give some product or
service examples if appropriate. Again, keep it short!

Be patient! - It may take weeks or months to be reviewed. If
you’ve submitted before and are still not listed, try writing
a polite note to the editor of the category to see if there
was a problem.

Paid Submissions - Paid submissions to quality directories
and portals is also a good idea. It is well known that a
listing in the Yahoo directory area will give you a good
Google PageRank boost. Listing in the Yahoo directory area
is $299, so skip this option if your budget is limited.

Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Submissions - Google lists the
results of many smaller pay-per-click search engines. This
can help link popularity if your site is listed in these
results for your important keywords and phrases. There are
hundreds of these smaller PPC engines that offer a free
advertising credit just for signing up. Take a jaunt on
over to PayPerClickSearchEngines.com for a good list of them.
Submit listings under all your important keywords and phrases
and include keywords in your title.

Affiliate Program - Having an affiliate program can boost your
overall sales by letting other sites do the advertising for you,
but did you know that this can also help link popularity? For
some affiliate program services like Commission Junction or
LinkShare, they use a special link to track clicks and sales,
so these may not be effective since they do not contain your
actual domain name. The kind of affiliate program I am talking
about is the type that uses your domain name in the tracking URL
you give affiliates to use. Something like:
http://www.yourcompanyname.com/aff?64340
As long as your affiliate program uses this type of link, then
your site should see an increase in link popularity. Just make
sure you offer a good incentive for affiliates so that they will
add your link to their site. Even better, you can approve only
related sites or sites with a good Google PageRank or Alexa
traffic ranking into your program!

Specialized Submissions - What type of site do you have? What do you
sell? Chances are there is a directory that specializes in just
sites like yours. Have a casino or gambling site? There are many
gambling portals and search engines. Submit to all of them.
Have a site that sells antique fishing tackle? Yep, there are
directories relating to fishing, but you can also submit to the
many antique and collectible directories as well! Sell wedding
dresses in New York? Submit to the many wedding and bridal directories
and the New York search engines too. Whatever your niche, chances are
that there is a specialized directory or search engine for that area.
Find them and submit! You’ll benefit from the targeted traffic they
send but also increased link popularity.

Create Your Own Directory - Set up your own specialized search engine,
directory or portal catering to your target audience. Your site can
be a featured or showcase site on the main page and other pages!
To attract users, add interactive content such as forums, have chats,
offer contests, the possibilities are endless.

Expired Domain Names - Maybe a site in your industry has gone out of
business? You may be able to pick up their domain name and with it
all their incoming links and traffic. Increase your link popularity
by adding your link to the site prominently, then go ahead and
re-direct the user to your site after a few seconds. Don’t re-direct
quickly or you may not reap any link popularity benefits.

That’s it! 7 ways to increase your website’s link popularity without
maintaining a links page and without sending your visitors to competitors!

Kacey Donston - Submit-URL.net has been promoting online businesses since 1998.
Offering search engine optimization, positioning services, pay per
click campaigns, ranking checks, resubmissions, evaluations and more.
We offer comprehensive packages for home business owners, small businesses
and corporate customers. http://www.submit-url.net

The last series of Google updates that started at the end of October has shown that Google is once more again a big step ahead of many webmasters and SEO Bounty Hunters. It seems like this time reciprocal links have been stamped as “less valuable” or maybe even “worthless” to Google.

Our observations have shown that link exchanges between non-relevant websites are apparently recognized as “reciprocal” and that they either disappear from Google’s list of existing back links or that they carry less value for inbound links. This resulted in either loss of page rank or direct referrals from Google which again means less high ranking in the search results for these websites.

Websites that participated in link exchange programs will soon have to realize that these link exchanges are not helpful anymore. But to recognize this it requires thorough analysis of traffic and how a website is listed in Google. Many webmasters will fail to realize this early on and continue with their strategy of exchanging links. They will lose valuable time that could be used for more important things to work on. This is good for webmasters who are becoming aware of this change in Google’s way of ranking websites and concentrate on other SEO related processes.

What are things webmasters should now concentrate on when doing SEO work? Webmasters should now concentrate on building strong one-way inbound links. Best ways to do this are press releases, publishing articles and the old fashion linking from directories. Link exchanges can still work as long as they are not reciprocal. An example would be that 2 webmasters have 2 websites each. Site A links to site C. Site C then links to site B and site B links to site D while site D links to site A.

About the Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Christoph lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. One of the websites he maintains can be found at Credit Repair Help.

If you are like me, by now you have heard all the SEO experts talk about link popularity and its impace on your search engine ranking. In fact, you can increase the link popularity of your site quickly and easily and get highly targeted traffic to your web site (more traffic=more sales).

In the eyes of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), reciprocal links add value to your site by attracting new visitors, and by attracting targeted traffic from clicks on your links on other sites. No matter what else you may have heard, here is the plain truth regarding link popularity:

1. Most major Search Engines rank your pages based on the number and quality of incoming links.

2. While one way links are being considered "more valuable" by certain Search Engines, it is still the number and quality of links, reciprocal and otherwise, contained on your site that impacts your ranking in the search engines.

3. Developing and maintaining high quality links to your web site is crucial to your online business success.

4. You MUST have a way to monitor, track and initiate new, quality links to your website (did I say quality?). You CANNOT have a top search engine ranking without incorporating link popularity into your internet marketing strategy.

5. The links to your web site should be related to your site theme and must have value to your visitors. The Search Engines place a premium on this. Your site must be useful to visitors, and your linking structure must bear this out.

In summary, in order for your website to achieve a top Search Engine Ranking, your linking strategy should accomplish the following:

* Steady, targeted traffic from new and return visitors to your web site.

* More customers and more sales through increased targeted traffic.

* You need to find out which web sites link to your competitors and convince these sites to link to your web site.

* You should develop new business contacts that can work with you and send customers to your company

* Increase your link popularity so that your web site will be ranked higher on many search engines.

* Find suitable partner web sites, contact them for reciprocal links and create a links page on your site

* You should create a link directory that you can offer to your visitors as valuable content.

As a result, you’ll get highly targeted visitors to your web site, more customers and sales. Most importantly, your website will achieve a higher ranking on the search engines. Isn’t that what you are shooting for?

Joe Borges makes it easy to get execute your linking strategy and rapidly get new quality link partners. Learn how to improve your link popularity for online business success by visiting our Link Popularity website.

We have all heard that adding quality content to your web site will give the search engines a good idea of how to index your web site, it’s a topic we covered in “Content, Content, Content” back in November 2004. But the secret to luring the search engines to your web site, and in part to improving your position within those listings is your inbound links.

So what are inbound links? Inbound links are simply the links from an external web site to your web site. You will also hear the phrase “link popularity” which is simply a search engines measure of the number and quality of links pointing to a single URL. We will cover “quality” later in this article but a site’s home page usually has the highest number of inbound links, or highest link popularity, because site owners tend to link to home pages rather than any other content page.

What makes a quality link?

Achieving good rankings using links used to be simple; today things have become more complex, with search engines using very complicated algorithms to measure the quality of the links that involves:

· Number of links to your site?

· What is written in those links?

· What key phrases are used in those links?

· What is the quality of the site that is linking to yours?

· How many other links does that site have?

A link from a web site that the search engine recognises as a leader in your industry carries a lot of clout and means that your web site is important. Two links from industry leaders means your site is even more important. But 100 links from random web sites, from industries you are not even related with, means almost nothing. Thus, getting links is only the start; the important thing is getting good links from quality (high ranking and relevant) web sites.

How Do We Get Links?

It all starts with content – yes we’re back to that again. No one will link to you unless you offer quality information about a particular subject. If you are an estate agent, why not offer information about the area you are selling in. People will be interested in local schools, clubs and associations, crime rates, etc. Once you have completed your information; find web sites whose visitors would benefit from your site’s content; solicit links from nearby leisure facilities, local towns, builders, gardeners, removal companies, etc.

How Do You Solicit Links?

To solicit links takes a lot of work. First you need to find web sites that are appropriate to your audience and also bear in mind that often, web site owners will require the link to be reciprocal; i.e.; they want one back from you. As a general rule, if you think your target market may visit a web site, you would benefit from a link from it. Type your search phrases into a search engine like Google.com and see what sites are listed in the first page of results and if appropriate, ask them for a link. Also check which sites are linking to these well-listed web sites and ask those sites for a link. For a list of inbound links to a third parties web site type in "link:theirdomain.com" in Google.

Send out personalised emails to the web sites you have identified giving some evidence that you have actually visited the web site. Don’t waste time on approaching web sites that haven’t been updated in years, many web sites are perfect but if they are rarely updated, your link wont be added. Be friendly and polite in your approach, and point out the benefits of linking to your web site. If you are lucky, around one third of your emails will get a response. It can be frustrating and discouraging when you get little response or a whole string of no’s, but it’s important to keep going.

It is also important to follow up. Until you get a definite no, keep in contact and keep it personal. The trick is to let the recipient of your emails think that they are the only web site that you are approaching for a link so make sure you keep track of who you have contacted and what you have written or said. If your linking prospects think that you are sending out mass emails, or that you are using the exact same approach with other sites, you will probably lose their respect - and any chance of a link.

Directories and Links

Do not forget to submit to the directories, relevant business directories and local listings. Getting listed in some of the larger directories such as the Open Directory Project counts for a lot in the major crawler based search engines. Take your time and choose the right category to submit to. Also, make sure you read the advice about how to write the descriptions and titles and write them in the way they ask, bear in mind that human beings edit these directories! Also consider submitting to Yahoo and Business.com, both charge annual subscription fees but both would provide high quality links. If the links turn out not to be cost effective, simply don’t renew your subscription.

Buying Links

Buying links is also becoming more commonplace. It is a form of purchased advertising that is less obvious than banner adverts or pay per click listings. Often the link will be placed on multiple pages, or all pages within the site. If purchasing a link, make sure you are clear about why are you buying it? Is it for search engine ranking purposes only, or to get traffic directly from the link?

Make sure the link is worth what you are paying in terms of the traffic it will send you and not solely to improve your page’s ranking. If the link partners page is well ranked in the search engines under a specific key phrase but receives few visitors, it won’t be sending many visitors to your web site. If the page is well ranked, it may help with your ranking in Google and the rest, but that would be the icing on the cake.

Forums

Join forums and discussion groups related to your business and place links to your web site in your signature line. Use your main search terms as the link text. But before spending time writing lots of posts with your signature line in each post, make sure that the forum is spiderable by checking the robots.txt file. Also make sure that links in signature lines are not hidden from spiders (view the source code to make sure that signature links are in plain HTML and point directly to the site).

Link Exchange Centres Find and join free link exchange centres like LinkPartners.com. There you can find a categorised directory of websites that also want to exchange links. Be careful not to sign up with FFA (Free-For-All) sites because they are mostly email address gatherers and you can expect a sudden increase in email sp@m soon after you sign up. Also, only sign up with centres where you can approach other sites personally, and where they can approach you personally.

Controlling Your Links

When providing your link partners with the text to use in your inbound link, make sure it contains the key phrase you are targeting. Search engines will take into account the words that are included in the actual link as well at the text around it so include a brief paragraph about your business and if possible link your top key phrase to your URL. Make sure that each link points to the page you are promoting for that particular search term. This should improve your ranking in their listings. Pointing all the links to your home page, with various target search terms, won’t achieve the same as pointing targeted links at specific pages within the site.

How not to link

Under no circumstances join any link farms! Link farms, such as LinksToYou.com, sound simple and effective, but search engines, Google in particular, disapprove of them as blatant attempts to manipulate the rankings and they will penalise sites that use them. Once a site has been penalised, it is very difficult to get the penalty lifted, so avoid all link farms at all costs. Search engine software engineers always look for spam tactics, when a software engineer discovers a link farm; all the domains in the link farm are banned. Result? Link popularity vanishes.

Summary

Acquiring links can be time-consuming and tedious. There are a number of ways to get them, some being easier than others. However you get them, inbound links are important for websites that want to move up the rankings. Inbound links, with the right link text, are essential for achieving top rankings when there is any competition for the search terms.

Link development’s main advantage is dynamic, cumulative, and difficult to imitate. Many sites maintain search engine visibility and the resulting qualified traffic because of successful link development, not just based on the number of keywords on a page.

For top rankings, it is essential to take the time to get as many quality inbound links as possible. It should be treated as an ongoing task. Getting your first link is like getting your first sale. It is just as hard - and just as satisfying.

Linking strategies are just one of a wide range of subjects covered in our guide “Start at the Beginning”. It covers all the basics of building and optimising your web site for both your customers and organic search engine rankings. For an excerpt and contents list visit: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html

For a complete guide to marketing on the Internet, including: · The General Principles of Internet Marketing · Start at the Beginning · Writing Text that Sells · Building Online Relationships · Maximising Your Pay Per Click Campaign · Measuring Success Why not purchase the whole series of downloadable guides for the discounted price of £64.95. Click for more information: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/promo_ebooks.html Justine Curtis Enable UK Internet Marketing Information and Resources Make your web site work harder! Web: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk Email: info@enable-uk.co.uk Article from Internet Marketing Tips Newsletter, a monthly publication of Enable-UK Copyright © 2004 Enable-UK.

These days’ people do link sharing to increase the page rank and link popularity. This way any search engine going to one site will also get references about the other linked site. This way a site linked to another site having good ranking will also gradually get an increase in its ranking as more and more people visit that site and click on it.

But more important thing is that great care should be taken while putting a link. A user has to use good anchor-text key words. By good text key word I mean a keyword which is more often searched on search engines. Please note that one key word that is important for one search engine may not be important for other search engines also because the criteria of one search engine is different from other search engines.

For getting good keywords for all search engines I strongly recommend you to visit www.keywordfindertool.com which will give you thousands of top key words for every search engine.

The anchor text that you use, should reflect the keywords of which you are trying to get a higher listing for. It should also accurately describe what information will be found on the next page if you click on the link.

internet keyword
keyword tracking
keyword extractor

Link popularity is without doubt one of the most important aspects of a search engine ranking algorithm - this variable tells the search engine how many web sites out there are linking to your web site, which gives a really good indication of how popular or important your site is.

Your web site NEEDS links, it can’t survive at the top of the search engine rankings without them. In this article I am going to explain how anyone can get good quality links for their web site, without paying for them…

Link building for your web site is not technically difficult, it just requires some time and dedication to do the job properly. If you don’t have the time and discipline to do the job right, I strongly suggest hiring someone - WCR Internet Marketing provides this service in some of their Web Marketing plans.

I recommend only looking for links from sites that are related to your site. If you can’t determine a relationship between your site and theirs, move along, there are plenty more sites out there that are more relevant!

Always remember why you have a web site - you want people to find your site useful, so make sure you are only linking to useful, relevant content. Think about this - if a surfer is browsing a site about rebuilding a car engine, they aren’t likely to find a mortgage broker link very useful, are they? Stick to linking amongst relevant sites, and I guarantee you that in the long term your site will benefit greatly.

This is the 6 Step process we use when building links for clients:

1) Determine what sort of links you want.

This is extremely important. The types of links that you’re looking for are industry specific. If you have a web site that is focussed on the rebuilding of car engines, you will be looking for links in the automotive or car related areas in directories. If you are selling electrical contracting services, you will want to look for regional listings or general business listings to find possible links.

2) Find your source of links.

So we’re looking for links that are relevant to your web site. The best place to source your links are directories such as DMOZ. Go to a directory, browse through to a category that suits your site (a lot of the time there will be more than one suitable category) and you will see a whole lot of other relevant sites, perfect for sourcing quality links. Try the directories below, they should keep you going for a while:

http://directory.google.com
http://directory.yahoo.com
http://dmoz.org

3) Determine whether or not a site is relevant.

It’s time to start visiting web sites. Have a look at each site one by one to see if a link to your site would realistically fit in. A webmaster isn’t likely to want to change the structure of their site just to add a link to you, so if you don’t think you’re going to fit in, close the site and move along to the next. If you think you have a chance of getting linked, move on to the next step.

4) Determine where on the site your link would fit best.

If it’s a directory that you’re browsing through, find the most appropriate category for your site. If it’s just a web site, have a look for a links page or any other pages that have links or might be suitable to have links on it.

5) Submit your site.

If it’s a directory that you’re on, once you are in the appropriate category for your web site, look around the page for a place to submit your site. Quite often you will find something like "Add URL", "Submit your site" or "Add a link" etc. Use this link to submit your site.

If you’re on a relevant web site and there is no "Add URL" function, you will need to find an email address for the webmaster. Keep in mind that when emailing the webmaster, always personalize your request - don’t just copy and paste a template to thousands of different webmasters - that’s a sure way to have your request sent straight to the recycle bin.

Take the time to look around for a name, it won’t always be available, but when it is - use it. Let the webmaster know where you think it might be suitable to have a link to your site and let him know if you are happy to reciprocate the link. At the end of the day, the easier you make it for them, and the more polite your request is, the more likely you are to end up with a link.

6) Document all of your work.

I can’t stress this point enough, it is absolutely the most important part of any link building campaign. Create a Word document with all your site information in it (Title, Description, URL). Also in this Word document, have a few email templates prepared for different scenarios - I know I said don’t use templates, but you don’t have to type out every request every time you want to ask for a link - make up a template that you can fill out specific information on like the web site address, where you would like your link to be placed etc.

Make sure you also document each individual link request you make - every time you ask someone for a link, write it down in your Word document. That way, at a later date, you can go through the list and check who is linking to you and who isn’t.

In Closing

Remember to be patient and keep your eye out for new potential links. Improving your web site link popularity won’t send your web site straight to the top of the search engine rankings, but it will help you in the long term. If you plan on building a successful web site over a number of years, a properly organized link building campaign will do you the world of good. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Charles Ryder is the CEO of WCR Internet Marketing, a specialist Australian Search Engine Optimisation company. For a free site analysis, visit http://www.wcr-internet-marketing.com.au

In the past all you had to do to get good rankings in Google and the other search engines was to trade links with several other web sites using your key words in the link text. Although this still holds true today, I have reason to believe sites are being penalized for not using a directory style link structure with no more than 25 links per page. Having a directory style links system on your site will make it more of a resource to your visitors and not just a bunch of un-organized links all lumped together on a single page.

There are of coarse other ways to attract incoming links to your web site without providing a link back or what’s called a reciprocal link.

1. There are thousands of forums out there that will allow your links in a short signature file at the end of each post. Join forums that are related to your subject matter and take part in the discussions. Make sure you use your key words in you signature file link and not just your URL.

2. Submit your site to as many directories as you can. There are thousands of directories out there that will post your website into there directory for free and also some that charge a small one time fee. Again your title or link text is key. Make sure you are using your key words in your link text or title.

3. Writing and submitting articles like this one with a small resource box at the end is also a good way to attract one way links back to your site. When you submit your articles to the many article directory portals you are getting links from the portal site, plus people will search for and use the articles from the portal site on their own sites. If you write just 1 good article and submit it to 10-20 portal sites you could end up with 100’s of back links over a very short time.

4. Writing and submitting press releases work almost the same way an article works. You write the press release and submit it to PR sites. The PR site will submit it to the major search engine for a small fee and your press release could end up on Google and Yahoo news search the next day. People are also looking for free news feeds to syndicate on their web sites and blogs. If you write a good news piece it could end up on 100’s of blogs and other news sites around the web. Again make sure your web site link is in the news piece some were.

5. Free classifieds may not provide you with much traffic but you can create hundreds of back links to your web site with a little time and effort.

6. There are also web sites that will place your link on their front page as a sponsored link for a small fee. For this to work thou you need to make sure your links are up for more than a month or two. If the search engine picks up your link one month but its gone the next it won’t do much good.

So for those of you who concentrate entirely on reciprocal links and are wondering what has happened to your Google ranking, you may want to consider a few or all of the above linking techniques.

Tom Worsley is a successful work from home Internet marketer and independent representative for Strong Future International (SFI), Owner and Webmaster for http://kawarthapublishing.com

This article may be re-published on your site or in your newsletter as long as this resource box is included.