Would it be possible for search engines to penalise websites displaying affiliate links? Would they want to? Should they?

I was looking through a links directory on one of my sites (Janric) to see how it had faired after the recent Google page rank changes and I noticed the page ranks varied from page to page.

Nearly all of the pages were created on the same day but some have loads of links, others not so many. All of them are linked to from the same directory page. I’d expected them all to be equal.

Most of the pages were page rank 3, but a few were page rank 2, so I decided to investigate. At first I though it was quantity of text or links on the page, but one of the lower ranking pages had only a few links, another was quite full. But there were both fuller and emptier pages with the higher page rank. So content size wasn’t the problem.

Then I made a discovery - all of the page rank 2 pages contained affiliate links. Links I’d put in place to add a bit of content when I first created the pages and to try to add a small amount of extra commission. Could affiliate links realy be damaging my page rank?

Another site I run, RealWebTraffic has a similar links directory, built around the same time. So I decided to check that. This also had a variation with page ranks, but some of those containing affiliate links had the higher page rank. Theory blown?

No, the lower page rank pages had affiliate links, but the affiliate links on the higher ranking pages were "hidden" from the search engines.

Not conclusive proof and in no way hard evidence, but take a look at your own site if you are using affiliate links and consider masking them from the search engines - your page rank might just thank you for it.

Keith Lunt runs several internet marketing websites. Contact Keith through http://www.janric.co.uk

Let’s face it, getting (and keeping) a good Google page rank is no easy task and requires constant attention. Not just in getting reciprocal links, but honing your Meta tags, and keeping your content fresh. But we are here to discuss only one part of the pagerank dilemma. In fact this article will focus more on other, and in some cases, more important benefits of a proper links directory.

Directory Structure

• Categorize your directory well- Meaning the more categories you have the better organized your directory is. More categories means your visitors can locate particular links a lot faster.
• Minimize the depth of your categories- You should not make your directory more than three category levels deep, for instance if you are a travel site and have a category for Jamaica, then the structure example would be Travel>>Caribbean>>Jamaica. Easy navigation for your site visitors is the main reason for this.
• Reason two for minimizing your directory depth- Search engines will spider each page of your website, they will determine the pagerank of each page based on its content, and distance away from your homepage. Use this as a rule of thumb; each level down from your homepage will cost that page “one” pagerank point. Using the example above, this is what is meant here, Travel>>Caribbean>>Jamaica: the Travel” page would have the highest pagerank being closest to your homepage, let’s say it has been give a Google rank of 4, the next level “Caribbean” in all likelihood would have a rank of 3, and so on.
• No more than 20 links per page- There is not a link partner in the world that wants his/her site to be on your link page as link number 100. I would rather be link number 3 on page number three than link number 100 on page one. This is clutter, and useless to all involved, you, your link partner and especially your site visitor. Keep this in mind as well, when the search engines spider your site they will also notice more pages on your site thus determining that you offer more content. Your link partners will also appreciate it.

Relevant Links

• Do your visitors really care if you own a travel site and have links to recipe sites? Of course not. Although locating good quality link partners for your site will take more time, it will be well worth it in the long run. If you have a travel site, seek out rental cars, vacation spots, travel accessories, and the like. Your visitors are on your site because they (at that moment in time) are interested in what your site has to offer, do not change the visitor’s train of thought into anything other than what you want them to think about, in this example, traveling and things associated with traveling.

Make Money from your links?

• Of course! Reciprocal linking is a great way to help your website’s search engine ranking, but making immediate cash from your links is a whole level up from that.
• Join affiliate programs like Commission Junction and add some affiliate links to your directory. For our travel site example, you can get offers like travel accessories, rental cars and the like.
• Have a good mix of links to other sites and affiliate links- You do not want a directory full of affiliate links, this is a major turn-off to your visitors. As a matter of fact, you should have at least a 10 to 1 ratio of regular links vs affiliate links.

Advertise in your directory

• Since you now have a well organized directory with an excellent structure, limited to 20 links per page, and a lot of pages with good advertising space, it’s time to place some banners.
• You can advertise some of those good sites that you are affiliated with and place a banner or two on every page.
• Keep it neat- You should have quality space on the left or right side of your directory add a Skyscraper banner to either side (only one per page though), it is well known that the bigger the banner the more clicks on that banner you should receive. A skyscraper is usually 120 x 600 in size. Add a single banner at the top center of each page as well; make it a different ad, offer something different than your skyscraper. This is the most valuable banner location on any page, use it for banners.
• Sell banner spots- Now that you have a well categorized directory, you can sell ad space to vendors whose products or services appeal to that particular category. You can even offer the top spot on a particular page for sale or as a trade for the same kind of link for your site in someone else’s directory.

Exceptions to the rule

There are those sites that do not fit into any category of your site that have that HUGE Google page rank, and you want them to link with your site. Here is a tip for you to keep those sites happy and get that top rank. In addition to you’re regular links directory, create a separate smaller reciprocal links directory. This may be only 1-3 pages in size. This directory must have a direct link from your homepage (most top rank sites require that), and title it something like “Special Link Partners” or “Recommended Links”. Add only page ranks of say 6-7 or higher to this special directory. This will ensure your most important link partners that you will not be burying their link inside your link directory.

We have quite a large selection of software in our downloads directory at http://www.bullmarketer.com that can help you automate the process of managing your own links directory. One program in particular is Arelis by Axandra.  This software is not only VERY user friendly but offers tons of features. There is a free lite version available for download.

Derek Arnold

Derek Arnold is the President of BullMarketer.com, a webmaster resource site offering many tools for webmasters, marketers, and designers. Also has over 18 years of experience in the marketing and advertising fields. Homepage: http://www.bullmarketer.com  

Links back to your site have a great impact on your ranking in the major search engines. Think of it like an election; your site is a candidate and every link to your site is a vote. Of course, it was never quite that simple (high ranking, relevant sites have more voting power) but now it may have gotten even more complicated.

The Dampening Link Filter

It seems that Google may have introduced something called a “Dampening Link Filter” into its indexing algorithm. I’ll give you a layperson’s overview of this filter, but for more intimate details, check out WebProNews.

More and more people are realising the importance of links back to your site (or “backlinks”). For some time, companies have been engaging in all sorts of link campaigns designed to generate thousands of backlinks. Many of these campaigns haven’t really paid too much attention to the context or lifespan of these links. And Google knows it. Because these campaigns are designed to artificially generate the perception of a site’s importance – to trick the search engines into thinking they’re important – it’s been suggested that Google has decided to put an end to it. Apparently, there’s evidence to suggest that Google has introduced a new link filter to dampen the effect of new backlinks. So if your link generation campaign has just created 500 links in a day from seemingly irrelevant sites, Google will suspect it of being artificial, and refuse to pass on the full effect of those links – at least for a while. Well, that’s how the theory goes, anyway.

It has been argued that you can avoid being penalized by this filter by generating links:

• more slowly;
• from relevant sites; and
• which have a long lifespan.

The wisdom of relevance and lifespan is already well established; the dampening filter is simply one more reason why people should start to heed it. Article PR (writing and submitting SEO articles for online publication) is one way to do so.

This article explains how article PR satisfies each of these three conditions. (For the basics of article PR writing, take a look at How to Top Google with Article PR - www.divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm.)

Build Backlinks Slowly

Writing quality articles takes time. It’s as simple as that. Even an SEO copywriter can’t just bang an article together in a morning – it has to be well considered. It must be accurate, informative, interesting, well written, and topical. And once you’ve written the article, the real work begins. You then have to submit it to your favourite article submit sites. And as they all have different requirements and idiosyncrasies, submitting your article to 50 submit sites can take you all day!

Once submitted, even the best articles will only be published gradually. A good article can be published 2 or 3 times a day for a week or two, then interest tapers off. But still, over the course of 6 months a single good article can be published hundreds of times! And remember, each time is a link.

Build Backlinks From Relevant Sites

As soon as you choose the topic of your article, you define the type of site that will publish it. All online publishers have an agenda; they want to generate traffic. Whether for commercial or benevolent reasons, they want particular kinds of articles for very specific audiences. Your article won’t be published on irrelevant sites simply because the publishers of those sites get nothing out of it.

Of course, your article may be published on sites that are only marginally relevant. For instance, this article may be published on general copywriting websites, advertising websites, web design websites, home business websites, etc. But the beauty of a well written SEO article is that you get to optimize it for the keywords that you want to rank for. So even if the keywords on the publishing site don’t quite match your own target keywords, the page containing your link (i.e. your article) does.

What’s more, you even have the power to optimize the links themselves. For instance, as an SEO copywriter, I can distribute backlinks throughout my article that use my target keywords as the link text (e.g. "copywriter", "SEO copywriter", "advertising copywriter", and "website copywriter" . Some submit sites don’t let you do this, but most will – at least in the byline.

And one other thing – other people link to good articles. This can increase the Page Rank of the site containing your article, which, in turn, can increase the page rank of your own site. It’s a win-win situation!

Build Backlinks With a Long Lifespan

The quality of your SEO article determines the lifespan of your backlink. Write a very helpful article, make it easy to read, and choose a topic which isn’t going to go away in a hurry, and your article will stay online for years.

In any event, most publishers tend not to clear out their article libraries simply because it’s better for them to have lots of content available to both readers and search engines.

Conclusion

While it’s no new phenomenon to SEO veterans and SEO copywriters, the use of article PR to generate backlinks is a tactic which offers much in the way of ranking. The possibility of a Google dampening link filter simply increases the value of that offering.

Happy writing!

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.DivineWrite.com or www.ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

If you want to make money on the web, you must get traffic
to your website. If you want to get traffic to your website,
you must have a high rank in google’s search results. Google
ranks websites based upon the number of links that point to
the site.

Many novice webmasters believe they can trick Google into
giving their website a high rank by swapping links with
other webmasters. One reason they believe this, is because
"wanna-be" web marketing "experts" keep spouting that trash.

It’s only partially true that Google ranks websites based
upon the number of links that point to the site. Google
uses a highly sophisticated page ranking formula that keeps
changing and evolving all the time. Google caught onto the
link swapping trick years ago.

Novice webmasters put all their link swaps on one
gigantically long page referred to as a "link farm". When
Google’s robot finds a link farm, their ranking formula
penalizes the websites listed in the link farm. If Google
finds the same site listed in many link farms, they remove
that site from their search engine.

Just about every week I get an email message saying
"I placed a link to your website on my website. Please put
a link to my website on your website. Here’s where you can
find your link on my website" … followed by a link to a
single webpage containing hundreds of links … a link farm.

I usually reply to such a message with a request to remove
the link to my website from their webpage. The novice
webmaster often responds with a message of pure astonishment.
Link swap requests have become so common lately that I have
been responding by clicking on the "Delete" button.

Every webmaster that wants to swap links has a website
with zero traffic. Even if Google didn’t penalize websites
for being listed in a link farm, why would I want to send
traffic away from my website to a website that can’t return
any traffic?

Not only are these novice webmasters not experienced in the
way of the web, they seem inexperienced in the way of the
world. The first rule of the universe is "you never get a
free lunch". If you want your website to rank high in Google,
you have to pay them. If you can’t afford to pay them, you
have to do the work.

It’s hard work to get traffic to your website. There is
only one method I know that works: put valuable, original
content on your website. Other websites, blogs, and forums
will post links to the valuable content on your website,
not with a link swap, but as a resource to their audience.

When someone places a legitimate link to valuable content
on their webpage, the webpage has low link density.
Google’s page ranking formula gives the page a high score.
If a link to your webpage is found on a high scoring
webpage, that raises the rank of your webpage.

On the other hand, a page with a high link density, with
hundreds of links and little other content, gets a negative
score from Google. If a link to your webpage is found on a
webpage with a negative score, that lowers the rank of your
webpage.

Don’t try to scam Google by swapping links, and don’t
cooperate with foolish webmasters who think there is a
"free lunch". If you want to get a higher ranking in Google,
resulting in more traffic to your website, there is only
one way - good old fashion hard work.

———————————————————-
Permission is granted for the below article to forward,
reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,
offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long
as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the
resource box below is included.
———————————————————-

Copyright(C)2004 Bucaro TecHelp. To learn how to maintain
your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web
site and make money on the Web visit bucarotechelp.com
To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter visit
http://bucarotechelp.com/search/subscribe.asp

When setting up your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on Google there are several factors you need to look at in order to obtain a high rank on their search engine. Of course your content and meta tags must be inline with positive density percentages and reciprocal links.  Google then takes your website and performs a mathematic equation and places a numeric value on your website depending on one of the most important features, reciprocal or back links.

A back link and reciprocal link are identical. They both say the same thing to the Google engine, that your site should be ranked higher in the order because other people find value in what your website has to offer, thus they provide a link to your site.  In turn, you keep a closed loop by reciprocating the favor to the other website by extending the same courtesy of a back link.  Thus creating a solid network connection.  Google likes to see interconnectivity and will reward your website well for planning it this way.

There are drawbacks to the equation. As things change a website that you are affiliated with may drop a hyperlink or a page may get accidentally deleted.  When the Google robot goes through your website and finds a dead link it notes that you aren’t keeping good care of your website and punishes your web rank by reducing its point value.  If you wish to know what your sites current point value is download The Google Toolbar and search for your website www.yourwebsitename.com in the box and perform a Google web search. Upon reading the full URL, Google will go directly to your site first thus pulling up your home page. There on the toolbar will be a page rank for your website between 1 and 10. 1 being a less visited and noted website and 10 a site that screams traffic 24/7. 

Some of the individuals you share reciprocal links with may in fact scan all their links for continuity, should they receive a bounce back for a broken link on your website you can be assured you will receive an email from them. Keeping your website in balance with other sites you share links with will keep the Google engine happy. If you go off and add a company that is not Google friendly, meaning they have no back links you may also lose points.

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Links to your site are one of the key components of Google’s PageRank technology. With a high page rank, you get higher position on the search engine results page, resulting in more visitors to your site and improving your chances of earning a living online.

As the founder of articlemarketer.com, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that writing articles results in a ton of links to your site. Of course it does.

But there’s a trick to it.

Many of the internet marketers who submit free reprint articles go about it all wrong. They fail to take advantage of Google’s linking algorithm and they lose some of the power of their articles.

What is Google’s linking algorithm? 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the googlebots are spidering the web, seeking out content, classifying and indexing the billions of web pages available to web surfers.

This results in a standard "Bell Curve" of links to your article around the web. A few links begin to appear within a few days, rising to a peak at about 8-10 weeks, and then tapering off over time. That’s the Google linking algorithm at work.

Over time, Google eliminates many of the links generated by a given article. Some call this the Google "Duplicate Link" penalty. I wouldn’t call it a penalty. It’s just the way things work on the web. And with a clever approach, you can take advantage of it.

You can keep your links high using the Article Marketer Bonanza approach. Our authors use it all the time. That isn’t to say that you can only use it if you’re an articlemarketer.com subscriber. I’m giving you the approach here and now, absolutely free. You can use the Article Marketer Bonanza approach if you use phantomwriters.com, Article Announcer, or even if you submit your articles manually.

What is the Article Marketer Bonanza approach? The Article Marketer Bonanza approach keeps your links high by taking advantage of the Google linking algorithm. Google wants fresh content and they begin to "penalize" (although I still wouldn’t call it a penalty) you when your content becomes stale. With the Article Marketer Bonanza approach, you never rely on stale links to drive new traffic.

Article marketing is just like every other form of advertising. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s don’t run just one television commercial and expect a continuing stream of customers to buy their products. Of course, they have the benefit of zillions of dollars and the resources at their disposal to continually buy new commercials.

Your resources are a bit more limited. You have less money and fewer people. Time is of the essence. That’s what makes the Article Marketer Bonanza approach so successful.

Most internet marketers can produce a quality article in about an hour (it took me exactly 27 minutes to write this one.) That includes spell checking and everything. But let’s say it’ll take you more than twice as long to write 500-700 words on your favorite topic.

Write a few articles. How many? Let’s say you write 3 articles. If you write them and submit them all today, Google’s linking algorithm will give you a few links over the next couple of days, a lot of links over the next 8-10 weeks, and then they’ll taper off. It’s like turning off the faucet.

The Article Marketer Bonanza Approach – Step by Step:

Bonanza Step 1: Submit one of your articles today. This allows the algorithm to begin working. Watch your links increase.

Bonanza Step 2: Submit the second article next week. Google goes to work on that one. You just added several new links, and you’re not near the peak yet. Now you’ve got two articles climbing the charts.

Bonanza Step 3: Submit the third article the following week. Again, Google gets busy. More links on top of the growing links from article two, which have been added to the large number of links that are already pointed at article one. You’ve set things in motion.

Bonanza Step 4: Ok, it’s been three weeks, it’s time to write a few more articles. Set aside a few hours and capture your wisdom on paper.

Bonanza Step 5: Submit your articles, one per week, over the next three weeks. You’ve now got six articles in the market place, and you haven’t yet reached the peak. Your link count is going crazy.

Bonanza Step 6: It’s now week 10. Your first article is dropping off the charts as Google "settles in" on the links it’ll keep. That’s ok because article 2 and 3 are holding your link count high, and you’ve got three more climbing the charts.

Bonanza Step 7: That’s all there is to it. You keep submitting new content and Google rewards you with a permanently high link count. You can keep this going indefinitely. Your link count will never drop.

Depending on how prolific you are as an author, you could submit your articles faster – two or three per week. If you love writing and you write articles on several topics, you could submit new articles every day. You’ll always have new fresh content bringing new links to your site

See, it’s not always about resources. With the Article Marketer Bonanza approach, you’ll be doing something Bill Gates wishes he could do – you’ll be staying one step ahead of Google!

Chris Ellington founded Article Marketer to make article submission easier. He made the Article Marketer Bonanza approach easy because authors can submit unlimited articles for one low price (even free). "Auto Pilot" helps too. http://www.articlemarketer.com

Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. If you want to do a backlink check in Google on your site all you need to do is type in ‘link:www.yourdomain.com’ into Google. Just replace the ‘yourdomain.com’ part with the URL for your site or webpage (note however you won’t get every backlink if you use Google - more on this below).

I recommend you check out the backlink numbers for popular and competing websites to your own site so you can get an indication of how far you have to go. Don’t get too discouraged if your numbers are a lot lower than other sites, just remember to keep working on your sites every day and over time backlinks will build up.

Backlink Frequently Asked Questions

Why should I care about backlinks?

Backlinks are important because each time someone links to your site it counts as a "vote" for it, moving it higher up in the search engine results pages (SERPS). As part of a search engine optimization strategy you should aim to build backlinks up over time. The more backlinks you accumulate the better placed in search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search your site will be.

How do I find out how many backlinks my site has?

Each search engine has backlink look-up tools that you can test by typing in ‘ink:www.yourdomain.com’ into the search form. Just replace the ‘yourdomain.com’ part with the URL for your site or webpage. You need to use ‘linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com’ for the Yahoo! search engine and you can use either tag for the MSN Search Engine.

My understanding is that the ‘linkdomain’ tag will provide all the sites linking to your entire domain name including subpages/directories, while the ‘link’ tag will only show backlinks for the one webpage. Generally you should find a higher total for the ‘linkdomain’ look-up.

Why are my Google backlink numbers so low compared to Yahoo! and MSN backlink counts?

No one really knows the answer to this except perhaps Google employees. I’ve asked a lot of web marketing experts and everyone has theories but so far we have no concrete answers. Most people report that Google backlinks are often a list of the least relevant (low PageRank) backlinks or a miss-mash collection of random backlinks. I initially thought perhaps only what Google deemed as authority site backlinks would be listed but so far this has been disproved because plenty of obviously non-authority sites show up in backlinks.

Another quandary you will probably come across is sites with a good PageRank, like a 5 or 6, having very low backlink counts in Google. It boggles the mind trying to figure out what Google is doing so generally I advise people not to make any assumptions based on the Google backlink counts. Watch them to see if they go up each update and leave it at that.

If you want a good list of the sites linking back to you use Yahoo! or MSN search instead. I’ve been monitoring my backlinks in Yahoo! on a near daily basis and my count goes up 20-40 per day. Whether this is because Yahoo! is indexing more sites or I’m getting more links (probably both) I don’t know, but it’s still fun to watch so I suggest you try it too.

How can I get more backlinks?

In so many, many ways. In a nutshell you can do the following sorts of things:

If you do all of the above you will slowly build up a huge network of backlinks. Remember your reputation counts, so don’t simply post links to your site all over the web like a spammer. Take part in the conversation and build a good reputation at the same time as you build backlinks.

I’ve heard I can get banned from Google for "bad" backlink building practices?

First let me say that I have never spoken to anyone that was penalised by any search engine for building backlinks to their sites. Now if you are building say 1000 link farm websites that all point to your site that is an obvious recipe to get banned. Also you should remember that relevancy is just as important in a backlink strategy - you don’t want to chase links from sites with content on politics if you are selling cheese. There just isn’t any relevance (hmm…or maybe there is?)

I have read claims that if you suddenly get a huge bunch of backlinks in a short period of time you might get into trouble. Since I know of no free way to get a lot of links quickly besides using what is called "blackhat" search engine practices (software that builds fake pages to trick search engines for example is considered a blackhat SEO practice - and this will likely get your site banned…eventually), I doubt you will ever figure out a way to get into trouble. I believe it’s certainly possible, but not likely.

If you stick to natural linking process and over time expand your website patiently and methodically you will have success. If there is one thing that has been proven online over and over is that if you spend a few years building a quality site you will get results. Most of the really successful sites I know of now are managed by guys that started writing content and building backlinks back in 2003 at least, some earlier in that. If you want to be another one of these success stories in 2007 stick to your long term goals and work hard over time.

By Yaro Starak
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Are you interested in online marketing, Internet business, blogs and podcasts? Are you sick of "gurus" trying to sell you the latest get rich quick online deal?

Get educated, it’s the key to real online wealth.

Download and read quality how-to articles and listen to podcast audio files in mp3 - Visit my blog: Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Search engines use algorithms calculate the order in which the search results are displayed. Although no one outside the search engine companies know the actual algorithms, search engine optimization (SEO) experts agree that back links are heavily weighed. A “back link” is text on another website that links to your site. Search engines count these links as “votes” for your site. The more votes, the better.

Drumming Up Votes

The most common way to get back links it to simply ask another site to exchange links with yours. This is usually accomplished by sending a form email to webmasters who have similar content. This method results in many back links with the same anchor text (actual text that is linked) linking to your home page. If search engines were simply counting the number of back links and the keywords in the anchor text, this would be adequate.

However, as a result of this growing trend to manipulate the search engine results, the search engines have tweaked their algorithms. It is no longer enough to ask everyone to link back to your homepage with your keyword as the anchor text. Search engines are looking for more natural linking behavior, which is evident in sites linking to your internal pages with a wide variety of anchor text. There is also some evidence to suggest that links are weighed more heavily if they are not reciprocated.

Obtaining natural back links requires some creative linking strategies. If you want to continue requesting links and adding sites to your “links” page, you will now have to send customized link exchange emails to each Webmaster, which takes more time and effort than a form email. Because only a small percentage of webmasters will reciprocate, you’re usually stuck with a very long list of links on your site. This can dilute your Page Rank and potentially classify your site as a link farm. Not to mention that you should be striving for one-way links, which none of these will be.

New websites face a unique challenge when it comes to requesting link exchanges. New sites have a Page Rank of 0. Most websites will only exchange links with sites that have a greater than or equal Page Rank. Page Rank is another variable in the search engine algorithm. The specifics are beyond the scope of this article, but you should know that Page Rank is determined by a variety of factors. One of which, is the number of back links from similarly themed pages with high Page Rank. The goal is to get many back links from pages with a high Page Rank. It’s a catch-22 that requires creative solutions. Thankfully, there are other ways to generate natural looking back links.

Content Syndication

Content syndication is a great way to get quality sites to link to yours without on-going effort required by link exchange requests. Simply post your articles to syndication sites. Be sure to include an “About the Author” paragraph at the bottom with a link to your website.

Websites are always looking for quality content that is related to their theme and will happily link back to your site if allowed to syndicate your articles. This method of linking is superior to being placed on a list of links. You are not required to link aback and because your site will be the only outbound link on the page, your site will be the sole beneficiary of the Page Rank. The page your article is syndicated on will usually acquire the Page Rank of it’s domain, which means you could potentially get links from pages with very high Page Ranks without link back in exchange.

With this method, you’ll still run into the same problem of having a great deal of your back links using the same URL and anchor text. The problem can be overcome by editing your submitted articles on a monthly basis to change the URL and anchor text. The sites that are already syndicating your content will be using the old URL and anchor text while new sites use the new information. As long as your URL and anchor text changes periodically, you will have a wide variety of natural-looking back links.

Press Releases

Press releases are another great way to acquire natural, one-way back links. Whatever you’re doing can be announced in a new-worthy fashion. Is your company introducing a new product line, implementing a new business strategy, or helping to solve a community problem? If so, create a press release and tell the world. Try to submit a new press release each month. It will help keep the media attention on your business and establish your company as an authority.

As you can see, there are several ways to generate natural back links. Simply syndicate your content and submit press releases. With a little imagination and a bit of elbow grease, you can out rank your competition and leave them wondering how you did it.

Danna Henderson has successfully created and marketed several e-Commerce websites using the methods in this article. For more information, visit Breastfeeding Strategies.

I feel the most effective way to get people to link to your web site is by offering web masters the option of giving away your free stuff. In exchange, they link to your web site. Why would other web masters want to do this? They may want give away a freebie to draw traffic to their web site. They also may not have the time, knowledge or skills to give away certain types of electronic freebies from their web site.

Your links will just keep multiplying. When a web master offers your freebie to his or her visitors. Those visitors may decide to also give away your freebie. And so on and so on… The more people that link to your web site the more traffic you’ll get. Below are four of the most popular types of freebies given away on the internet to increase traffic.

Free Software

Offer free software from your web site. The software could be freeware, shareware or demos.

Free Online Services

Offer a free online service from your web site. The online service could be an e-mail account, search engine submission or e-mail consulting, etc.

Free Information

Offer valuable free information from your web site. The information could be a report, article, e-book, online audio recording or e-mail course, etc.

Free Affiliate Program

Offer a free affiliate program from your web site. The affiliate program could be pay per sale, click through, two tiered, etc.

Now, I know, there are many other ways to get links like trading or exchanging links with other web sites or joining a banner exchange. You can also do joint ventures or cross promoting. I feel these are not as effective as multiplying your links. I hope this article can help you increase traffic to your web site.

———————————————————
Julia Tang publishes "Smart Online Business Tips", a fresh
and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people
like you. To find out the best online business opportunities,
to discover hundreds more proven and practical internet
marketing secrets, plus FREE internet marketing products
worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-internet-businesses.com
———————————————————-

More and more search engines rank your web pages based on the number of links that point to your web site (link popularity). Google uses link popularity as its most important factor in ranking sites. HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi, and others also use link popularity in their formulas.

In the near future every major search engine will use link popularity, so developing and maintaining good link exchange campaigns are essential to the success of your business. Also, finding the right partner to exchange links with is equally as important as becoming a member of a link farm can be devastating to your long term search goals.

Your exchange link partner should be reputable in the industry, and should provide links back to you on pages that have a high page rank. The end goal is to have the greatest number of websites pointing to you saying on the link itself, “Your Company – Offering (insert your key phrases here)”.

For a good ranking on Google, Inktomi and Altivista, you need good links that point to your site. If you develop a strong content oriented site you can persuade thousands of other webmasters to link to you or to trade links with you. If you want to do it yourself, all you need is the right content, the right email letter, and a keen eye for finding sites that well link to your site.

The key is to develop content people want to link to and then get out there and make the contacts by visiting people’s sites, sending out personalized emails to webmasters of sites you have visited, and networking in discussion groups.

You can also make posts in forums related to your industry to increase your link popularity. Just do a search on any search engine with your industry + forums or discussions and you should be able to find a few discussion boards where you can make posts.

Make sure that you find a way to participate on the discussion as opposed to just posting an ad that’s not related to what people are talking about. Another way that you can greatly increase the link popularity of your website is by publishing articles. There are literally thousands of ezine and newsletter publishers that would love to publish your article on their ezine.

Again, if you search for ezines related to your industry you should find plenty of places where you can submit an article and see it bring lots of targeted traffic. Make sure you place your resource box at the bottom of the article and require publishers to keep it there.

That’s it for now. For more info on how you could Get a High Ranking on Google in 3 Days, Visit www.WebProfitSecrets.com/FastonGoogle

Marcio Dias is an established Web Marketing Specialist who has taken dozens of sites from obscurity to millions of visitors per year in as little as a few months. Visit his main site at: http://www.webprofitsecrets.com?s=ea