By: Michael McLaughlin
http://www.webmastershed.com

Interested in boosting your link popularity, raising your Google PR, and improving the amount and quality of your traffic? Then discover the ancient secrets of a successful link exchange!

The practice of effective link exchanges has nearly been extinguished by the extensive amount of spam email. I plan to help webmasters who are interested in real effective and professional link exchanges reach their goals.

What is going to make you the most amount of sales if you are trying to sell fishing equipment? A link from an outdoor hobby website or a link from a bubble gum corporation? I think the answer is straightforward, the outdoor hobby website. The trick is to know your market and understand your customer. What age group would your customers be, and what other type of website would they look at if they were interested in your product?

Now, put yourself in your customer’s feet, what would you search for if you were interested in your product? Type that search phrase into a search engine now and look at what results come up. Disregard the competition and look at the other websites.

I suggest you rate these websites in your head on the following criteria:
relevance, design, content, and navigation. I ordered them by how heavily you should consider them. I already discussed relevancy; because of course you want to bring customers to your website instead of click-happy people.

You may be asking yourself what a website’s design has to do with a link exchange. Well over the years I have noticed one trend, which is that websites with a very nice design tend to prevail faster than others. Know one wants to visit a website and have to wince to read the text. Content on the other hand is what brings the readers. Content can substantially improve the quality of your website because the internet is about information and if you have what people are looking for they will find you! Not the other way around.

Content is king, how many times has that been said? And it still holds true, content is what get websites' links back to them, which in turn raise a website's presence on the internet. So why not have a link from a content website, in opposition to just another website trying to sell something?

And of course a website's navigation must be search engine friendly, because you will prefer to have the location of your link to be indexed by search engines.

Basically you should try to pick your link partners by first eliminating the irrelevant links, and then choose a website that is search engine friendly and has the potential to grow! And remember look for quality websites, not high PR websites.

One of the first signs of maturity in a person’s life is to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. For example you hit a car in the parking lot and don’t leave insurance information, you later feel bad because you know if that was your car that got hit you would be angry about it. Get the point? Good now apply that to writing emails; put yourself in your reader’s shoes.

Do you want to open another email that is titled “link exchange” or would you perhaps prefer to read something a bit more refreshing and alluring entitled “our partnership” or “link opportunity”? Be creative but don’t stick with the old link exchange title that is highly overused.

The content of this email, however you entitled it, should be very professional and businesslike. Use proper punctuation and complete sentences, also remember to compliment part of their website that is distinguishable so they identify that you actually visited it instead of simply finding their email address in cyberspace.

Don’t trust what mom says “it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” True content does help a website grow, but rarely do I trust a website's content if its design is pitiful. Remember be picky when choosing a link partner, personalize your letter, and be professional. As a final point do not partake in spam email!

Written by: Michael McLaughlin at http://www.webmastershed.com – webmaster forum, for more articles by this author please visit:
http://www.webmastershed.com/articles
 

When people want to rank their sites well in the search engines, they ignore one of the most effective ways to increase the ranking of internal pages. Internal link building is used by only a few smart site owners who have good knowledge of search engine optimization. Amazon and Wikipedia are examples of sites which dominate the first page of Google because of effective internal link structure.

The internal link structure of your site can have a massive impact on the ranking in search engines. This is more important if you own a big authority website. You can effectively improve the ranking of the internal webpages by making changes to internal links within your site. You are actually boosting the ranking of certain pages by diverting the link juice from important pages of the site.

Unfortunately the internal link structure of most of the people is not in good shape and they do not realize the power of linking within their site.

If you go to Wikipedia website and read any article, you will see loads of internal links in the article which take you to the relevant articles within the same site when clicked. Every time they link to internal pages, they are sending ranking power and link juice to those pages. This is quite an effective strategy which you can implement to your site right away. This will give a huge advantage to you on your competitors.

You should know how to control the flow of page rank to other internal pages of your site. The nofollow tag is added to links to tell search engines that they should not pass on page rank to the linked page. The point is, you should add nofollow tag to links leading to pages which do not require ranking in the search engines like contact us page or about us page. This will prevent wastage of the ranking power on unimportant pages.

Nofollow tag should not be used when you want to pass on the link juice to the linked page. This sends some page ranking power to those pages which you want to rank well in the search engines.

If you are using Wordpress for your site, you can use some plugins which automatically link certain keywords to the relevant internal pages. This type of internal linking of pages is very much similar to that used by Wikipedia site.

There is another plugin which shows a list of related posts at the bottom of all posts on your site. This also is a very easy way to develop internal link structure of your site.

If your site is themed and well linked internally, you have a higher chance of ranking well in the search engines.

Backlinks (otherwise referred to as "incoming links") are links that originate from another website and link to your website. Obtaining backlinks is one of the most important steps you need to take in order to raise your search engine ranking. It's also important to know that the quality (relevance and ranking) of the links that come to your site will affect your score. A link popularity campaign is a way to attract more links to your website.

There are many ways to go about getting backlinks. One of them is by posting another website's link on your website. Make sure that you are posting something that is truly relevant to your website content and preferably links back to a site that is highly ranked by the search engines. When you do this, the owner of the site you post will likely also place your site on his website. This is called "reciprocal linking" and, while it's better than no linking at all, you don't want to have only reciprocal links.. First of all, they are not as effective as one-way links, and second of all, you are giving your website visitors the opportunity to click off of your site and on to something else.

In order to get one-way links, you can buy them from a link building service, ask for them from other webmasters, or create exceptional content that others will naturally want to link to in order to provide more value to their visitors. Exceptional content is the key to natural link building. However, you may need to use other methods to push your link popularity campaign alone a little bit.

It's also very important to regularly monitor your website's link popularity. This can be done quickly and easily with a number of free online tools. You always want to have an idea of where your website stands, what strategies are working for you and which one's aren't.

Finally, this may seem obvious but if you are committed to link building, you need to continuously put your web site link in front of people. This doesn't mean that you need to be spammy or overly promotional. But find outlets where you can offer advice, provide solutions or bring up questions about the business that you are in. And include your link whenever you participate. This will create interest and links if you are participating in the right way.

Again, updated, top-quality content is the foundation to getting high-quality links to your website so that other webmasters will include your link in their recommendations to their visitors. It also helps to have numbered titles or sections on your website or blog like "5 Ways to Create a Link Popularity Campaign" or "21 Mistakes You Don't Want To Make When Building Your Website". These are just two examples but titles like this offer perfect linking solutions for other webmasters.

There's no question articles are one of the quickest and easiest ways to get targeted traffic and quality incoming links (that boost your search rankings) to your site. Not to mention, they don't cost a cent!

And unlike other free advertising methods that have faded away over time, articles continue to grow in power as time goes on.

After all, there's always an increasing amount of website publishers who need quality content to share with their readers.

Of course, there's a catch. Your articles have to be good quality, be for an in-demand topic, and you must submit them to article directories (where publishers can pick-up your articles to syndicate). Otherwise, you will have wasted your time.

Instant Article Submitter and its companion software Instant Article Creator (given as a bonus) sets-out to eliminate these problems associated with articles.

First, Instant Article Creator is a fill-in-the-blank software that guides you to creating an article. Its a simple software that does its job well. By having a step-by-step structure, you don't have to worry about your articles getting too involved.

Everything you need to include is right in front of you, all of the time.

Instant Article Submitter is an automatic article submission software. This is opposed to many other competing software that are only semi-automatic (meaning they still require you to visit each site manually and click the Submit button).

This makes using these tools long and tedious to use. Instant Article Submitter visits all of the directories for you, logs into your account, and takes care of pushing all of the buttons. All you must do is fill in the security code that around three out of hundreds directories require.

This makes Instant Article Submitter a very similar option to the paid services which charge you a fee to use their service and they take care of all the submitting. The only difference is that there are zero recurring fees, you know exactly where your articles are getting submitted to, and you can put it to work whenever you want.

So, how well does it perform?

Well, just submitting to the article directories alone are going to send hundreds of incoming links to your site. But, when you hit the right topic, then you're going to see countless publishers picking up your article (along with your resource box at the end).

And, if you get picked-up on the right site, then youre going to get thousands of visitors.

For ease of use and functionality, Ive used it numerous time and never noticed any bugs. Plus, their have been several updates which keeps on adding new features and directories.

As a result, this tool gets my highest rating. It stands out over its competitors and the quality support and updates makes using it an easy decision.

You can pick-up your copy at:

http://tinyurl.com/instnt-art-sub412

Link Building is without a doubt one of the most important factors when optimizing any website and is a subject that has been covered in countless articles. This article gives one persons opinion on how to obtain top quality links.

WHY LINK BUILD?

Link building is important as each link that points to your site is like a thumbs up from the other site saying your site is a good resource. Basically the more thumbs up you get the higher your website will rank.

Back in the day before search evolved into the clever little beast it is today, it really was as simple as that, and those black hatters out there went away and obtained links from everywhere under the sun in a bid to obtain high rankings for their own sites and clients sites. They didn't care where the links came from and it became a big battle as to who could obtain the most links. This couldn't continue so Google introduced the PageRank Algorithm which made link building more of a skill, and gave more weight to links that were actually relevant to the websites they were pointing to.

Although some people still argue that quantity still outweighs quality, Google still claims that it doesn't so I will keep this article in line with Googles thoughts and save the other argument for later.. Getting back to it, it's important to obtain relevant links to your website in order to gain higher page rank which will in turn raise your rankings. This is why it's important to link build, as without lots of top quality and relevant links pointing to your website, you may as well give up unless your website is extremely niche that is, and by extremely niche im talking about a website that is about pink and gold spotty dogs with only one leg, for example.

WHAT ARE MY LINKING OPTIONS?

There are many different types of links out there and I have listed a few of them below. I One Way Links - Links that point to you but you dont link back Reciprocal Links - Links whereby somebody links to you and you link back to them Social Bookmarking Links - Links obtained through social media Article/Press Release - One way links obtained through articles and press releases Link Baiting - Links obtained through offering something useful to the end user

Link Building is without doubt a skill that any SEO must be good at, as it's extremely difficult. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of relationship skills. It isn't something that is going to go away

Before discussing the link popularity tool, let's discuss link popularity itself. What is it? Link popularity basically refers to the total number of web pages which link to your web site or any of its individual pages. The reason it is so important is because this is one of the main factors that search engines use to evaluate your website and where it will be ranked. If your website is ranked high with the search engines, you will come up in the first results when a potential customer goes online and searches for what your business offers. That's why webmasters are concerned with their link popularity.

So what is a link popularity tool? It depends on the tool. There are many facets to link popularity and link building so there are tools that correspond to those aspects. Some tools will perform an analysis on the various search engines to show you how many pages are linking to your site. They can also tell you which pages are linking. Some will actually give you a score so you can judge how well you are doing. Some will give you the opportunity to compare your site to others. Most free tools will only give you the results from the biggest search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

You'll probably notice that the amount of links varies significantly from search engine to search engine because the figures displayed represent the number of inbound-links that are known to each search engine in particular and will vary based on the size of its database. Search engines also figure out certain inbound-links (again, this varies according to the search engine) so certain backlinks may not figure into the total.

While you don't want to become obsessed with using this tool or checking the data all the time, it is important to keep tabs on your links. You want to keep your links as high-quality and relevant as possible and knowing where they are coming from can help you manage that information.

After you analyze the information that you get from your tool, you can then continue on with your link building strategy. Many tools are also connected or related to other services that can help you with this realm of link-building as well. Just remember that the same rules apply if you should decide to go with a link building service to take care of that aspect of your business. You want to get a quality service so make sure you do your research in order to get the most bang for your buck. While many link-building tools are free, link building services are definitely not. However, what they save you in time and effort could very much be worth it in terms of cash.

By all means, take advantage of a link popularity tool and then decide if you plan to go as far as to hire someone else to handle your backlink strategy.