Archive for October, 2007
How to boost your Google rank with free links (Hint: It’s not just all about PageRank!)
By Andrew Mallory
Last week, Derek wrote an editorial telling you how to get high quality links pointing to your site by registering your site with the ‘Net’s top paid directories.
This week, Derek has asked me to write an article explaining how you can expand your link network by getting FREE links from other sites.
This process is a little more time consuming… but the links you’ll get will definitely be worth it. (Not to mention all that extra traffic thanks to your improved search engine ranking!)
But before you set off in search of free links that will propel your site to the top of the search engine results, here are 5 things you need to consider:
- Pay attention to PageRank — but don’t live or die by it!When trying to find sites to link to their site, most people tend to look for ones that have a high PageRank.(PageRank is a function of Google’s toolbar that supposedly measures the importance of a given website.)
However, all this focus on PageRank has resulted in many people looking ONLY at PageRank when evaluating possible linking sites. They also spend a lot of effort trying to improve their own PageRank — without stopping to consider whether their actions are helping their actual ranking in Google’s listings.
And that is not a good thing.
The fact is, no one is really sure exactly how much Google takes PageRank into account when calculating its natural search algorithms.
For example, sites with very little PageRank can be found at the top of the search results, while sites with a high PageRank are languishing on the fourth or fifth page… or even lower!
On top of that, it’s hard to tell exactly what PageRank uses as its criteria to measure a site’s “authority.”
Government sites such as FEMA, the IRS, and the FBI all have a PageRank of 8 out of a possible 10. Yet I can’t imagine there’s a more authoritative source of information on the IRS than the IRS itself!
Finally, PageRank “addicts” should know that unscrupulous webmasters can steal another site’s PageRank and use it to manipulate their own PageRank numbers!
(In fact, this is what lots of shady “link sellers” do — they sell links based on their PageRank, but often that PageRank has been artificially inflated!)
So while you should still pay attention to PageRank, it’s certainly not the only thing you should look at. You need to consider what the actual rank of that site is, and how well its content relates to the content on your site.
(More about that in a moment…)
- Looking for links from a commercial site? Make sure its products are complementaryThere’s no point in trying to get a link from a site selling something that has no relation to your business! You need to look for commercial sites that sell things that go well with your product.If you sell the cola and I sell the glasses and ice, it could be the beginning of a beautiful joint venture relationship that provides great value to both your customers and mine.
- Look for web pages with content that’s closely related to the content on your pageI would argue that this is just as important as a site’s PageRank, if not more so.You want your links to come from pages whose content is as focused on the content on YOUR page as possible.
It’s not just a matter of getting links pointing from another site’s homepage to your homepage! Try to go deeper and more specific than that.
If you sell used tennis rackets and you find a site that talks about tennis topics in general, try to get a link on a sub-page that talks specifically about tennis rackets.
And if it talks specifically about used tennis rackets, even better.
Also look for web pages that have content related to your product or service, even if the site itself doesn’t have any real relation to your business.
For example, if a popular blogger who typically writes about her daily life writes a post that directly relates to your product in some way, ask her if you can get a link on the page that has that particular blog post.
Or maybe a general information site has an article that relates to your product. THAT’S where you want your link — right on the article page itself.
Links from general information sites can still be valuable, provided they’re heavy traffic-sites with a great search engine rank.
But in general, it’s more effective — and in many cases, much easier — to try and get a link on a web page whose content directly relates to your own, even if that site is lower down in the search engine rankings and doesn’t get the same volume of traffic.
- Is this a good page for a link? Consider it from the user’s perspectiveWhen you’re debating whether a web page is a good link source, think about it from the perspective of the visitors to that site.They’ve come to a page, and on it they see a link to a site they’ve never heard of before. It’s got intriguing anchor text and it’s embedded in content they’re interested in.
Now… if they click on that link, are they going to be happy?
If they don’t find what they expect to find — based on the content of the page that led them there — they’re going to be disappointed, and they’re going to leave. And they’re going to think less of the site that sent them there.
So if you’re going to try and get links from other sites pointing to yours, make sure the people who click on that link are going to find something valuable to them!
Offer them free information — maybe something they can download, like a free report. Because if you don’t send them to a page that makes that click truly worth their while, you’re just gaming the system.
- When you ask for links, emphasize what’s in it for THEMThe days when you could email people and ask, “Please link to me” are long gone.When you approach other sites owners to ask them to link to your site, what you’re really asking is for them to share some of their traffic with you.
Smart website owners are jealously protective of their traffic. They’re not going to share it with just anybody. The sites they recommend reflect back on them. If they tell people to go to a low-quality site, their visitors aren’t going to like them very much for it!
That’s why you need to emphasize the benefits of linking to your site — both for their visitors and for them.
How will you provide value to the visitors they send you? Are you a great source of information? Will your product help their visitors solve a problem you know they’re experiencing? Do you offer something the other site owner simply can’t provide — something you know their visitors want?
That’s what you need to tell them in order to convince them to link to your site.
Never forget: when you ask for a link from a site, you’re essentially borrowing that site’s credibility, and you need to be respectful about that.
Building a network of free links definitely takes some time… but you have to remember the benefits…
Not only will you enjoy the indirect benefit of better search ranking and the traffic it’ll bring you, you’ll also get the traffic sent directly from the links themselves!
And all that extra traffic will make all your efforts worthwhile.
[Ed. note: Andrew Mallory is one of the top Internet Entrepreneur Club experts.]
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Website traffic is the a main goal of any web master. Websites are worthless without it, as it is the amount of data and information received and sent by a website visitor. A website needs to have increased traffic in order to survive. To increase website traffic, a website should have many visitors.
How are you going to increase the web traffic of your web site? If you are a web developer or e-commerce owner, increasing the amount of visitors in your website is of extreme importance. For you to gain many visitors, you need to use the following methods to learn more about increasing the traffic of your website.
• You only need to maintain a particular content of your website. Your website should contain all the information your visitors need. The information you should feed your reader must contain many links to your website. You also have to put quality content to give your visitors reason to come back.
• Have a regular distribution of newsletters. Newsletter serves as a reminder to your visitors that your website still exists. You should send newsletters especially to those who have subscribed but has failed to visit your site for a long time. Write and send newsletters on a regular basis. It can be monthly or weekly as long as the newsletter you will be sending to your subscribers is of quality and has convincing content.
• Make a forum or community posts. This will give you information to all the asked questions of your visitors. Not only that, it also answers all the questions of your visitors including yours. It also gives you information that you can add to your website. Get your self involved in the forum, and add your advertisements as well as your URL.
• You can run contests or promos that will encourage your visitors to log on to your website repeatedly. Promos and contests will catch the interest of your visitors. Make them go after your good prize; it will make them excited to win. You should make your visitors aware of your rules, like the most times that a visitor uses your website, the more chances of winning. This catchy promotion will absolutely increase the web traffic of your website.
• Invite good writers to your website. From writing your own web contents, you are sure to save money from it. However, there are things you need to master before you can write a quality article. By inviting writers with good reputation, your site will be a good hit to the visitors especially to the ones who appreciate good insightful literature. They are going to write quality articles that will make your visitors comeback to your website.
• You can also invite special personalities in your website. They can join the forum together with all your visitors. You can hold a special event where your visitors will be given a chance to chat with a prestigious personality. They are given special privilege to ask questions and chat with the special personality invited.
• Advertise your website through banners, text links, magazines, newspapers, media and offline advertisements. This is an invitation that should catch the attention. Make sure to make convincing advertisements. Aside from the mentioned above you can also try giving away free e-books or articles as well as classified ads.
• You can also give the top visitors free items or freebies. These items are given to the frequent visitors of your website. Pens, shirts, stress balls and many others that can be given with your websites name and URL. This will be a good advertisement.
To build a good website, you must build a good reputation. It is the most effective way to make your website famous. This is attained through writing emails and making good contents of your website. You can also write articles on other websites as long as you put a small resource box after your article. This will serve as the link to your website. With more articles you made, the more chance of getting more traffic in your website.
You are able to get the major numbers of traffic in your website by using the following methods. If you want to earn money, you have to work for it, and you need to do lots of effort to attain effective and positive popularity of your website.
Click Here To get your free money-making website setup free and learn how to drive massive traffic to it and earn multiple streams of residual income.
Technorati Tags: Website traffic
A Small Guide To Free Advertising
Thanks to “Johan” from the SFI Discussion Board…
Contrary to what some may say, free advertising on the Internet is NOT a waste of time. Many SFI Affiliates have successfully used free classified ad posting to build strong SFI home businesses for themselves. Although it typically does take more of a time investment than other, more costly methods, when used effectively, free advertising can truly take your SFI business to the next level!
If you’ve tried free advertising in the past and have not gotten the results you were looking for, it may simply be that you’re just not going about it the right way. This guide discusses how you can effectively use this form of advertising to successfully build your SFI home business, increase your sales, and raise your commission checks.
Before You Start With Free Ads
Before posting free ads, it’s STRONGLY recommended that you set up an extra business e-mail address. Free classifieds are free for a reason: When you post ads, you will receive “confirmation e-mails” that your ads were posted. If you post to classified networks, you can receive hundreds of confirmation e-mails per day.
Simply set up a free Hotmail or Yahoo account to catch these emails. Then once a week, clean up your e-mail account by deleting all e-mails, so your inbox doesn’t get full. In many cases, you must register and verify your business e-mail address before you can post your ad. Use the same password for all registrations so you easily can remember it.
Why You Should Post Your Ads On A Tuesday 12 Noon CST
Statistics are very important for a successful ad campaign. For example, you can use statistics to figure out when it’s more likely that people will find your ad. First, let’s take a look at some charts that display statistics collected from personal Websites:
Here is a graphical chart that displays how Internet traffic flows during the hours of the day:
This chart displays how traffic flow during the days of the week:
This chart displays how much of that traffic comes from different timezones:
When you combine these statistics, you’ll see that it’s best to post an ad on a Tuesday, 12 noon CST, the day and time when most people you target are active on the Internet. You can also see that it’s a waste of time to post an ad at 5 a.m. on a Saturday. By taking advantage of these facts, you can improve your results by 10 times or more.
Stay Focused!
Try to stay focused when you post ads. It’s easy to get distracted by some advertising that says: “Post 2000 ads here!” or “This submit software posts to 500,000 sites with a click of a button!” or something similar. You will find a lot of attractive offers on those sites because they know that you are a targeted customer! One good rule is:
You will never find anyone advertising effective advertising.
Logic: If the advertising is effective, it will be used by the owner himself.
Submission software is useless, because it posts to sites no real human visits. All good classified ad sites have protection against those type of submission programs. Posting manually or with the help of a typing program like AdWizard are the best methods (the only methods).
How To Place Your Ads
Place your ads in categories such as, Business Opportunities, Work At Home, Home Business, MLM, and the like. Do not post ads in unrelated categories. If you have to option to post in several relating categories, do so.
In many cases, there is a form where you can fill in your Website URL. Sometimes you have to include your URL in the ad description. Either way, ALWAYS include your site’s URL. When you start to post free classified ads, you can do it without adding the sites to the AdWizard program mentioned above (if you have chosen to use that software). But as soon as your tracking shows that a site is giving you visitors, add this page to the AdWizard or-at the very least-save or write down the URL.
Your goal is to find as many classified ad sites that bring a positive result; those sites will be your goldmines! A site that gives you a visitor per day or at least every second day is a good site. Don’t waste your time posting ads to sites that do not give you any visitors. As you go along, you’ll see that the more ads you post to different sites and track the results, the more and better sites you will find. This is the secret behind effective free advertising, as your results will inevitably get better every day. To what degree depends on your effort.
How Often To Place Your Ads
This depends on whether you find a high-traffic free ad site. Sometimes, your ad can roll off the site in one hour or faster. Sometimes, it stays for weeks. Generally, however, you should post to your free ad sites once every day. Be aware, though, that if you post on a site where no one else is posting, multiple ads from you may appear a little silly. Therefore, it’s a good idea to check out a site before you post your ad a second time.
Finding Classified Ad Sites
You will find some classified ad sites through the SFI Dboard Resource Center, but it’s probably a good idea for you to search for more online sites on your own.
One major mistake people make is that they search for classified ad sites by doing an online search for “classified ad sites.”
For example, if you go to a search engine and search for “classified ad sites,” you will, no doubt, find a lot of ad sites. BUT is that what the people you are trying to reach (your target audience) do?
No! They search for a phrase like “work at home,” “home based business,” etc.
So, if you place ads on classified ad sites you found while searching for “classified ad sites,” your ads will be on pages your targeted visitors never find.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s looking for a work-at-home opportunity. How would they go about searching for this topic on the Internet? Think of the phrases they might type in their favorite search engine’s search box. Now, type one of those phrases in the search box of the major search engines, and research the sites that show up in the results. Then, try those phrases with different search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Lycos, etc.).
When you’re conducting your research, go to EVERY site that comes up in the first 20 matches. Take notes or print out the results, especially the Yahoo! and Google results.
Finding classified ad sites in this way is a little harder and more time consuming, but it’s well worth the extra trouble!
Tracking Your Results
Effective tracking is why many SFI Affiliates are able to build profitable businesses. It’s also at this point that many marketers fail. You must have a personal Website to track your advertising effectively.
By adding a piece of HTML code to your Website, you will discover statistics about your visitors. The most important stats are how many visitors you have and from where they come. You will be able to find out the exact advertisement that attracted the person to come to your site. By placing advertising and tracking your results, you will find out where you should continue to place ads, and where you should stop wasting your time!
Yet another method of tracking your results are to imbed keycode numbers (anything from 1 to 9999) into your SFI Gateway URLs in your SFI advertisements. When an affiliate joins the SFI program, they will be listed in your Genealogy with the keycode number you assigned to that ad.
So, for example, if you run an ad and give your SFI Free Gateway URL for viewers to go to for more information, your URL would look like this:
Now, let’s say that you assign a keycode number of 1000 for a specific ad. Your Gateway will then appear like this:
Anyone clicking that link and then joining the SFI program will then appear in your Genealogy report with the number “1000″ next to their name.
If you compare this type of tracking with that of offline advertising, which is very hard to track with statistics, Internet marketing is a playground for those of you who like to have control over what happens.
Here’s an example offline scenario: you open a new bookstore in your town and want to tell everyone about it. You place ads in different categories of newspapers and send out commercial mailings to mailboxes all over town. People start to visit your bookstore and business is OK. You figure that your advertising campaign worked, but have no idea WHAT aspect of the campaign actually brought the customers in. At this point, your only option is to start asking every visitor that came to your shop where they found out about it. This is hardly practical.
However, with Internet marketing, it’s a breeze!
Place ads during the most active hours on the day. Then, at the end of the day, log in and make notes of the Websites that gave you a positive result. If you repeat the procedures outlined in this article every day, you will soon have many Websites sending you visitors and your results will improve steadily, step by step, day by day.
SFI is the one of the oldest and most respected online business opportunities online. Join now buy clicking the banner below!
Technorati Tags: advertising
Affiliate marketing is very much popular today. This started when the internet was introduced in the world and the way we look at business was never the same. It opened a lot of doors and a lot of Pandora’s box as well. I am not going to paint you a rosy picture, there is as much negative as there are positive in the internet.
There are many strategies and ways for businesses to flourish in the internet. One is the affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a way of allowing website to earn an income from their website by displaying the adverts, links to banners of a merchant or by carrying contextual advertising.
Affiliate marketing is a popular method of promoting e- businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber or costumer provided through his efforts. The compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit or pay-per-click, registrant or pay-per-lead and commission for each costumer or sale or pay-per-sale.
In affiliate marketing, an affiliate program is necessary. Affiliate program is a partnership with an online merchant who compensates any sales that is being sent by a merchant via links on the site.
Affiliate programs are also arrangements in which an online merchant web site pays affiliate web sites a commission to send them traffic. These affiliate web sites posts links to the merchant site and are paid according to a particular agreement.
The agreement is usually based on the number of people the affiliate sends to the merchant’s site, or the number of people they send who actually buy something or perform some other action.
Some arrangements pay according to the number of people who visit the page containing their merchant site’s banner advertisement. Basically, it is a link on an affiliate site brings the merchant site traffic or money; the merchant site’s pays the affiliate site according to their agreement.
Recruiting an affiliate is an excellent way to sell products online and it is a cheap and effective marketing strategy. It is a good method to get word about the site.
There are three parties in an affiliate program transaction; the costumer, the affiliate site and the merchant site.
There are many affiliate programs available in the web today. it is very important to make one’s affiliate program stand out and catch the attention of professional affiliate marketers.
The following are some tips on making affiliate program stand out from the massive amount of competition that are available.
• Provide your affiliate partners with creative and promotional materials. Make it an aim to make their job of marketing the products or services as easy as possible. The less work they have to do and the more conversions they see, the more likely they are to promote the products or services.
• Don’t try to sell everything to everyone. This is the quickest way to fail in a business venture.
• Communicate with the partners by welcoming them to affiliate program send out updates on products additions or changes. Give them tips and advise on how to be successful in marketing products. Always pay them on time and take care of them.
• Once claimed, the niche market research, find web sites that have viewers interested in the niche market. Finds partners that has already built a traffic and would benefit from the affiliate offer. The offer should be a win-win situation for both.
• Don’t rest on your laurels just because there are a few good partners. They may decide to jump ship. Protect one by actively recruiting new partners. Try finding new partners by advertising the affiliate program on the web site, listing or advertising in affiliate directories and by contracting potential affiliates directly.
Affiliate programs works best when affiliates choose products, services and companies that match the content of their web site and would interests their readers. If a content web site chooses affiliate programs well, everybody involved in the process wins.
The affiliate wins because it is able to sell products to its visitors without having to run an e- commerce business. The merchant site wins because it gets a piece of the profit for setting everything up and the web surfer wins because the affiliate web site directs her to products she would be interested in, which she can purchase easily.
An affiliate program can be successful if it effectively links commerce and content and takes advantage of the respective strengths of site and its affiliates. All kinds of people might buy different things like books online.
Successful affiliate marketing programs takes time to build, but with a bit of effort, they hves the ability to increase internet sales noticeably.
Technorati Tags: Affiliate marketing
How much do you know about the visitors to your web site? Are they directly interested in what you have to offer them? Is what you are speaking about on your site general information that is available anywhere on the internet or something that they can only get from you? If you are simply rehashing what everybody else is saying than you are losing out on a lot of traffic and a lot of income.
Exactly how much you need to know remains something of a mystery. However, it is relatively safe to say that if you offer only generalities on your web page, you may generate a lot of traffic but you will probably not get a lot of return visitors. While people who come to your site initially may provide some base ad revenue, unless they can interact on your site, they are probably not going to be very receptive to actual sales pitches from you.
For example, if you are involved in the health care niche and you only put out a couple of hundred articles about how important health care is without giving your visitors and readers any real or useful information, it is not likely that they will be returning to get any real information from your site. When you offer them something of substance, no matter whether it is a digital product or something more tangible, they will remember your mediocrity and not be compelled to purchase your offering.
On the other hand, if you have fifty well-written articles discussing the different types of health care and different concerns, benefits and hazards of specific health care needs, your visitors will be more likely to return. When you have something specific to offer those readers, they are bound to be more responsive to your offers.
You can have ten thousand people on your list regarding your particular niche, but are you taking all of the possible variations into consideration in order to offer something that is directly relevant to your list? That is not to say that you have to get into too much detail but that you do need to offer them something that is directly related to a specific need. If there is no specific need to fill, none of your visitors will feel a need to purchase it.
While you do not want to narrow your niche down so far that you no longer have any real audience at all, you do want to include specifics about as many of those subgroups in your niche as is possible. Concentrate on building them up one at a time and you will actually fare much better than you would by bombarding them with everything all at once.
If you return to our health care niche example, you could very well start off with a general site stating the relevance of health care and how important it is for everyone. That main heading can than be broken down into sub-categories in order to meet and fulfill the needs and requirements of all of the people that visit your site.
The health care needs of a professional athlete are going to be different than the needs of an elderly and infirm person. However, by including sections in your site to cover the needs of both of those groups, you have expanded your audience by providing more specifics separated into different areas. You have also accomplished this without alienating either group. This is something that is very relevant when you want to generate return traffic or confidence in the products you have for sale on your site.
Whatever particular niche yours happens to be, try expanding it as far as possible while continuing to provide enough information for the casual reader to learn what category they belong in. Offering something for both the general audience as well as more specific information for each of the groups within that arena will only expand your audience, your credibility and your income.
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