How To Get Links To Your Web Site

In a previous post about Search Engine optimization (SEO) I mentioned that link building (getting links from other sites to your website) is the biggest factor that affects your Search Engine rankings. So that leads you to the question:

How Do I get Links To My Website?

Well, the good news is that there are many ways to get links to your site, the bad news is that there are many ways to get links to your site. There are so many ways to get links to your site that a person can seriously get overwhelmed. A few years ago I wrote a post called “101 FREE Ways To Increase Your Blog Traffic” most of those methods involved getting links to your website. The truth of the matter is that there are more than 101 ways to build links to your site! So where do you start?

Well, first of all I recommend that people find 2-3 methods of building links to their site and focus on those. It’s easy to get caught up in always trying out the latest and greatest methods of link building, BUT then you never get really good at any of the methods. So, here is a list of some of the methods we use in our business to get links to websites. They work and they are fairly easy to implement. Unless you are in an unbelievably competitive market using just 2-3 of these methods will really help increase your traffic and your website’s search engine rankings.

1. Directory Submissions
There are many people in the SEO/Internet marketing world who for the last 7 years have been claiming that directory submissions don’t help you get traffic and don’t help your rankings. However, for that entire time I have been using directory submissions to get websites ranked and it’s still working for me. Directory submissions are an easy way to get related links to your website that will help your site rank higher in the Search Engines.

2. Article Marketing
Article marketing is my personal favorite way of getting links to a website. Article marketing is essentially the process of writing articles related to your website and allowing other people to reprint them on their website provided that your by-line remains intact and that they link to your website from the article.

The by-line of your article should have the name of the article, your name, a short description of the article, reprint information, and a link to your website. After you write the article you submit it to what are known as article directories. These article directories will display your article and allow other people to reprint them on their websites. This can lead to a lot of links to your website.

3. Video Marketing

With video marketing you come up with a video message or slideshow, then create the video and then post it to video sharing sites like Youtube, Metacafe, Google Videos, etc. It’s a pretty simple process and can result in a lot of traffic and links to your site. Not to mention Google tends to rank videos high in the Search engine rankings for some terms, so not only can you get links but your videos may rank for some of the search terms you want people to use to find your site.

4. Social Bookmarking
One way your company can get more links is through social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites are sites where people post articles that are voted on by other users of the site. Two of the most well known players in the social bookmarking arena are Digg.com and Delicious.com. The social bookmarking site that brings the most traffic to my sites is Stumbleupon. Stumbleupon is easy to use and once you start getting stumbleupon friends to vote for your articles you will start seeing a steady stream of new traffic from the site, not mention links.

5. Link Exchanges
Much like directories some people claim that link exchanges don’t help you get higher Search Engine rankings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Link exchanges with other websites still works to increase a website’s rankings. In fact, if you have a blog and you can find 10 other quality blogs in a related industry to trade blog roll (links on every page of the blog) with you, in most cases you will be on the road to top 10 rankings in no time. Now on the downside you have to spend a lot of time keeping track of whether or not people still link to your site and managing the requests you will get from people wanting to trade links with you. So it is time consuming on an ongoing basis, BUT it does work.

The bottom line

There are many ways to build links to a website. Become a master of a few of those methods and you will be on your way to dominating the Search Engines. If you need help then contact us at (832) 497-1610 or by email at info @ mantywebdeisgns.com and we can help you create a marketing plan, teach you how to do it yourself or we can do it for you.

Why Search Engine Rankings Matter

You may have noticed we haven’t written a blog post in a few weeks. Once every two years we write an Olympics blog– one for the Winter Olympics and one for the Summer Olympics (this one hasn’t yet undergone a facelift– look for that soon). For a couple of weeks every two years, every spare moment is spent watching and writing about the Olympics. What does that have to do with your Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? Keep reading, and I’ll let you know.

In the current age of Pay Per Click, it can become easy to ask– does it matter where I rank? After all with the right PPC manager, I can appear on the front page any day I want. That may be true and, certainly, given enough money you can buy a spot in the Sponsored Ads.

However, PPC cannot buy you authority. People who know those are sponsored ads know that you paid to be placed there and that it has nothing to do with the quality of your site. Sometimes that may not matter. It depends whose attention you’re trying to attract.

Ranking for Olympic related terms is, as you can imagine, challenging. When we wrote our first Olympics blog– 2006TurinOlympics.com, it ranked in the top three for the phrase 2006 Turin Olympics. Not only did this lead to a huge amount of traffic, over 200,000 page impressions for the month of February in 2006, but it also lead to being quoted in the Washington Post.

Of course, then we had the domain working for us. But after the Turin Olympics, we decided to create the ongoing winter and summer Olympics blogs. That meant we would no longer be attempting to rank for a specific Olympics, but for the more general (and, therefore, more difficult) terms winter Olympics and summer Olympics. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, we ran into a problem with our ranking. While we ranked well early on, our site completely disappeared the day of the Opening Ceremony and didn’t reappear for over half of the Olympics.

We were concerned we were going to have the same result with this winter’s Olympic blog. Sure enough, when we started out, our rankings were pretty low and so was our traffic. Once we started adding content, though, we were able to rise to 12th in the rankings for “winter Olympics” and to maintain a number 1 ranking for “winter Olympics news”– not bad considering five of the top ten positions were held by the official IOC site, the official Vancouver site, and NBC’s Olympics site. As our rankings rose, so did our traffic. And, apparently, so did our profile and authority in the eyes of others.

During the second week of the Olympics, we were contacted by a representative of the public relations firm running Proctor and Gamble’s Olympics campaign. Would we be interested in interviewing a couple of the women from the U.S. women’s hockey team? Um, sure. That resulted in this post about Jenny Potter.

When Sherry (my co-writer for the blog) emailed our contact to say thanks, she offered to set up another interview. That resulted in this interview with Kristy Yamaguchi. Not bad for a couple of “amateurs” writing an Olympics blog.

So, what’s my point? I know that the pr firm rep found us through the search engines. She didn’t pick a random company who was paying for sponsored links. She picked a website that ranked well for the terms she was searching. Our ranking gave us automatic authority in the eyes of others. In turn, that gave us the opportunity to conduct a couple of interviews that allowed us to create some unique content that will allow us to gain even more traffic. I hope you can see how this could be a good thing for your business.

Even if you’re not trying to conduct interviews or writing a blog on your website (although if you’re not, we really must talk), a top ranking for your keywords WILL promote you as an expert. If you’re searching for Houston widgets, which company are you going to do business with? The one ranked number one or even number four? Or the one ranked twentieth? Whether you, personally, think your ranking should make a difference in your potential customers’ eyes, it does.

Am I saying Pay Per Click is bad and that no one should go that route? Certainly not! More traffic is more traffic and a well-designed PPC campaign can be especially helpful as you’re building your organic search ranking or if you’re in a really competitive niche. But PPC will not help demonstrate that you’re an expert. Natural search results just might.

The Basics Of Search Engine Optimization And Why It’s Still Important

With the huge growth of Social Media sites some people are claiming that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no longer important. Those people are SO WRONG!

One of the reasons that Search Engine marketing will continue to be important for a long time is that all traffic is not created equal. With social media traffic you have a lot of people who are coming to your site looking for something interesting to read. On the other hand, people using Search Engines to find your website are often people searching for answers to their problems, specific products and services. In other words, they are much more likely to buy the products and services you are offering.

Now, that we have established that Search Engine traffic is important, what are the main things you can do to get more Search Traffic?

To keep things simple, I am going to give you an overview of the three most important factors in Search Engine optimization.

1. Choosing Keywords

Keywords are words that people use to find your website. Keywords are the words entered into the search field of a Search Engine to search for website pages related to or including those words. For example, if you are looking for blue shoes, you would type “blue shoes” into a Search Engine and find websites related to “blue shoes”.

The phrase “blue shoes” is called a keyword phrase. To increase your Search Engine traffic you should choose a 1-3 word keyword phrase for each individual page of your website. You also should choose two or three keyword phrases that constitute the overall theme of your website. There are many methods that can be used to choose keywords, but we won’t go into all of them here. Choosing the right keywords is one of the biggest keys to running a successful Search Engine Optimization campaign.

Google provides a really good free tool that you can use to research keywords with:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

There are MANY other keyword research tools you can use; the best ones you have to pay for. I am not going to go over all your choices here because that would take too much time. I recommend checking out Allan Gardyne’s site keyword workshop for a detailed look at most of the choices out there.

2. Title Tags – On Page factors /HTML SEO

On page SEO can be a little more tricky than off page SEO. From what I have observed, Yahoo®, and Bing® give more weight to on page SEO than Google® does. However, like I have said before the Search Engines constantly adjust their algorithms, so don’t worry too much about which factors are stronger than others and make your best effort at taking as many factors as you can into consideration when creating your pages.

The bottom line is that having good on page optimization will help your site get ranked well in the Search Engines, but be careful not to over-optimize as some Search Engines might penalize keyword SPAM (repeating keywords everywhere possible in what appears to be a very unnatural way).

The most important on page factor is the title tag.

The TITLE Tag is an HTML tag that is located in between the <head> and </head> tags in the HTML code for your site. The text in between the <title> and </title> title tags is the title text. It is displayed by the browser in the Title Bar at the top of your browser (see image below):

The TITLE makes a big difference in where your page ranks in the Search Engines for a given keyword phrase.

The title tag should be relatively short. Most Search Engine experts say you should keep your title tag between 6 and 12 words and under 80 characters. However, I believe that shorter tags 1-5 words can be equally as effective, if not more effective in some cases (especially if you are only targeting one short keyword phrase for that page). Too many words will dilute the effectiveness of having keywords in your title, so limiting your title text to 12 words or less is a good guideline to follow.

Your Title tag should contain the keywords you would like people to use to find that page. Take one of my old websites for example:

http://websitepromotionbook.com.

Look at the Title tag for the main page. You can do this by either viewing the source or looking at the text in the very top left hand corner of the browser window.

To view source code for a page in Internet Explorer:
1.Click on the top pulldown menu “View”.
2.Scroll down and click on the menu item “Source”.

When I wrote this book the Title tag said “affordable website promotion, increase website traffic”.

The keywords that I was targeting on the main page of this website to rank high for were:

1.“affordable website promotion”
2.“website promotion”
3.“increase website traffic”

These keywords appeared in the title tag for the home page. In most Search Engines the keywords at the beginning of the title tag contain more weight than the keywords at the end of the title tag. This means they are considered more important in the Search Engines eyes. For this reason, you should consider putting your main keywords first in the title tag. I could have put something like the “Great ebook by George Manty” in the title tag.

However, none of my targeted keywords appear in the title, which does not help the Search Engines know that my website is about affordable website promotion and increasing website traffic. In fact, a really good way to look at on page Search Engine optimization is that you are helping the Search Engines understand what your website is about. That is why you need to put your main keywords in your Title tag. You need to let the Search Engines know what this page is about.

3. Links Are King

In the world of Internet marketing it is often said that “content is king” and while content is extremely important with Search engine optimization, links are more important. In fact…

THE single most important factor that affects your Search Engine Ranking in Google®, Bing and Yahoo is inbound LINKS pointing to your website.

In general, the more quality, related links that point to your website the higher your website’s Search Engine ranking will be for the keywords that people use to link to your website. While some Search Engines don’t place as much weight on links, the three major Search Engines (Google®, Bing®, and Yahoo®) do place a significant amount of weight on inbound links.

The reason for this is that Google and other Search Engines rank websites based on the number of websites that link to them. One of the Google algorithms that does this is the Page Rank algorithm. Basically, the Page Rank algorithm calculates the number and quality of all incoming links to a website.

Each link to your website is viewed as a ‘vote’ for it. For example, I just went and checked Yahoo® for the number of links from other websites to mantywebdesigns.com using the following command:

linkdomain:mantywebdesigns.com -site:mantywebdesigns.com

The Yahoo® command above lists all the web pages that the Yahoo® Search Engine thinks links to this website, not including links on this site. The result today was 2,640 sites.

According to the Google® Page Rank® algorithm this is equivalent to 2,640 votes for our website. However, all these votes are not created equal. Each link to this site is given different weight. A link from a web page with more links, is more important than links from websites with less links. Also, links from “related” sites count as more votes than links from non-related sites. For instance, if you run a Houston Plumbing company, then links from a houston directory or links from a home repair site are given more votes than links from a site about hummingbirds. This is good to keep in mind when you are getting links to your site. In fact, I have found that related links are often more important then links from high page rank sites. So, get as many links as you can from related sources.

There is more to LINKING then just getting links from powerful related websites. Not everyone realizes this, but the text that others use to link to your site is extremely important (especially to Google®). Let me explain…

The text that a person clicks on to get your site is called the “anchor text”. By default “anchor text” is blue text with an underline. Search Engines consider anchor text very important. In fact, the number of links to your site and the anchor text used to link to your site predominantly determine what keywords your site will rank highest for in Google®. If you don’t do any other SEO work on your website do this one thing:

Place the keywords your web page is targeting in the anchor text that you ask others to use to link to your website with!

While you can’t always control what anchor text other people use to link to you site, when you do have an opportunity to choose the anchor text, use your main keywords in the anchor text.

Back when I started in Internet Marketing, all you had to do to rank high in the Search Engines was to exchange links with other webmasters and have them link to your site with the keywords you wanted to rank high for. That technique doesn’t work as well anymore.

Search Engines have gotten smarter over the years. A few years ago, the Search Engines started to detect if people were using the same exact text to link to your site over and over again. The Search Engines determined that this technique was easy to spot as an “unnatural” link pattern. In other words, when websites get links without asking for them, the links usually are done using a variety of anchor text. Some of the most common links used are “click here”, the full URL (ie. http://www.canimakebigmoneyonline.com/), and the website or page name. Due to this fact, the Search Engines started to lower the ranking of sites that had too many links with the same anchor text linking to them.

That is why when you trade links, buy links, and interlink your sites you should be sure to vary the anchor text between AT LEAST 2 keyword phrases (preferably more).

For example on my son’s website that’s about dinosaurs for kids, I might have people link to it using the following anchor text variations:

“Dinosaurs for kids”
“Dinosaur Toys”
“Dinosaur Games”

Another method might be to include the same keywords in your anchor text, but to use different variations of that text. For instance, for our dinosaur site, if we were targeting the keyword phrase “dinosaur for kids” we might use the following three anchor text links (all of which include the words, “dinosaur”, “for”, and “kids”):

“Dinosaur website for kids”
“Dinosaur for kids”
“Dinosaur Time Machine for kids”

Either method is a good method of varying the text you ask for in your reciprocal links. Search Engines are always changing, but at the moment it is very important to vary your anchor text (especially for Google).

In Summary, The 3 Most Important Keys to Successful Search Engine Optimization are:

1. Finding Good Keywords

2. Using the Keywords in your Title Tags

3. Getting Links To Your Site That Use Your Target Keywords As Anchor Text

If you need help doing this, then click here to fill out our free website analysis form and we’ll be in touch with you.