The Link Wheel Workbook

Let me begin by saying that if paid advertising is your primary form of Internet promotion this article is probably not for you. However if you are looking at ways of creating long-term Internet success developing backlinks to your website will be important to you.

I find it interesting that the World Wide Web has not changed that much even though Internet marketing has. The Web itself is composed of links all pointing to each other.

If you grasp this concept you can quickly understand why the more backlinks you have pointing to your website from a multitude of different sources the more potential traffic it you can bring to you.

Not only that but the traffic will continue to be there over a long period of time as long as the backlink remain. This means you must spend the majority of your time creating quality back links and all of your marketing efforts.

In the early days of Internet marketing reciprocal linking was very popular. Trading links with other sites was a way to create backlinks to your site.

This strategy is not as popular today because link directories are pretty much discarded by the major search engines. Not only that but you want to spend as much of your time creating one way backlinks to your site and not away from your site.

So how do you go about creating one way backlinks? Here are 3 easy ways that are working very well today and should be incorporated into your linking strategy.

1. Write and submit articles to the top article directories. In each article you can include a link pointing back to your website and your resource box.

For additional keyword relevance try hyperlinking your primary keyword phrase to your site as well. As you begin to develop backlinks to your homepage begin deep linking to sub pages within your site from your article resource boxes too.

2. Write blog articles and submit them to the top social directories. Search engines love fresh content and your blog articles will be spidered quickly if you submit them to the top social directories. We are talking about sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Technorati, and more.

Each article submission creates a backlink to your blog or specific blog article. If you do not have a blog you are missing out on easy traffic and long term quality backlinks.

3. Utilize social networking to create links pointing back to any web page you have. For example when you create a new web page announce it as an update on your Twitter account.

When you Tweet your followers this way you are creating back links to any webpage or blog post you make. Again the search engines will find these, as well as your readers, giving you more potential traffic.

Other popular social networks to join and create a profile with your website address in include Facebook, My Space, eEntrepreneur, and many others.

I feel that the most important thing you can do to create a long-term Internet presence is concentrate on backlinks regardless of how the Internet changes in the future. These three ways right now are excellent to create backlinks to your website and blog!

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With this context in mind, many people are continuously struggling to get noticed in the world of the Internet. Websites are growing like mushrooms everywhere, every time. How can one’s website get past the millions of other websites and eventually be noticed by its target audience?

Search engine optimization aims to achieve the goal of getting more visitors to a website by helping it get higher rankings in the search engines. This simply means that search engine optimization’s goal is to make a website appear on the first pages, if not the first page of a search done through the search engine.

There are two ways to be able to get noticed by search engines. One is through pay-per-click-advertisements. A good example of a pay-per-click system that is employed by search engines is the Google Ad words system. It has created a hype and has given Google around 5 billion dollars in terms of revenue per year. Webmasters can place their bids to be shown when a keyword is searched by a surfer. The highest bidders will get their sites to appear first when the search is being done.

The second way of getting high rankings from search engines is through organic searches. Search engines evaluate websites by using what they call “spiders.” These programs scan the websites and collects information about them. They then collate the information and pass it on to the search engine. This area is primarily the main arena of search engine optimization. It utilizes a set of methods to be able to get search engines to list the website on high ranks.

Traffic

The main purpose of search engine optimization is to increase the traffic generated by a website. Websites are built to be seen by Internet surfers and search engines can help it achieve this goal.

The power of the search engine should not be underestimated. It is one of the building blocks of the foundation of the Internet. A survey showed that 90% of all Internet users employ search engines to aid them in their Internet-related activities. Google, the dominant player in the search engine industry, generates 70% of all search-related Internet activity.

People and Search Engines are alike

Search engines behave like people. They like websites which contain substantive information about a certain topic. The best sites usually appear first in search engines because people like them as well as the search engines.

Search engine optimization does not only generate traffic, it helps maintain the traffic. The behavior of the search engine is indicative to the behavior of the people who visit the website. Search engine optimization leads to the optimization of a webpage or a website. It will lead to a website which is more organized and a website which contains substantive information.

Target Audience

The use of the search engine to be able to target one’s target audience is one of the most effective Internet marketing strategies. It is not like other on-line marketing techniques (such as email marketing) which can lead to a lot of leakages in terms of targeting the right audience.

Search engines segment the market and connect the right people together. People search for topics which they are interested in and this is the main strength of search engines in connecting markets together.

Cost Effectiveness

One can do search engine optimization under the assumption that he knows what he is doing. Search engine optimization is a full-time job and has a very long learning curve. This is why most people would resort to out-sourcing the job to experts who are good at what they do. One of the best SEO company I will like to recommend is www.website-control.co.uk . Search engine optimization is a very cost effective way of getting more people to know about one’s products or to know about a certain issue or event that a website is disseminating.

SEO is very important for websites since it determines the position of the website in comparison with its competitors. It does not only generate traffic from the targeted audience but is also a cost-effective way of optimizing the website.

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Everyone wants traffic to their website. However, most people don’t know what it takes to get traffic. It’s a simple process, contrary to what the gurus will tell you. All you have to do is find good keywords, write quality content based on those keywords and then build backlinks to that content.

This is where most people drop the ball. They think if they write it people will come. This just isn’t true. What makes your content any better than the next guy’s What makes Google or any other search engine chooses to show your site in the search engine results as opposed to your neighbor’s

The answer is links. The number of people, places, sites that are linking to your content is what makes the difference between whether your site shows up in the search engine results or someone else’s. Now you just need to know what backlinks are and how to get them.

The first question is very simple, and what I will be dealing with in this article. Backlinks, simply put, are links pointing back to your site or a page on your site. Backlinks can happen in any number of ways. You can write something amazing other people like and want to tell people about and they link to you. You can take the process in your own hands and send out articles or make comments on blogs. There are of course, differing degrees of value between backlinks.

Google counts all the backlinks you have to your site. Some links it gives more weight to, others it gives less to. You will be wise to take on a link building strategy that involves both quality and quantity because both are important. You want to get backlinks from high page rank sites, Google likes these and gives you a little more credit for them. You also want to get links from directories, and other quantity type places. Although Google doesn’t give you as much credit for these you certainly get credit for having a lot of backlinks to your site.

The best possible backlink you can get is one where you have your chosen keyword in the anchor text of the link. This means if you had words in a sentence that someone could click on to go somewhere else, these would be your keywords. This is important because you are trying to rank in the search engine for specific keywords. Each time you have a link with a certain keyword or some derivation of it, you get credit. So never, never, write a link and have the words you click on be “click here” that’s a ridiculous waste of a backlink, unless, of course you are linking to someone you don’t want to give a backlink to.

You can link within your own site, from free places like squidoo and hubpages. There are a million places to get backlinks to your site. It can be the most boring part of online marketing, but if you don’t do it you will never find yourself number one in google and getting all that traffic.

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I hear this question constantly on the internet recently. Since backlinks play a huge, huge part of how you rank in Google, MSN, etc, then people naturally want to find a fast, easy, and effective way to build backlinks. It has to be a legit way so you don’t find yourself banned one way, so you need to trade like a normal exchange, but in an automated way so you’re continually hunting down trading partners and changing html code all the time.

Despite what you may hear on the internet, backlinks are still very much alive and highly valued by search engines. The internet is sometimes called the Web because, like in a spider web, one point ( a website) connects to many others. Web sites linking to each other is not only usual, but essential.

The deal with Google and backlinks is that they too agree that backlinks are natural. On-topic backlinks that is. Sites naturally, if there were no incentive due to search engines, link to other websites their visitors would also like. This is an on-topic backlink, and is valued by search engines much more than random backlinks for the sake of having a link.

So, what does this teach us as webmasters?

What it means to us is that while we should keep search engines in our mind when working on websites and designing them, the focus should be users. Provide good material and a good website, and you’ll naturally get backlinks and build a relationship with your users. Word of mouth is a very powerful friend indeed.

So, what CAN you can do to build your backlinks?

There are many options you can use to build natural-type backlinks.
1. Write articles. Writing articles(like I am doing now) and having them get out to article directories and other websites means you get free backlinks from good sources. This really helps out, and the more you write, the more gain and traffic you’ll see. Write an article a day and you’re in great shape.

2. Join an on-the-level link exchange site. This means join one in which every exchange is manually approved, and not one where 10,000 links show up to your site overnight. You can see where that is not a natural curve, so stick with link exchange sites that you choose who you link to/from and stay safe. Another positive note is that the other websites are there looking to exchange also, so it’s much faster than searching down websites and waiting weeks for a response.

3. Link directories. This is where you submit your site link, and in return give the directory site a backlink(usually mandatory). Though these aren’t too valueable to Google, they still may get you some visitors here and there which is always a good thing.

So, in conclusion, let’s come back to the initial question. Do link exchanges work? Absolutely. There are many ways to get legit backlinks (much safer) and that’s what you need to concentrate on. The trick is to keep your link partners as close to your topic as you can. The more relevant, the more it weighs.

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