issue #17, January, 1st, 2005. SEO - Tips to get more quality links

Dear Colleague,

welcome to all new subscribers. What was meant to be the last newsletter in 2004 has now become the first one of the new year.

I´m very busy these days preparing for a big travel. Me, my wife and our kids will be going back to our brazilian jungle home on January, 2nd, and spend about 10 weeks there. That´s a pretty long holiday indeed, but if you consider that it takes almost two days and three different flights to arrive there, you probably agree that it wouldn´t be worth the effort for merely two weeks or so.

Just in case you´re curious about where our brazilian home is located, I´ve put a map and a picture of our house here.

Don´t worry - it´s not the end of TheJungleMarketer´s newsletter, I´ll still keep in contact with you and support you as much as I can. Just purchased a new (more powerful) notebook this week in order to be able to continue producing video tutorials for you while sitting in the sun.

A couple of weeks before Christmas I took my family to a professional photographer to make some nice pictures of us. You can see some of my favorite ones here.

What are your plans for 2005 ? Have you already set your goals for this year ? If you just got started with your online business, I´d suggest you think about where you want to be by the end of the year and make a list of what it takes to get there.

Hey - don´t just say "I want to make 5k/month by December 2005 and in order to do so I just need to sell x pieces of this or that product".

Make your battle plan as detailed as possible and then break it up into little steps and most importantly ... stick to it !

Enjoy today´s newsletter. Drop me a line if you have any questions or commments. But please remember that after January, 2nd, it might take some days for me to answer your emails.

SEO - link popularity building tips

You know that in order to achieve good rankings in the search engines, one of the most important factors is getting links to your website. And I mean not just any kind of link you can get but quality links !

In short you can say that a quality link comes from a webpage which is related to your website theme, has few links on it and at least a bit of PR (the higher the better of course). Unreciprocated (one-way) links are better than reciprocated links.

From the various link building techniques that are often discussed I´d like to pick out two as I see that many are either doing it wrong or making false recommendations.

1) Reciprocal Linking.

If you want to get the most out of your reciprocal link exchange requests, then you should provide exactly the same thing you are searching for: quality links.

I usually deny about 90% (or even more) of all link exchange requests for the following reasons:

• the requesting website doesn´t fit my website´s topic
• my link is on a page with lots (about 50+) of other links
• the requesting website has a PR of 0 but already hundreds of sites listed in its link exchange directory (they´re probably exchanging with anyone and spamming other website owners)
• the requesting website has a high PR (5 or more), but the link directory has a PR of 0. They don´t seem to care much about passing PR value on to their partners.
• link pages of the requesting website are not indexed in Google, although other web pages are indexed. This indicates that they either don´t link to their directory pages, use dynamic links or simply prevent those pages from being indexed (using meta tags for robots).

Searching for good reciprocal link partners takes some time and I bet you agree that it´s a real pain when only 1 out of ten webmasters you contacted for a link exchange replies to your request.

Fortunately you can increase the response to your requests simply by providing the other website owners with quality links and mentioning this fact in your requests.

Good headlines for link exchange proposals are these (remember to personalize your emails where possible):

" - a new quality link to your website"
"A new PR 3/4 link to your website"

Then you start the email saying that you visited their website and linked to it and that you are making every possible effort to provide quality links to your partners which is:

• linking from a relevant page
• keeping the total number of links low
• keeping the link page PR as high as possible

Then you ask them to place a reciprocal link to your website and reply to you within a couple of days.

You should always provide your link information in two ways as you usually don´t know what software (if any) the other website owner is using to manage his/her reciprocal link pages:

- plain text (URL, title, description)
- html code

So the next question is how you can get some decent PR to your link pages with almost no link partners or when you are starting with a brand new website.

Well, there are three great ways to get non-reciprocal links to your website pretty fast. I´ve used these (mainly b) and c) to make the homepage PR of my posters affiliate site jump from 0 to 5 in only 3 months. The link directory index page currently has a PR of 4 and some of the category pages a PR of 3.
(update February 2005 - now PR 4 category pages)

a) Search engine friendly forums

Search for ""keyphrase" forum" to find forums related to your website topic. To find out if a forum is search engine friendly, simply go to an older thread / post, copy the URL displayed in your browser and paste it into any search engine to see if the page is indexed in the given search engine.

In many forums you can include links in the signature of your posts. But don´t just post to put your links there, give useful info, too.

b) High PR website directories and link exchange directories

I´ve compiled a list of good web directories for you.

Some are free, others charge a one-time fee. Make sure you read their guidelines before you submit as some of the fee-based directories don´t give you a refund in case your site is rejected.

You wonder if it´s worth paying 10 - 50 bucks for a link ? Well, if you can have your link on a relevant page with a PR of 3 or more and only a few other links on that page, then it´s definitely worth the one-time investment.

c) Purchasing text links

A great (and profitable) way to build link popularity - if done correctly.

Although I´ve seen many people recommending to stay away from purchasing text links I can say that in the past few months I´ve made some good experiences with this type of advertising. Of course I´ve made mistakes, too - so I think I should dedicate a few more words to this topic.

Buying / Selling Text Link Ads

Basically there´s nothing wrong in paying someone a monthly fee to have your link placed on a certain webpage or all pages of an entire website. This has been done for years using banners, but when links started to become important in the SEO game, paid (static html) text link ads became more popular.

There are many webmasters who are directly selling ad space on their websites and others prefer to sell their ad space through third parties (ad brokers) like TextlinkBrokers.com

However, my favorite place to find great deals for text link ads is LinkAdage, an auction site for text link ads.

There aren´t always great deals, but if you browse just once per week through the auctions, I bet you´ll find something for you this month.

You should look for sites with PR 4-6 and rather few pages than 1000s of pages. PR7+ links use to be very expensive. Packages with homepage only links from several different sites are great, too.

When you consider purchasing text link ads, you should not only think of increasing your website´s PR but also have in mind to receive visitors from these links, so it would be a good idea to contact the seller before bidding and ask for the website´s traffic and where your links will be placed.

Also consider linking to internal pages of your website, especially for those of your pages that are optimized for medium competitive keyphrases and only need a little push to jump to a top 5 position.

The traffic you´ll be getting from the link and the improved ranking could well pay more than the cost of the text link ad.

For my poster website I found three great profitable deals:

1) A homepage link (located at the top) from a PR5 art criticism website with only very few links on it. This link costs me 15$ per month and it only generates about 10 visitors per month, so the sales from these probably don´t pay for the link, but the link is mainly responsible for the PR5 of my art posters web page: art posters

2) One PR6 and another few PR5 links from a space educational site for only 15$/month, pointing to my website´s homepage. In order to make this link more relevant, I´ve added some space posters to the homepage (now you know why they are there). cheap-posters-and-prints.com Not only is this link passing PR pretty fine but also sending enough visitors who buy space posters, which means I´m getting some great one-way links for free.

3) A sidewide link from a PR4 celebrity site. This one used to cost 49$ per month and has been linked to the celebrity posters category index page of my posters website. Unfortunately the owner of this website sold the site - it sent me about 150 unique visitors each month. I cannot say if the poster sales from those visitors alone paid for the link but all celebrity poster sales (including those made by search engine visitors) surpassed the link cost.

That´s how I easily got a good PR for my poster site in a short time and now it´s not only easier for me to get link partners to respond to link exchange requests but I can also add another income revenue: Selling text link ads !


If you consider buying text links and want the best for your money, you should take some precautions:

Don´t buy sitewide links from websites with thousands of pages unless you´re doing it for the traffic alone. Contact the seller for details about the location (top or bottom ?) of your link. It´s possible that such a sitewide link doesn´t pass much PR as it is easily detectable as purchased link.

Look for offers where you can have multiple different URL / anchor text combinations for your text link ad. This is supposed to be a more natural link in the eyes of the search engines.

Of course, buy only text links from relevant websites.

Look for multiple link packages from only the homepages of different websites if your main purpose is boosting your website´s PR.


Well, that´s it for today. If you have any questions or want to leave your feedback, feel free to email me. Sunday afternoon I´ll be on the way to Brazil, but I´ll respond as soon as I´m online again.

Wishing you a happy new year and much success in 2005 !

Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

^^ TOP of Page ^^

Disclaimer

I accept no responsibility whatsoever for the content, profitability or legality of any published articles or advertisements contained within articles published on my web pages.

And, although all of the guest articles have been selected for their content, the publishing of such articles on this website does NOT constitute a recommendation of the products or services mentioned or advertised within those articles.
Be responsible! Always do Due Diligence before responding to any offer.

If you found some information to be out-of-date, please contact me and let me know it.
support #AT# thejunglemarketer.com

Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

  Advertisements