The Basics to Building Back Links

Building back links to your site can be a valuable means of increasing your websites ranking. Google and most other search engines use links to determine the quality of a website. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards your ranking. Many people have questions about the best practices for organic link building and here are many different perspectives, but our approach is always to follow what is outlined in Google’s webmaster guidelines and that is what we want to outline for you.

The best marketing technique for new websites is to get involved in their niche community. Building your brand and reputation alone can drive people to your site. If you are providing quality long-lasting, unique content people will want to recommend it to others by linking to you. Great content is the best tool for organic link building. Interacting and contributing with the community though publishing articles, posting on forums, and through blog commenting and posting can have unmeasurable benefits when you are contributing in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site.

When looking for a promising way to create valuable content for your target group and earn great links try to find a topic that will help them. Think of issues or problems your market might encounter and present them with solutions. Visitors are much more likely to appreciate something like research results, your experience, a tutorial, or a practical tool than reading a sales pitch. Valuable information grows your credibility in your niche market as well as increases your brand visibility. This can help you gain quality, merit-based links that direct traffic and improve your image as an authority.

Directory submissions are another common way to promote younger sites in Google’s index. When submitting your site to directories always make sure they are focused on your niche and well moderated as there are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet, but most directories are of lower quality and are generally of no benefit. It is also common to see mass submission services. Most of which are useless and not likely to benefit your site unless it is a quality service ensuring that all links are topical.

There are also other ways to develop links that are not going to be as valuable as the aforementioned. With social media services constantly growing viral marketing techniques are now becoming a larger strategy to increase the visibility of a site. However, these short-lived tactics are wear off quickly. As powerful as viral marketing can be, and as much traffic as you can get, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or your only marketing effort if you are looking to create a site with long term potential.

It's important to understand that developing a sites longevity through legitimate link building is a long term effort. There are those who advocate for short lived methods of link building, but if your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid buying links, mass submissions, or randomly participating in link exchanges. Google considers these to be some of the worst ways of attempting to gather links and it is likely they will have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. Buying and selling links is actually in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results if discovered.

I hope this information has been helpful to you and you have an idea of where you stand as far as a quality link building strategy. As an after thought, when developing links you can use Google webmaster tools to view links to pages on your site located by Google on the web and check your progress. The data Google provides is comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded . All you need to do is prove you are the webmaster for the site by adding a small piece of code to the header tag.

In order to help you analyze the data lets look at the two categories links are divided into, external and internal.

External Links

External links are considered to be the links that reside on pages outside of your domain that link to your site. For example, if you are viewing links for www.idealthis.com, any link not coming from a subdomain of idealthis.com, such as a link from www.overtairsoft.com, would appear as an external link to your site.

Internal Links

Internal links to your site are come from within your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for www.idealthis.com, all the links that originate from pages on any subdomain of idealthis.com, such as www.idealthis.com/carte or marketing.idealthis.com, would appear as internal links to your site.

We hope you enjoyed this article and remember, there is always more great info to come!

Quality Website Guidelines | Google Webmaster

How do you know when your site is a-okay? Let’s take a look at what the mecca of the internet has to say.....Google Webmasters. Today we will look at the 3 different aspects the infamous Webmasters evaluate: Design and Layout, Technicality and Quality. Please keep in mind that the instructions to keep a quality and optimized site can be highly detailed. With the risk of one post turning into a novel we have limited to only the basics. As always there will be more to come.

Website Design and Layout

Navigation - Every website has a different way of guiding their users. Make sure your website navigation is easy, clear and concise. Here are a few tips provided from Google Webmasters:

• Linkage! Make sure every main and essential page has a minimum of one available link and clear route.
• Site Map. When all else fails your users and the search engines need a site map. This is a great way to show the search engine how vast and detailed your website is and also help your users find what they are looking for.
• Do not over link any certain page.

Content - Your content plays a huge role in who arrives at your website and what actually happens on your site. Whether you are looking to convert and increase sales, generate more contacts to increase clientele, create a new email list for marketing purposes or whatever, your content determines what occurs.

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your purpose and content.
• Think about the words users would type when searching for your website, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. (This is the first step toward Search Engine Optimization)
• Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and and keyword rich.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.

Website Technicality

Userability - This may not be a word, but it should be. Online today the look and feel, the content, the prices of your products are all useless if your visitors cannot view the site correctly or if the site takes an longer than our 30 second attention span can take. The follow is some great advice and tips from Google Webmasters to keep in mind:

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
• Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Every search engines goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience.

Quality Assurance

The Basics - Every website and business online would benefit from adhering to following basics. Much of these are a given, but with businesses struggling to achieve profit the illegitimate practices can seem enticing. Stay away from them!

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google’s Terms of Service.

Specific Guidelines - There are some very specific and direct guidelines provided for what you should not do. Google is big on quality content, quality marketing techniques, and honest online business practices. It will always be in your interest to follow these directives.

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

5 simple internet article marketing tips

Are you new to article marketing or looking to improve your articles? Well before go into too much depth trying to find what you are doing wrong take a look at our 5 Simple internet article marketing tips and make sure that you are covering the basics first.

Article marketing tip 1, quality is important.

When you are writing articles the number one thing to keep in mind is that in order for your articles to be effective they need to be informative to your target audience. It is good to make sure that your article conveys either new information or a unique viewpoint, is easy (and maybe even fun) to read, grammatically correct, and on the same topic as your site.

Article marketing tip 2, make sure to develop an effective article title.

Developing an article title can be tricky business. You need to appeal to the publisher, the search engines, and above all the readers. Make sure to take some time and research out some long tail keyword phrases that will be of the most benefit to you and to include some kind of enticement to draw the eye of the reader. You can find more tips on our blog posts of yore for developing effective article titles.

Article marketing tip 3, be consistent in submitting to multiple directories and publishers.

When it comes to article marketing you are going to need to write more than a couple articles to see significant benefits. It is good practice to submit articles on at least a weekly basis as long as you are maintaining your website. This will allow you to diversify your marketing and keyword strategies with many long tail keyword phrases.

You will also want to stretch your articles to help you get the most out of your elbow grease. If you go through all of the trouble of writing an article and then only submitting it to one directory you are wasting your time. When you write an article you are able to submit it to multiple directories as well as alter in and resubmit it to multiple directories and gain the benefit of an exponentially larger number of back links to your site. Say you write one full article, alter it and create three different versions, and submit each version to 30 directories. This is going to give you the benefits of 90 articles linking to your site for only a little more work than 1 (especially if you have an article submitting software).

Generally when you are altering your articles by hand you can create these new altered articles without running into duplicate content issues and you are able to generate more content at a quicker pace. There is software available for creating altered articles that can save you time, but doing it by hand will make for higher quality articles. There is software available for submitting articles as well, most article marketers consider this to be a very sound investment, but again you will get the best quality when doing this by hand.

One final thing to remember when submitting, you will want to make sure and find the highest ranked directories as well directories that have a good publisher following when submitting in order to get the most benefit for your efforts.

Article marketing tip 4, have purpose and know what you’re talking about.

Don’t just go into an article writing blind. Before you write an article just because you found a good keyword phrase research it and know your approach. Define your goals with the article, are you going to measure your articles success by its click though rate? comments? converting visitors? the traffic of the article? or something entirely different?

If you are trying to write a converting article consider something like a product or service review. A product review is going to make sure that you are getting very targeted traffic with commercial intent, if you are aiming for high click through rates you may want to be sure to include a call to action or incentive to follow your link.

If you are a retailer and plain on writing a product review, actually review the product. This means using it and give your valuable input. If it is your product or service it can be beneficial to get a guest article writer or guest blogger to review your service in order to get a point of view outside of the company to ensure client trust in the article.

Article marketing tip 5, learn what works for you and your writing style.

Everyone has their own writing style and every blog is going to have a different feel. Some articles are very serious such as articles contained within news sites, and some articles are very laid back and personal touch like something you may find on a family blog. You can decide how you want your article to feel before you ever start writing it or just see how it turns out. As with anything to do with marketing testing and optimization is very important to Internet article marketing.

Before you start trying to determine your best performing articles think of the goals you had for them as discussed in tip 5. Keep an eye on your article statistics and find which ones perform their purpose best and then determine what it is about those articles that are making them successful.

Articles can out preform others for many different reasons. You want to look at things like the writing style, the title, your keyword saturation, and your calls to action.

Remember, no matter how long you have been involved with internet article marketing there is always more to learn. Make sure to always be implementing these five simple steps and you will be writing better articles and have a more effective article marketing campaign.

Optimized Link Building: It's A Popularity Contest

It seems lately all we hear about is networks. How good of reception does your mobile device get? How large is your network?

Today we are going to be talking about networks but not in the traditional sense. I am not referring to social networks, wireless carrier networks or sheer people to people networks. No, what I am talking about is your link network.

So first of all let’s take a look at why this should be a subject of interest. We all well know now that the bigger the network the better. But that is certainly contingent on the quality network as well. Every network really is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

With any website who is it that we are first trying to impress? The search engines, right? Of course. It is all a popularity contest. But this contest if more difficult than high school. This one has algorithms set in place to determine you real popularity. Math....determining popularity....what? While Google and others may be dealing with math we can simplify a bit and forget about that. Today, I want to teach you how to become popular online. First, we will cover how to create quality and optimized links. Second, I will talk to you about different ways to generate keyword optimized links from online authorites. And lastly, I am going to put you to work!

How to create optimized links?

First we have to understand the bare bones of how a link is created. This is where HTML will come into play. Keep in mind that when creating content in most places online today they will have a tool for you to create you own link. But for those who still do not we still want to be ahead of the game. Below is an example of the HTML for an “embedded link” (the embedded part of that phrase means that it is a link hidden within text. You don’t see the actual URL any where).



Now it is important to remember that your “phrase for optimization” as noted above will also be the phrase the link to your website is found in. For instance, if I were trying to optimize our site for the keyword phrase “Link Building” I would have a link that, in final, shows up like this:

Link Building

And if you actual did click on that you would find it takes you directly to the {ideal}this website.

Now we know that “how” of link creation and optimization. Let’s take a look at where you would want to be placing links like these and why.

If you remember, this is a internet marketing popularity contest. So there are a few things to remember when popularity is a factor. Rule #1 is the person who knows the biggest people in the biggest places is in! And links are the ways other websites will reflect whether or not they really “know” someone. So how do we know who are the biggest websites? And how do we get a link our their site to ours? Check out the following definitions for a little help:

Page Rank: a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

Reciprocal Linking: A link offered to another site on the condition that you gain one in return. For example, you might provide a link to Site X on your links page provided Site X has a link back to you.

Essentially you are able to locate websites with higher page rank than yours, exchange links, and therefore raise your level of importance online in the eyes of various search engines. The page rank system is build on a scale from 0-10. The higher you number the better.

Next you are also able to create relevant content (such as an article or press release) that you may also place optimized links in as well. A very common and revered place for doing this is through eZineArticles.com



This is a great place to generate content that will be indexed as a web page itself, is relevant to your niche market or website, and provide yourself with a great link as well. Here is how you do it:

• First write an article of at least about 400-450 words in length minimum.
• Make sure the article is relevant and not advertising or too promotional.
• Create an account with eZine in order to submit your articles.
• When submitting your article (usually toward the end of the article) place your embedded and optimized link in the text.

This article directory currently holds a page rank of 6. This is a great rank and is likely higher than yours. It will be a great start.

This is not the only way to get links online that will optimize you for search engines. We will be talking more about other forms of creating quality content online with link optimization in future posts.