I got a question posted at TIMC Yahoo Group on linking strategy. Is buying one-way text link worth it?

I think it is still ok to buy one-way link if you have the budget and are very care. Text link from high PR site can be quite costly - US$100/month upward from a PR6 website. But, Google algorithm can detect if that is a genuine backlink or a purchased link which is not allowed by Google. So you got to be very careful especially when the rental fees is costly.

More important, why do you need a high PR? You do not need higher than PR4 or PR5 to be ranked well in Google for moderately competitive keywords. I think you will be better off to build more useful content than trying to rig your PR rating.

As a guide you should be aware of the following two points:

1. Do not buy link on every page of the seller website
2. Make sure the page where you puchase link is relevant to your website

If you still think you need a one-way link from a popular PR5 website with mainly Singapore based traffic, contact me by leaving your contact email or tel. number in the comment.

I have been thinking of building a human-edited web directory for Singapore. This will be a Singapore directory for local businesses and websites to gain visibility on the Internet - and also search engines ranking. (more…) Web Directory and Niche Article Directory

How to Build InBound Links for Top Search Engine Ranking

1. Vary the keywords used in ‘anchor’ text link
Unless you provide only one product or service the chances are you will want to rank for many key phrases. One way to help achieve this objective is to change the link text you want all new sites to use periodically. Vary the anchor text slightly each time and by doing so you can cover more of your targeted key phrases. This approach can help your site rank for many keywords rather than just one or two.

If you do only provide one product or service on your web site it is still important to vary anchor text. If you sell ‘blue widgets’ then you could also use link text like ‘cheap blue widgets’ or ‘blue widget store’. This means your links take on a more natural feel and are much less likely to be penalised or filtered out by search engines for being ‘fake links’.

2. Set up your link information differently - create a link in context
Typically people set up their link information in a very similar way, however you could offer your link information with the hyperlink inside the description instead of at the beginning.

Imagine this is a description about your web site on a partner’s link page. Instead of a typical hyperlink followed by a description you could write a sentence describing your web site and then place “your descriptive hyperlink” inside it.

One reason for doing this is that it reads more naturally and search engines may value the link higher as it reads more like a narrative. Many webmasters will be happy to accept this style even if some do not. To cover yourself offer the link in context as a second option along with your regular link information, that way if some sites can’t support the layout you still get your link.

3. Vary where your links point
Try to vary where link partners point to on your site. It’s fine to have the majority of links pointing into your home page, however it can be beneficial to have some links pointing to other key pages on your web site as well. Taking this approach balances out your linking and can help raise the profile of more pages on your web site.

4. How to find potential link partners from your competitors
If a web site links to your competitors it may also link to yours, and in order to find these potential link partners you can use search engines. Not so long ago Google was useful for getting a lot of back link information about a site. Recently Google’s back link data is a lot less forthcoming and it now tends to show only a tiny percentage of the sites that are linking combined with a lot of internal link data. Whether the few web sites Google shows us are the ones it finds important or whether they are in fact red herrings we cannot say for certain. I would assume the latter.

Currently Yahoo is a better portal to check for backlinks. To generate a list of linking web sites on Yahoo simply go to http://www.yahoo.com and type the following into the Yahoo search bar.

linkdomain:www.mycompetitorwebsite.com

This will deliver up to date link information as read by Yahoo. The only downside with the information is that one site may appear many times if it is giving multiple links.

5. Alternate your description text
This is often overlooked, but there is no real advantage to be had if the description text supporting your inbound links is always identical. To avoid the possibility of a description ever being seen as ‘duplicate content’ alternate it when you can. If you combine it with varied anchor text [as in tip 1] you’re heading in the right direction.

6. Link to good related content from your web site
It seems like an obvious thing to say, but with so many people caught up in link exchanging you sometimes wonder if we’re losing site of the basics. If you have something useful to say on your site and can back it up with a useful link to another web site then do so. Not every link has to be reciprocated. This resourceful linking will allow your visitors to read around the subject. Linking to informative related content is useful for visitors and search engines quite like it too.

7. Seek out directory links
Links from good web directories can be some of the best links you can get for your web site. Aaron Wall has a -directory of directories- at http://www.directoryarchives.com where you will find a great selection of search engine friendly directories. Some of the directories are free to get listed in whilst others may charge a fee.

About the Author:
Gareth Davies is a web design consultant based in London, UK. For information on web design services please visit http://www.garethsketty.com or if you have any questions about this article or its contents please email Gareth at garethsketty at yahoo.co.uk.

I am talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Content optimization or sometime know as Content SEO has been what subject of focus. It is easier for me to optimize content by using proper meta tag, appropriate keyword research and optimal keyword density.

However, it is getting tougher - at the same time easier - to optimize content. Search engines algorithms are getting smarter and will have the ability to analyze natural language faster. That means repeating same keywords to produce a certain density will no longer be effective. The search engine will incorporate intelligence (albeit artificial intelligence) to “read” the content lile a human being and ranking it’s relevancy with respect to the theme and keyword used. For a proficient writer, getting into the good book of these smart SE is easy - she just has to write naturally and focus on the topical subject or the theme - without having to worry about keyword.

Likewise, offsite optimization - the gathering of backlinks or inbound links for link popularity, has to focus on the theme relevancy. Just getting high Google pagerank(PR) links from any website will not do much to your PR ranking. A link from website related by common them may be given more weightage than a link from a higher PR website. So focus on getting link from related websites.

By Mark Daoust

Browse through any search engine forum, or simply do a search on Google to look up search optimization for Google, and you will find incredible amounts of information on the latest trends in website ranking, webmaster tricks, and theories as to what the future holds for Google. Website owners are simply obsessed with Google, and many are spending too much time trying to appease Google when they could be building a wildly successful website.

Successful Websites Do Not Have To Rank Well

Investors constantly preach the benefit of diversifying a portfolio to reduce the risk of investment fluctuations. The same strategy needs to be taken with developing your website’s marketing strategy. Diversify the sources of your traffic. Becoming over-reliant on any single type of traffic sets your website up for failure if that type of traffic happens to fail for some reason.

Unfortunately, many website owners simply do not know how to generate traffic to their websites. These website owners would do well to think about their website in more traditional business terms. Traditional businesses do not have search engines to bring people to their doorstep. Rather, the brick and mortar businesses rely on word of mouth, good solid promotion, good customer service, a good location, and quality products.

Websites can incorporate these same techniques in developing traffic. Article writing, press releases, participation in forums, development of a mailing list, and developing a strong public relations campaign are all solid promotion techniques. Entering into partnerships with industry websites, doing joint promotions such as co-registrations can help position you in a location where your visitors can find you. Offering your visitors the ability to recommend your site to a friend, adding community interactivity to your website are all ways to help promote your site effectively.

Stop Optimizing Your Website (That Means No Trading Links)

One of the worst things to happen to websites is the development of search engine optimization. Although it is perfectly acceptable (and expected) to do a cursory amount of SEO, many website owners do too much to the detriment of their sites. The purpose of your website is to offer information and possibly a service to clients and visitors. Your SEO activities should never define how you develop, structure, and word your website.

The most popular technique in search engine optimization currently is link trading. Knowing that Google judges a page’s value by the number of inbound links, website owners learned that they could set up entire links pages and exchange links with hundreds of other website owners. You will know the websites that do this. They will have a page named “links” or “resources” that contains a myriad of links to other websites. If you visit those other websites, they typically will have a similar page.

The problem with exchanging links is two-fold. The first, and more important one, is the fact that link exchanging does not have as strong an effect as it once had. Google knows that webmasters exchange links, and many webmasters are concerned primarily about the quantity of links they have. Google also knows that these links are primarily exchanged in an attempt to increase page rank, something Google probably will try to not recognize. Page rank was initially developed to incorporate the number of natural inbound links a website had. So, to prevent website owners from falsely increasing their page rank, Google actively works on developing systems that determine links that are a part of a link exchange and links that occur naturally. The problem with link exchanges is this: website owners are spending way too much time on an activity that has relatively little impact when they could be spending their time writing articles or other more reliable traffic generation techniques.

The second problem with exchanging links is the cosmetic effect it has on your website. Visitors that come to your website do not want to see a loosely collected arrangement of links to sites that may or may not be similar to your topic. They came to your website to see what you have to offer. If you want to recommend a resource to your visitors, you can do so, but you certainly would not do so in the form of a links page. The cosmetic effect that links pages have on a website is to make it look less professional.

SEO should never dictate how your site is arranged, worded, or how you spend the majority of your time.

When You Get That Visitor

Promoting your website is only half the battle in developing a wildly successful website. The other half is to have a website that will bring visitors back time and time again. Not only do you want a website that visitors find worthy of revisiting, you want a website that people talk about and refer to others.

There is a popular saying among internet marketers: “Content is King”. Well, this is sort-of true. But, it takes more than simply having content on your site to bring visitors back to your site time after time. It takes quality content.

People visit websites on a repeat basis for a few reasons. First, they may believe that a particular website is the only place they can get the content they are looking for. Secondly, they may recognize that more than one website offers the same content or information, but they prefer the format, look, and design of one website over another.

When developing your website, make it your goal to not just match the quality of your competition, but rather to far exceed the quality of your competition. Be confident that your layout and design is of a higher caliber than any competing websites. And, most importantly, offer more unique, valuable, and helpful information than any other website that could compete with you.

That’s the Rub? Yep, that’s the Rub.

Here is the amazing part… when you stop focusing on developing your website for the search engines and start focusing on a website that is the best of its kind, the search engines will find you. By focusing all of your attention on developing a high quality website that leaves an impression on visitors, and by focusing on developing alternative sources of traffic, search engines will take notice and give you the ranking you deserve.

Google and the other search engines have a very simple goal with their search results: to provide the most relevant results to those who perform a search. Some of the brightest minds are working on developing formulas and algorithms that do just this. Your job as a website owner is not to focus on trying to demystify the secrets of members of Mensa-level search engine developers. No, your job is to develop your website, to promote it through the many channels available, and to maintain the high level of quality content your site offers.

If you successfully build your website on a diversified set of traffic sources, your website will be protected from the loss of any single traffic source. Furthermore, if you build your online business to capitalize on every visitor that you receive, the traffic will always be there. If you happen to be picked up by Google, or Yahoo!, or MSN Search, the results will simply be a pleasant addition to your already abundant sources of traffic.

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Mark Daoust is the owner of http://www.site-reference.com. This article originally appeared at http://www.site- reference.com/Marketing/5258/index.html
Discuss this article, and other topics, at http://forums.site- reference.com
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Backlinks also known as Reciprocal Links are crucial if you want Google to give you a good PR. Anyway, that is the common believe. To me, having other quality websites linking to mine is an accredition. Much the same feeling when I found out that people were bookmarking my websites or save my URL in their Favorites.

In addition, having backlinks will definite add a few visitors to your website. Imagine the day when you have 50% traffic from backlinks partner websites and 50% traffic from search engine. That is to say when you optimise your website to attract 1,000 SE hits, you will get another 1,000 from your link partners. That would translate to 60,000 unique visitors monthly to your website!

Now that I have done quite a bit on harnessing SE traffics, it is time for me to move on to Phase 1B of my SEMO (Search Engine Marketing Optimization) project. I have started to use Reciprocal Manager to build and manage link partners to my websites. Here are some of the websites that I’ve installed the software:

http://www.forex-trading-secrets.com/partners

http://www.onlinetradingprofits.com/partners

Reciprocal Manager is a sophisticate piece software - not easy to install - it took me nearly 2 days to get things right and going. You’ll need a certain level technical and linux server knowledge to get things right.

Next, there are two things that I can do.

1. Use software like PR Maximizer or SEOlite to find relevant link partners with good PR to solicit reciprocal links.

2. Register with services e.g. LinkMarket or GoTop to get people to link to me.

You’ll be updated as soon as I have results from these exercises.

At last, I managed to created the link directory with Zeus and uploaded to the server. Actually it was not really very difficult if I were to grasp the concept of link directory creation. Richard Quek advices helped me a lot. So check out the link directory that I have created on TradersVic.com website,

http://www.tradersvic.com

Since I was using the free version, the template for the link directory was fixed and could not be customized. Buy the Pro version? Maybe…

Recommended reading: The Top Five Strategies for SEO

I realized that submitting to search engine is only a small part of search engine marketing and the big picture is to attract as much targeted traffic as possible. My objective is to have more than two hundred unique targeted visitors to my website. There are basically two things that must be done to get targeted traffic:

1. Go get targeted visitors to my website
2. Let targeted visitors find my website

For number 1, take up advertising campaign online and offline to get people visit your website, however that could be very costly. No matter, a small budget should be set aside to monthly for such campaigns. Ultimately, targeted traffic will be an asset that generates profit so it is definitely worth the investment.

As for number 2, that’s where search engine optimization comes in. Beside making your website appealing to human visitors, you also have to make it easy for the search engine robots and crawlers to find you. Search engine will think you have an important website if many other websites are linked to you. Hence, getting lots of appropriate backlink partners is crucial to your Search Engine Result Position (SERP).

My plan is to start in number 2, search engine optimization first, and then invest the money so that we can get better result in getting targeted traffic to the website.

I just realized that the website, ProSubmit.biz, which I bid recently on eBay did not come with submission software. What I paid for was merely a pretty website with basic backend administrative function. I did not ask for money back - it’s a pretty website with a cool domain name, so I decided to keep it.

I spent a couple of hours searching the web to look for suitable low cost search engine submission software. There are several software which cost about $70, three of which I selected for evaluation are Addweb, Trafficseeker and Dynamic Submission. The higher priced ones are Webposition Gold 2 and IBP which cost $150 each. I will download the demo versions and test each of them.

Richard Quek replied me that he has not heard of Linkproctor. Richard has recommended me to use Zeus and Traffic Equalizer. It was quite fun using TE on my TradersVic website. My first attempt generated 400 pages of keywords directory.

What if I could find a software that does both search engine submission and manage all the backlinks to begin my Search Engine Marketing campaign.