Broke Marketer,s Guide To Traffic Part 3

Link building For Success

Every Internet Marketer is focused like a hungry shark on increasing their page
rank and improving their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and, if you are a
serious marketer, you might be, too. Your attention will be sharply focused on
"backlinks," their individual quality and how those backlinks appear to Google's
army of robot spiders when compared in their current algorithm.

Let's start with "backlinks." They are links on other websites directed back to
your website. Both the popularity and the importance of your website is gauged
by how many other website owners consider a link to your site worthwhile. All of
this is done in the name of Search Engine Optimization...or getting Google and
other search engines to love your website.

But, don't run off gathering up as many links as you can from other marketers.
Google is more interested in "quality" backlinks to your website than any others.
Those quality backlinks would be backlinks from websites with similar content to
yours. It's all a game of relevancy, from Google's point of view, and has a lot to
do with the success of your website and marketing efforts.

A search engine calculates the keyword relevancy for a site and that calculation is
strictly based on the percentage of related content found at either end of the link.
For example, if your content is all about writing and selling ebooks, and the links
from other sites have nothing to do with writing and selling ebooks, they will not
be considered important to your relevancy and you will lose page rank or be
totally ignored by the spiders.

There's several ways to accomplish this balancing act with the search engines and
to stay out of SEO trouble while you're doing it. More than one seedy webmaster
has been banished to Google Hell for trying to manipulate links to get a higher
ranking, which is why Google tightened the criteria in the first place.
There's lots of ways to virtually shoot yourself in the foot online without irritating
Google, so why add it to the list?

Backlinks are great ways to get visitors to your website. That old chestnut, "Build
it and they will come!" has no meaning in the virtual world of Internet Marketing.
If no one knows you're there and what you're doing, they will NEVER find you.
One way to attract attention and the resulting free traffic, is with reciprocal link
exchanges, as long as those links are "quality" links and from other sites with
content or focus similar to yours. You will have to learn to check out your link
partners and avoid any with pages full of unrelated links or links to what Google
labels "Bad Neighborhoods."

If Google devalues a site because of the "bad company" it keeps, or the "bad
neighborhood" in hangs out in, your site will get devalued also and dropped in
Page Rank if you are linked to it, or worse, just ignored by the robots.
What makes a bad neighborhood?
• Sites that use black-hat techniques to drive traffic
• Sites with many, many pages of outbound links
• Sites with pages of no content usually are just storage sites for
thousands of links of poor quality and will certainly have Google
snorting fire.

Word of caution: Do not get involved with "Link Farms."
Link Farms, according to Wikipedia, are "a collection of intentionallyinterlinked
pages, designed to fool search engines that use Page Rank or
a similar algorithm, into believing that the pages are more important
than they really are. Google is known to employ a link farm detection
algorithm, which penalizes those pages determined to be a link farm."
You will have to stay constantly vigilant to make sure you are not linked to a "bad
neighborhood." You are in control of whom you link to and that has to be your
main focus. You cannot control who links to you, but the search engines will
punish you if you link out to a "bad neighborhood."

A search for the term "bad neighborhood," with quotes, will turn up several free
tools you can access to uncover any sites that might be harmful to your own
linkbuilding efforts.

There are certain industries that seem to be involved in using spam and link
farming techniques that you need to be aware of before you start building your
links. Two major players in this field are the pharmaceutical and adult industries.
Unless your business is in some aspect of those two industries, you would be well
advised to avoid them entirely.

While inbound links to your site are good to have, quality outbound links to other
high-quality or authority sites definitely will help your rankings considerably. Just
remember that, in order for those outbound links to matter, they have to be
within the subject field of your site.

There are a couple of things you have to consider while you are trying to get
traffic and a decent Page Rank for your websites. It is important for you to
check on your links and to keep track of which sites are linking back to
you. If all the links are outbound from your site and not reciprocated with a link
back, the sites on the other end of your outbound links will get all the traffic and
page rank. You, on the other hand, will be considered an unimportant website.
Search on "verifying reciprocal links," with quotes, and you will have a list of
online tools you can use to check your site and those you've linked to for
backlinks.