Linking - what a mess if you don’t know what’s going on. Either linking is “IN” or it’s “OUT” according to what you read these days.? Here’s the good news: Linking Works.?

Here’s the bad news: How It Works Has Changed!?

The good thing is you are going to pick up a linking tip today that will put you light years ahead of most webmasters who think a reciprocal link directory is all you need to gain link popularity in Google and traffic from other sites.?

Link directories are still ok, but the key is moderation. Directories with thousands of links are a dark ages website promotion tactic.?

Today there are many people focusing on content again, thank god. And that means you have a lot more real estate than just a home page and a link directory to work with.?

People have written to me to completely disagree with me on what I am about to show you, but believe the expert, it works!?

Say you have 500 pages of article and resource content on your site. If you are publishing articles on several categories you could have many more pages than that.?

But even if you only have a 30 page site right now, it should be growing all the time and will be large eventually. (If not, forget about Google staying excited about your site if it doesn’t ever change.)?

Each of those articles and resource pages is a link to your site waiting to happen.?

There are two ways to get links to your site here:?

1) Ask for a link to your main page in exchange for a link on one of your relevant article pages to the site you are requesting an exchange with.? 2) Deep Linking: Ask for a link right back to the specific page on your site you are going to link to them on. Again, find relevant pages of content to the sites you are going after. People respond well to this, especially if you say you are limiting your outgoing links to “further resources” to 5 per page. (The number is up to you.) What does this do for your site??

3) It gets webmasters WAY more excited about linking with you because you are putting them ON your site, not in some cobweb-ridden part of your site that no one ever visits.? 4) It lets other site owners know you have actually taken the time to review their site enough to know where they would best fit on your site according to the topic of the page you want to link to them on. Again - this is a way different message to them than the “Let’s swap links” letter we all trash these days.?

5) You start building link popularity and traffic direct to pages within your site other than your index. (If you choose to direct swap with them.)? 6) It gives you leverage to ask for a better link from other sites than just being thrown in their link dump (link directory) where, again, far fewer people ever visit. You command the power to ask for a similar link of importance from the pages their visitors actually see. Win-Win?

7) You increase the value of your links page because you are not loading it down with any and every person who will link with you. You can go back to old school linking to sites that you honestly do recommend and that list can be far smaller and really fit on 1-2 pages. All of a sudden you have traffic to your links page again and can truly reward webmasters who are on it with some traffic.? 8) The links you get this way are going to be some of the first links you have probably ever gotten that actually send you significant traffic. The same goes for your link partners.?

“But Jack, I don’t want to send traffic away from my site!” Yes you do, in fact. Because you are asking your link partners to do the same. Links like this are just as profitable in the long run as Google AdSense ads because you are finally engaging in a real traffic exchange and leveraging your property for what it’s really worth. Trust me - this works. Send some traffic out and see what happens to your referrer stats.? Never give more than you get. Many people won’t understand this type of linking for another year or so. They will try to shove your link in a dark hole on their site. Don’t let them do it!?

If someone doesn’t understand the power of deep linking from their content pages, send them this article as a last ditch effort and tell them Jack said so. Otherwise, move on, take their link down, and find someone smart enough to see where linking is headed.? Overall, you are going to find it is much easier to get links this way, even from sites b�gger than yours. Telling people “I want to link to you as a recommended resource on (name of article) page…” tells them that you are a pro and not some schmuck who has a linking program that spits out cookie cutter emails.?

Too much work? Hire someone and pay them per link they secure in your name. Write the letter and have them fill in the blanks for specific sites. Teach them how to go through your site, learn the content, and go out and find relevant recommended resources for each page.? You’ll be surprised to find out how cheaply you can get good work done these days on Elance.com and other “for hire” sites.?

Sit back and watch your incoming quality links soar from month to month!

By Jack Humphrey

Link building has become an integral part of search engine marketing and positioning. The topic is inevitably the subject of many web conference programs and the WebMaster World of Search conference was no exception.? In a session entitled “Proactive Linking”, three experts in search marketing, Bruce Clay of BruceClay.com, Jim Banks of WebDiversity and Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla, shared their strategies and opinions on the linking campaigns.

Bruce Clay suggested what he called “aggressive Linking campaigns” be done with some basic guidelines. Suggesting that many uneducated link builders do foolish linking into multiple domain networks which are all hosted either on the same server or simply buy links from a series of sites hosted within a single C block of IP addresses. He recommended gaining links from a wide range of IP addresses hosted in different places so that it replicates “natural” links that might be gained over a period of time. This guideline was given as “IP address - Different is good”.? Another aspect of aggressive linking is to vary the PageRank quality of those sites linking to you (or client sites) so that, it too, appears more natural to the search engines. This is because too many linking campaigns target only PR8 and PR9 sites. Clay warns that this is an “un-natural” thing, especially for new sites or those with low PageRank themselves.? He suggests that link partners should not be chosen purely based upon PageRank and that, if it is, that you should seek a full range of PR level link partners to replicate “natural” links. This guideline was stated simply as “PageRank - Natural is Good”.

Jim Banks of WebDiversity recommends looking at linking campaigns from a highly scientific, regimented and tested method involving segmented groups. He contends that there are different types of visitors to web sites, including “shoppers, buyers and visitors” and that each carry a different return on investment, or ROI, to the site owner. Clearly if you’ve determined the value of a visitor based on their actions and paths through a site, what search phrases the different visitors use to find your site, and which keyword phrases convert to sales - you can target link text in your campaign based on the highest value customers.? This approach involves extensive keyword testing and conversion analysis through pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Once you’ve determined the highest value keyword phrases, then you apply those phrases to the anchor text you request from link partners. This method allows some very clear requests for link anchor text based on the highest ROI determined in the PPC testing. Banks contends that this method allows very clear guide to organic search optimization and targeting highest value search phrases and highest ROI for individual clients.

Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla offered commentary on both Clay and Banks methods when he called the PPC testing method advocated above as “Checkbook SEO” and basically agreed with Clay by recommending that linking campaigns should “aggressively replicate natural links”. He warned not to buy links without knowing they will be posted to sites spread across a wide spectrum of pages, with varied link text and geographically varied hosts and IP addresses. Boser joked that sites that go from zero links to 20,000 overnight may be red-flagged by the search engines.? During the Q&A session following the three presenters, audience members offered up a long list of questions about linking. Questions ranged from how to determine the IP address of link partners, to which Clay responded that he simply writes a PERL script to retrieve IP addresses from domain names. Most webmasters know that there are many services online which return the IP address if you enter domain names into a text box and click the button.

Additional questions included how to find out if domains or IP address ranges were considered “bad neighbourhoods” as mentioned in warnings by several search engine webmaster guidelines for good ranking. Bruce Clay responded by saying that he does research to determine “is the IP block dirty,” as a way to avoid those so-called bad neighbourhoods and that there are several published lists available that could be found with a simple search for “IP address resources”.? Audience members asked if there were words that might be avoided in page filenames such as links.html, which would be seen as what has become known as “poison words” which search engines have used to determine possible reciprocal links pages and downgrade the value of those pages. Panel members all agreed that the word “Link” should be avoided in filenames and title tags of reciprocal links pages. Audience members asked about results they are seeing at the search engines with nothing but links and pages full of what appear to be search results on top ranking sites for competitive search terms.

Clay responded that he had a problem with sites employing “search scrapers” which gather the top ranking results pages from the search engines for competitive and expensive search phrases which then link to him through those results purely as fodder for lazy webmasters using AdSense ads on those pages, which become highly ranked themselves. These “search scraper” results are happening more often for terms fetching PPC bids higher than $5 from Adwords and Overture ads. “Search engine optimization” as a PPC term ranges from $3 to $6 and is targeted by search scrapers for those AdSense ads.

By Mike Banks Valentine
Mike Banks Valentine operates WebSite101.com and performs ethical search engine optimization and press release optimization & distribution online. If you’ve got news you can rank at the top for your search phrases.

It’s amazing how many marketers fixate on their site’s HTML, believing that’s where solutions to their search engine marketing (SEM) challenges are found. But they’re looking inward when they need to be looking outward.

At a recent industry conference, I provided SEM assessments for Web sites belonging to audience volunteers. Participants invited me to review the sites in front of the other conference attendees and offer suggestions about how to initiate, or improve, their SEM campaigns.

Every brave volunteer’s natural inclination was to immediately dig into their sites. That was the last place I wanted to look. It’s as though marketers think their Web sites are the focus of their SEM campaigns. They’re not. The audience is.

Many marketers worry about how they can attain top ranking without first understanding how their audience searches and where in search results they click. Consider these actual assessments I performed for the audience.

Home Healthcare Monitoring
One volunteer’s company offers a system that remotely monitors certain medical conditions, allowing patients who would otherwise be in the hospital to rest comfortably at home. I asked the marketer to name the most important keyword her SEM campaign should target. The reply: “Home healthcare monitoring.”

First, I searched for that phrase on the home page. Nothing. Clearly, this highlights a huge challenge.

Next, I used Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool. This tool determines how many searches were performed on a keyword in the previous month. I input “home healthcare monitoring.” Overture reported not one single search was performed on that term in the previous 30 days — an even bigger challenge.

“Home healthcare monitoring” is an industry term. Sellers of these sorts of solutions use it to describe what they sell. As is too often the case, it’s not how the audience describes it.

Users think about these services in terms of “medical alert,” “alarms,” and “systems.” That the devices are installed in the home apparently isn’t as important to them; they’re interested in the systems’ response features.

Some keywords that were searched:

• “Personal emergency response”
• “Medical alert systems”
• “Medical alert system”
• “Medical monitoring”
• “Medical alarm systems”
• “Medical alert devices”
• “Medical alert alarm”

Next I looked at Overture’s View Bids tool. “Medical alert systems” has multiple bidders; the current high is a whopping $14 per click. “Personal emergency response” is selling for over $3 per click. How do we know we zeroed in on the right language? There were clues.

First, “home healthcare monitoring” had zero or low-query volume. It also had no paid search advertising bidders. “Medical alert system” was queried more frequently. It had multiple bidders and a high bid price (suggesting it’s valuable to competitors).

This problem is more common than you might think. Marketers think of solutions in their own terms, not in their audience’s terms.

Here’s my favourite example: A major bank’s executives recently asked me to ensure their site could be found on every search for “lending” because they’re one of the world’s largest “lending” institutions. I pointed out what I thought would be obvious: Their audience wants to “borrow.” Smiles slowly formed on their faces. They got it.

Ring Tones
Another assessment I performed was for a large telecom. It’s active in a number of markets, including data, cellular service and local and long distance services. I was asked to review a wireless product’s Web site.

I asked the audience what keywords should matter to this company. Someone shouted out “cell phone.” Someone else suggested “calling plans.” Then, I heard it. Some smart marketer blurted out, “the brand!”

Yup.

Big brands often find their branded keywords are the most important and enjoy the highest click-through and conversion rates. Again, I referred to Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool. The most frequently searched term was the brand name and the phrase “cell phone.” But the second most frequently searched term was a surprise to everyone. It was the brand name paired with “ring tones.”

I asked the marketer if ring tones were a profitable business. He assured me they are. Yet the phrase “ring tones” was buried deep in the site. I searched Google and Yahoo for the company name with “ring tones.” Dozens of other companies showed up in the search results but not this major brand.

Though the company is engaged in paid search advertising, no one thought to bid for this keyword phrase or to feature it on the home page, even though the keyword included the brand and was the second most frequently searched branded term.

To experienced search marketers, these examples seem simple and intuitive. To others, especially those new to SEM, they aren’t intuitive at all.

Before focusing on your site’s HTML, first look closely at how your audience searches. How they search is probably different than what you’d expect. Looking inward instead of outward can leave a lot of money on the table.

By Fredrick Marckini