Link Bait: Attracting Links To Your Website

You know it is funny in a way. Webmasters have learned that the most important thing that they can do to improve the traffic to their website and to attract attention from the search engines is to build links to their website.

But when it comes time to actually start building links to one's website, people typically pick the hardest way to accomplish the task and then they get to work.

Working Hard

People have been told about various ways to build links to one's website, and they go through the process of picking out the method that they would prefer to use. It is kind of ironic that most people pick the method that they believe will be the easiest and least expensive to achieve, and when all is said and done, they will have picked out the hardest, least effective method of building links.

For example, most newcomers to online business choose:

* Reciprocal links;

* Directory submissions.

With Reciprocal Links, people buy a software package that helps them to search out websites that are supposedly "related" to theirs and then they send an email to the person who owns that website, proclaiming the benefits of trading links and asking for the link.

With directory submissions, webmasters can get software that is supposed to help with the process, but it takes hours just to submít one's website to a few dozen directories. Fortunately, there are service providers who also provide submissions to web directories. Regardless of how you get links submítted to web directories, you generally have to pray that those web directories are approving submissions, since most owners have abandoned their directories.

Beyond the time required setting up links in this fashion, and the frustration of getting very few links for the amount of time spent, the worst part of the equation is that the search engines tend to ignore links gained through these methods, and few humans find and follow those links.

Internet newcomers using these methods frequently spend a lot of time trying to promote their websites, and in the end, they have accomplished nothing more than wasting a lot of their time and energy.

Working Smart

What if I could show you a better way? Would you be intrigued enough by my methods to try them for yourself?

My point in sharing this with you is not to annoy you, but to help you get better results in much less time.

When we launch new websites, we ignore reciprocal links and web directories altogether. We consider both to be a complete waste of time, effort and money.

Let me put this into perspective for you by giving you a real life example.

On November 18th, 2008, we bought and built a new niche domain: http://www.shoppingtraveldeals.com/blog/

Today is December 27th, so this site has only been active for just under six weeks.

We purchased the domain on the 18th, had it set up with content on the 19th, and then on the 20th, we started promoting this website. We released our first and second reprint articles, promoting this site on the 20th of November. We released our third article on the 24th and the fourth on the 25th. Then we released our fifth article promoting the website on December 15th.

We also set up bookmarks for the main page of the website in Stumbleupon, Digg and Propeller.

In the 39 days since we bought this domain, our website has seen 520 unique visitors. The site had 86 visitors in November and 434 so far in December.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

We got traffic from 66 unique web pages, and we drew click-through traffic from Google and Windows Live, with 86% of our search traffic coming from Google.

On our search engine traffic, we have traffic on 171 unique keyword phrases. In order to better understand this search engine traffic, we ran the top 25 search terms through Google to see where our website ranked in the search results, and this is what we came up with:

* Two #1 listings;

* Ten listings that were ranked from #2 to #4;

* Ten listings that were ranked from #5 to #10;

* Two listings on page two of Google's search results (#11 to #20);

* One listing on page three of Google's results (#21 to #30).

We built this website with the express intent of earning affiliate commissions in the travel industry. The prognosis is good, as we have already started earning money from this website, and in terms of our current earnings, we expect to be in the black against our initial ínvestment into this website, within about three months.

More About Reprint Articles

The concept of the reprint article is to write an article and give it to other webmasters to use in their websites and newsletters, in exchange for a link back to your website.

Those articles that seek to teach something of value typically get published more frequently than those articles geared to sell a product or service. It is our fervent belief that the Author's resource box - the paragraph that follows the article - is the only place where a writer should try to sell his or her wares. The goal of the resource box is to get a reader to your website, and your website is where the real selling should take place.

Reprint articles provide good value to the people who use them wisely. But the online marketer must first be willing to invest the required time or money to have appropriate articles written and/or distributed.

While it is true that I work for an article distribution company, it is important to note that our guiding principle is that each article distribution company will reach a different and unique audience. As such, we always use our own service to distribute articles and occasionally we use our competitors' article distribution companies as well.

We distribute ALL of our own articles through our own company, because we know that our service does provide real value. But for some articles, we do go to some of our competitors to expand our reach and to reach new audiences.

We actually learned to do this from some of our more successful customers, who suggest that there are certain publishers that only we can reach, while our competitors also have certain publishers that only they are able to reach. As a result, many of our customers use two or three article distribution companies, and we do too.

Working Smarter

While reprint articles is a tool that we consistently utilize to build links and to grow traffic to our websites, there remains a more long-term, yet more valuable approach to building links for our websites.

Link Bait is an idea where you create a resource that people find so useful that they feel compelled to link to it from their own websites.

Look at it this way. With reprint articles, we have to write the article, and then distribute it through the sources we choose to use to get it into circulation. All told, we will invest several hours into writing, and then we will invest another hour to distribute the article.

All told, we will have spent four to five hours to write and distribute this article. In turn, we will receive dozens or hundreds of links from related web pages (the links are from "related web pages", because we designed the article content to look like what we are trying to promote). Writing and distributing articles typically creates a great return of value for our businesses.

But consider this. Last week, we created a resource page on one of our websites. This page is an enumeration of the +1200 article directories we know to exist on the Internet. We were not the first website to provide such a list, but we may be the first to give the Internet community an easy method to add new sites and to flag bad sites, automatically from the page where the sites are displayed.

If you are able to create a page such as this that people find extremely useful, then people are more inclined to link to your page, without you even asking them to do so. The beauty about building pages like this on the Internet is that all you have to do is to let people know it is there, and then the links will roll in steadily.

One Link Bait page we built on May 1st, 2004 has been used by the public more than 38,000 times according to its built-in counter. And according to a Yahoo search, it has more than 10,000 inbound links from third-party websites.

We built this page in a day, wrote one article to let people know it was there, and then we left the page alone for more than four-and-a-half years.

Do you see how it is much easier to build one link bait, notify the world, and then to let people link to your web page for you? The time invested in our Text To Hyperlink Converter was less than 12 hours, yet it has attracted +10,000 links with almost no promotion on our part. And this article will generate +100 links in exchange for five hours of our time.

In Conclusion

We are working smart when we write and distribute articles to promote a website. The Shopping Travel Deals site attests to the value of reprint articles to build links and traffic to a new website quickly.

But we are working smarter, when we invest the additional time to build a link bait web page that people will appreciate and link to for us, without any additional effort on our part.

For SEO Services contact us.

Bounce Rates Count

Of late there has been a lot of discussion about bounce rates and whether or not the search engines count these in their algorithms. As far back as late 2007, there were reports that webmasters were seeing a difference in their rankings for major keywords within a few weeks of drastically changing their bounce rates. However, none of the tests and reports seem to be complete enough or repeatable enough to constitute proof.

As a result, there are plenty of naysayers who believe that such things as bounce rates are not now and probably won't ever be part of the search engine algorithms.

I am of the opposite view; bounce rates will certainly be part of the search engine algorithms and probably already are.

What I would like to do here is share with you some of the common naysayer objections and refute all but one of them. But first, for those who are scratching their heads about what bounce means, we are referring to people leaving a website. A bouncy website is the opposite of a sticky website, one where people stay a long time.

Objection 1: There is no definition of "bounce rate".

Response: This is the flimsiest of arguments. A bounce is when someone leaves a website, going back where they came from.

Objection 2: I don't like how Google Analytics defines a bounce.

Response: Sadly, Google doesn't ask me for advice, either. But cheer up, the bounce rate in Google Analytics might not be the same as they use in their algorithm, just as the little green bar is not necessarily the PageRank they use in their algorithm.

Objection 3: Many sites don't have Google Analytics turned on, so Google would have very incomplete data.

Response (scratching my head in confusion): What does Google Analytics have to do with anything? This is about Google (or Yahoo, or MSN, or Ask, or some other) tracking their own traffic and how their own users move about and - most importantly - how their users return to their website.

Objection 4: What is the threshold for a bounce? After 5 seconds? After 10 seconds? After 15 seconds? This is a mess! (This is often part of the how-do-we-define-a-bounce debate.)

Response: A bounce is a bounce, whether it takes a person one second or one hour to bounce back, it is a bounce. How the search engines choose to treat bounces with varying lag times is another matter. Let's be clear; they won't tell you, just as they won't tell you how many links on a page they index, how many they follow and how many they count in their ranking algorithms. Furthermore, it is a moving target. Just like every other algorithm input, bounce rates and bounce lag times will not be treated in the exact same way one day to the next.
Objection 5: What if people quickly click on an external link and leave my site? They found the site useful because they found a useful link on it, but they bounced.

Response: That is not a bounce, that's a referral. A bounce is when someone hits the back button.

Objection 6: What if the user quickly closes the window?

Response: That could be any number of things, but it is not a bounce. Who can guess how the search engines might treat that, or even if they treat it at all. However, it need not be considered a bounce unless the search engines believe it should be.

Objection 7: Doesn't a bounce mean the person has found what they want? Can't a bounce sometimes be good?

Response: Sometimes, perhaps, but rarely. After 5 seconds, a person has no time to read a page. After 30 seconds, they might have found something useful. So lag times matter. More importantly, the search engines can determine what a person does next. If a person returns to the search results and clicks on another link, that is a sign they did not find what they want. If they return to the search results and conduct a similar search, that might also be a sign they did not find what they want. If they return to the search results and conduct an unrelated search, that might be a sign that they found what they want. Search engines can weigh various bounces in light of the user's next action.

Objection 8: For some searches, people look for multiple sources, such as comparing prices, comparing products, seeking varying opinions, etc. Too many sites would be penalized if all those bounces were to be counted in the rankings.

Response: This is an example of false logic. If someone clicks on one website, then bounces, clicks on another website, then bounces, clicks on another website then bounces...all the high-ranking websites for that particular search query would be equally affected. Nobody would suffer a ranking disadvantage because rankings are relative.
Objection 9: Can't I just set up a bot to visit all my top competitors and leave their site after varying numbers of seconds to make it appear that their sites are all bouncy.

Response: Yes, you can. And you can get very creative. I have even heard of couriers in China travelling from one Internet café to another to click on a particular site as a means of increasing its rankings. I have no answer for this, other than that the search engines will have to control for this, just as they have found ways to control for automated link-building.

So have no fear. Good websites that provide what their visitors want or who help them find what they want will prosper. Sticky SEO looks at conversions and stickiness as integral elements to SEO.

Cheap sites that do a lot of link-building - bouncy SEO - counting on large volumes of traffic to offset poor conversion rates, will suffer - because the search engines will stop sending them that traffic.

It's just a matter of time. Or perhaps it has already started.

Website checklist for 2009: is your website ready for the new year?

The new year 2009 might be a tough year for many businesses but if you do it correctly, it can be a very successful year for you.

2009 can be your year

Before you start with new things, you should make sure that your current website is up-to-date. The following checklist will help you:

Step 1: Check your company information

Does your about page draw a current picture of your company? If you have a staff listing on your website, is it up-to-date?

Check these pages as well as the copyright notice and the privacy police of your website to make sure that your web pages don't look outdated.

Step 2: Check your contact information

Does your website list your current phone and fax numbers? Are the mailing and email addresses listed on your website correct? You'll lose customers if your contact information is outdated.

You should also check the email addresses that you use on your website. Are help@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, order@yourdomain.com, etc. redirected to the correct recipient? Send test email messages to all addresses that are listed on your website.

Many businesses have so strong spam filters that many legit customer email messages don't reach them.

If you have contact forms on your website, make sure that they work and that they are easy to use. If someone doesn't enter a correct email address in your contact form, does the error message make sense?

Step 3: Check your auto-responders

Do you send automated confirmation messages when someone sends you an email message? Does your shopping cart send email messages after an order?

Check the text of your automated messages to make sure that it says what you want to say and that is contains current information.

Step 4: Check the links on your website

The older your website is and the more pages your website has, the more likely it is that it contains some broken links. For that reason, you should regularly check the links on your website.

Step 5: Check if your web pages are ready for Google

If you want to get high rankings on Google, you must make sure that it's easy for Google to parse your web pages. Can Google easily find all of your web pages? Do you target the right keywords on your web pages? Are all elements of your web pages optimized for Google? You can check this SEO Services

Does Your SEO Content Sell?

While written with search engines in mind, SEO content should also consider the end users of your website; your potential customers. Attracting masses of traffic, regardless of how targeted that traffic, is only a portion of the battle.

If the content you've used is next to meaningless or smacks of being written solely to rank well in the search engines then your website will under perform and your online business efforts will suffer as a consequence.

Finding the perfect blend between search optimised content and offering an enhanced user experience is critical to better website performance.


Treat Your Business Like A Business

Every website, blog, and other online real estate should be viewed as a business if it is being used to generate an income of any sort. This means that the customer experience is equally as important to your website as it is to your business as a whole.

A good customer experience means more sales, greater conversion rates, improved customer loyalty, and increased customer retention and return business.

Small businesses and bricks and mortar commercial ventures have been living by the ethos that "the customer is always right" for decades and this should go for your online business as well.

Every Word Counts

From the home page to the deeper, product pages, and from your blog to your support forums, the intention of each visible page is to promote your business. Whether you're trying to ensure that customers continue to return to your service or you intend to attract new customers this means that your website content needs to be set up to sell as well as attract the attention of the search engines.

The CTA (Call To Action)

Decide on your Call To Action (CTA) for each of your pages. Once you've done this, don't simply give visitors the opportunity to follow your CTA but ensure that they're left with little choice but to do so. Entice them, emote them, but above all ensure that you convert them.


Identify Your CTA

The desired action for each page can differ significantly. On the home page of your site, you are most likely to want to divert customers to the product or services pages where they can learn more information. On the deeper pages, such as product description pages, the desired action is adding the item to the shopping basket or proceeding to checkout; alternatively, it could be to request a quote, make a phone call, or register their details.

Make sure you know what your CTA is before you write the content because if you don't know then your website visitors certainly won't.

Stand Out And Stand Apart

At the same time as identifying your CTA, you should also consider your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is the single thing that makes your business or your website stand out from every other one in the same industry. Virtually every website has one even though many website owners don't know about it.

Think about the things that benefit your customers and not those that benefit you. Free shipping, discount on bulk orders, hand made products, a no fuss money back guarantee, or a truly personal service can all be used as effective USPs if they are sold properly.

Website Content That Performs

Website content can do so much more than attract a flurry of visitors to a website, and indeed it should. Yes, traffic is important, because without it, the most effective combination of CTA and USP in the world would bear no relevance but never forget the end user.

The Benefits of a Solid Content Management System

In the early days of the web most sites consisted of a handful of HTML pages. For smaller sites, it made sense for webmasters to use programs like Microsoft Front Page and Macromedia (now Adobe Dreamweaver) to edit their site templates, which usually contained the navigation, header and footer (the "shell" of the site), and individual pages.

Editor's Note: On Dec. 29/08, we published an article by Kalena Jordan entitled "A Beginner's Guide to Google Website Optimizer (Part 1)". The entire article which includes Part 2 can be found at SiteProNews.com.

The problems?

* Messy code
These so-called What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG) editors didn't always get the code right. Webmasters almost always had to get into the back-end and tweak the HTML source code. This took time.

* Tedious site updates
Edits to a site template meant every page had to be updated and reuploaded to the web server. This took time and used resources - especially before the days of broadband.

* Painstaking SEO
Optimizing for search engines meant going through every page and manually making sure your H1 (header) and Title tags were well optimized.

* Risk of data loss
Forgetting to download the most recent version of a site when working with multiple site editors or from multiple locations made it easy for editors to overwrite site updates - sometimes losing hundreds of hours of work with one ill-advised click of the "upload" button.

While Adobe Dreamweaver has certainly come a long way over the years (messy code is no longer a major problem) and uploading an entire site to your web server doesn't take all day anymore thanks to broadband, the other problems and annoyances still persist when working with a straight HTML site.

Enter the Content Management System (CMS).

Content Management Systems do what they sound like - they help you manage your content. Essentially, a CMS allows you to create/edit/delete your site pages without getting into the coding side of things. For larger sites, they also make organization easier. The content is largely stored in a site database, which lives on a web server, alleviating the need to back up hundreds of HTML files (if your site is that big).

Ecommerce websites, for example, use content management systems 99% of the time.

Blogs use them too.

While they may sound expensive and complicated, there are several full-featured content management systems available for free. Among the most notable are WordPress and Drupal. Both systems are free to download/install at your web server, and both have been developed by an open source community with ease of installation and use in mind.
If you're considering moving your site to a CMS or building a new site with one but aren't yet sure of the benefits, here's a quick líst:

* No need to be a code junky
While the setup process can get somewhat technical and customizing templates involves coding, in the long term working with a CMS means working with less HTML/CSS and server side scripting code. That means an easier time for content editors and authors. It means you don't need to rip your hair out figuring out which HTML tag wasn't closed properly. It means you don't need to know what an HTML tag is at all, in most cases. This saves you a ton of time and resources in the long term.

* On-page SEO is built right in
SEO is a concern for every webmaster, and most content management systems include beneficial features in this regard. There are many available SEO plugins for WordPress, for example, that make for well-optimized title tags, URLs, links, etc. Once your CMS is producing search engine friendly pages there is little need to go back and "tweak" on-page optimization or play with file names. This allows you to focus on creating great content without worrying about your on-page SEO.

* There is little risk of losing/overwriting important files
Since site content lives mostly in the database with a CMS, there isn't much risk of someone accidentally overwriting a recently-updated page or losing important files. Most site authors and editors can work from within the CMS and don't bother saving/uploading a file at all. This will save you many headaches. Just be sure to back up your database on a regular basis and before upgrading your CMS.

* The site can be accessed/edited from any location
Most content management systems are web-based - meaning they live entirely on your web server. The only thing required to access/edit your site in this case is a username/password to log in. This means you don't need to worry about being at your computer or carrying your site files with you when traveling. Adding/editing/deleting site pages is a simple as logging in and using the web-based back end to get it done - and site updates can be published live instantly with no need for FTP.

* Simple site updates don't require you to call/pay your web developer
This alone can save most companies thousands of dollars a year. With a content management system you no longer need to call your web developer every time you need to correct a spelling error or add an event to a calendar. You can handle updates yourself or have someone in your office - maybe even an intern - make the change directly. The point is: it's easy. You no longer have to pay the developer's rate for simple updates, and you don't need to waste time communicating the changes via phone or email and settling invoices.

* Development costs are cheaper for open source content management systems
If you're looking to either migrate an existing site to a content management system or use one for a new site, you are likely to be looking at a cheaper project overall (depending on the level of customization). Most of the bells and whistles are built right into the system - so development becomes more a task of updating the look and feel of the CMS template than building from scratch. Of course, design is crucial - so if you're looking for a polished site design you'll still want to hire a solid designer/developer, but a simple and clean site design with moderate customization shouldn't break the bank. There are also some very nice "out of the box" templates and themes available for most open source content management systems, such as the feature-rich and attractive Thesis theme for WordPress.

Essentially, there are few downsides to using content management systems, and the open source options available are very attractive (especially the price tag). If you're considering either of the open source solutions mentioned in this article, WordPress or Drupal, there are a few considerations you'll want to have in mind. Namely, keep in mind that WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform and is therefor somewhat limited in flexibility (although for most sites WordPress is a solid solution - even when you don't need a blog). Drupal offers much more flexibility and power, but it tends to require a more extensive and costly set up phase.

Also keep in mind that not all content management systems are created equal. Some lesser-known content management systems have rampant issues in search engine visibility - such as including session IDs in all URLs - that can render your site entirely invisible to search engines or at least sub-par when it comes to on-page SEO. The more popular and widely-used systems are usually a safe bet since they've been around for years, and any such issues will have been well hashed out at this point.

For companies operating on something of a shoestring budget for web development, an open source content management solution is often not only an attractive solution but perhaps the only viable one to stay within a budget without sacrificing the quality of your site's infrastructure.

And to those for whom the thought of working with HTML code causes instant panic: rest assured - with the right CMS setup, you'll rarely need to see an HTML tag again.

Debunking the Top 10 Search Engine Myths

We've all done it at some point in our professional lives. We search a keyword that describes our business only to scratch our head as to how our competitor's website shows up on the top of the líst instead of ours. If you've gone one step further and read about Search Engine Optimization, then surely you have come across the conflicting information online.

One article tells you to do one thing while another tells you to do the opposite. Which one should you believe?

This gray area of what you should or should not do is much like the modern day "Bat Cave." If you are lucky enough to stumble upon it, chances are you don't quite know how you got there and if you had to go back one day you would probably just find yourself lost in the woods.
So what should you believe? The general rule is to combine what you read or heard with what you have experienced and somewhere in there lies the truth. To get you started, let's debunk some of the more commonly used myths floating around.

1) Use a Keyword Rich Domain Name:

It is widely believed that if you include your keywords in your domain name like www.professional-website-design-in-nj.com it will greatly improve your rankings. This is not true. It is best to choose a domain name that is short, easy to remember and if possible includes your company name.

2) Google Partnership:

If you are ever approached by a company claiming to have a partnership with Google, run in the opposite direction. There is no such thing as a "preferred" relationship with Google and in fact on Google's website it even states: Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google.

3) Meta Keyword Tag:

It used to be that the Meta Keyword Tag was given a lot of weight in the early days of Search Engine Optimization, but people abused it and now it does very little. You may still want to include your keywords here, but know that it will not do much and in fact most search engines won't even check it.

4) Bold or Italicized Text:

Adding emphasis to certain keywords like using bold or italics can make your text easier to scan for the reader if done properly, but has little to no effect on your search engine ranking.

5) Content Length:

There is no search engine rule stating that your content needs to be a specific number of words in order to get indexed. Any recommended length is more to assist the reader in understanding what you do than to aid the search engines.
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6) Duplicate Content:

Posting specific content like an article or blog entry on your site and then on another site will not get you penalized. In the search results, Google will recognize that the content is the same and only choose one of the pages to display, but it will not hurt your overall search engine ranking.

7) Avoid Flash:

Any text that you place in Flash will not be readable by a search engine, but this doesn't mean you have to avoid flash altogether. You can still very successfully incorporate Flash into your site through rotating pictures or a header on the page. Just don't have an all Flash site or use a Flash intro if you are interested in increasing your search engine rankings.

8) Pay-Per-Click:

Some say that using Pay-Per-Click will help your organic listing while others say it will hurt. Both are false. The fact is that Google has gone to great lengths to separate the two departments of organic and paid listings to a point where the two departments don't communicate or even sit at the same table for lunch.

9) Update the Site Frequently:

Updating your site often is a good idea if you have something new to say. Just don't change around a few words to accommodate the search engines as that won't help your listing at all. Regularly adding legitimate content like articles, press releases and blog entries will help though.

10) Doorway Pages:

Many companies will sell this idea of increasing your ranking by creating hundreds of one page sites loaded with keywords that link to you from various domains. This is considered spamming the search engine and is not recommended. If you properly optimize your site and focus on the correct way to get listed, you will improve your ranking much quicker than these doorway pages ever could.

Of course there are many other myths out there confusing the general public about what works and what doesn't work. Some of them are spread by people who don't really know the truth and others are spread by SEO companies in an attempt to make search engine optimization confusing... mission accomplished!

Regardless of where the myths come from, if you or the SEO Company you hire use common sense and do things the right way, you will have no trouble finding the proverbial SEO Services Bat Cave and when you get there please tell them that I want my utility belt back!
For More Detail call Abhay Mathur