Programming
The Tricky Business of Getting Other Sites to Link to Yours
Mar 28th
Promoting your web site takes a lot of work and even more patience. Your strategy should include finding ways to get other sites to link to yours, what is commonly known in web parlance as backlinks. Backlinks serve mainly in establishing your site’s reputation in the major search engines, especially Google. All backlinks are good, but not all backlinks are equal.
Image courtesy of Svilen Milev
Google gives each web site a rating, or pagerank, to indicate its importance. The pagerank value ranges from zero to ten, where ten is the highest rank possible. The formula Google uses to derive the pagerank of your site is a well kept secret, but what is known is that it’s largely based on the number and quality of the sites linking into yours. Thus a backlink from a site with a pagerank of 6 will help raise your own site’s rating much more than one from a site with a pagerank of one. This doesn’t mean that you should reject a link exchange request from a site with a low pagerank, as that site could have a higher pagerank later on and every link that might send people to your web page has an intrinsic value.
Another factor affecting pagerank is the number of total links on a page that links back to yours. If there’s lots of links on a page, the value of the backlink is lessened. Therefore, you should concentrate on getting other sites to link back to you from their blogroll or from within an article, rather than a resource page with hundreds of other links. Over time Google has also started to penalize a site’s pagerank for such offenses as participating in link farms, which are directories that exist for the sole purpose of creating backlinks. What is and isn’t penalized isn’t clear, despite claims by hundreds of SEO (search engine optimization) sites.
Curiously, Google has said publicly that the importance of pagerank has been greatly exaggerated. Truth is, it has some effect on Google’s search engine results, but your content’s keyword relevance is far more important. However, since so many people use pagerank as a gauge of your site’s worth, you can’t ignore it and have to seek ways to improve your rating. Your new web site starts out with a pagerank of zero and will likely stay there unless you devote the time to promote your site in the right places.
Organic links, that is links to your Website that other people put just because they like your content, are the best kind, and they’ll come, but you can’t rely on them when you first start out. There’s a number of methods you can use to create quality backlinks:
1- DO Exchange links with other sites that are relevant to yours. You can do this directly by contacting the site owner or through discussion forums and social networks. DO NOT exchange links with sites that are totally off topic. DO NOT join a link exchange site, as the backlink will be likely lost in a sea of other links on the others’ sites, and for the high risk of being associated with a link farm, which could result in a penalty against your pagerank.
2- DO post in discussion forums related to your site’s topic. Answering someone’s question and including a link to a relevant article you wrote is perfectly acceptable. DO NOT put links to your pages just for the sake of creating a backlink. People aren’t stupid and you’ll soon be barred from that forum.
3- DO submit your links to as many directories as possible. There’s a great number of them that specialize in blogs, while others accept only RSS links. Do them all! DO NOT pay for a listing unless it’s one of the very top directories, or it will be wasted money.
4- DO submit your posts to article or “help” sites such as associatedcontent.com, zimbio.com, ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, squidoo.com and searchwarp.com, among others. The biggest article sites are crawled by Google every day, and some of them allow other sites to copy your article with your bio, which includes a link to your site, thus multiplying the backlinks and potential visitors. Of course, you have to mind your grammar and your posts usually have to be at least 500 words long. Some can just pick-up your RSS feed and do the rest.
5- DO submit your own links to bookmarking sites such as Digg. Not all of them will get crawled, however, but as we said before, all backlinks are good!
6- DO link back to your site from your own accounts on social networks such as Facebook. Again, some of them might not produce backlinks because the content is either dynamic or requires a log-in, but must I repeat that all backlinks are good?
7- DO link back to your posts from your microblogging accounts on Twitter and others. As you build a list of followers, this will be a solid block of visitors to your site every time you publish new content.
Finally there’s another kind of backlink that’s steeped in controversy: paid backlinks through services such as inlinks.com. DO NOT do it! This practice is poorly regarded and will probably wind-up being penalized by the major search engines once they figure out how to identify them. Your money would be better spent using advertising such as AdSense. It doesn’t do anything for your pagerank, but it does produce highly motivated visitors.
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10 Features Your Blog Absolutely Must Have!
Mar 27th
You may have the greatest blog on earth content-wise, but if you don’t equip your site with the required features, it could be the proverbial web page that nobody reads. Good, interesting content is the most important feature of any blog, of course, but you also have to devote an equal amount of time to presentation and promotion, at least initially, or your sweet prose will be wasted! Here’s ten things your site can’t do without…
Image by Svilen Milev
1. A logo. Your site or company name in plain text says “amateur” like nothing else. Your site’s logo is the most important visual element, your trademark, carrying with it a high recognition factor. Thus, it’s imperative to invest in a professional logo if possible, or at least thoughtfully create your own using graphics software or one of the many free logo generating sites. Having professionals make your logo doesn’t have to be expensive, costing as little as 69 USD with logodesignteam.com, for example. If you elect to make your own, remember that your design has to reflect what your company or site is about, and to keep it clean and simple. Gimp, a very sophisticated but totally free graphics program, has everything you need, although it might take a while to learn how to it. Alternatively, there’s lots of free logo design tools online. One I particularly liked is flamingtext.com.
2. A favicon. This is the tiny icon that appears next to your site’s name in the browser’s bookmarks, history, and location bar. Much like the logo, it helps distinguish your site from every other. Nothing could be worse than having the WordPress default icon displayed instead of a custom one. Although tiny, the icon should resemble your logo as much as possible, or failing that, mimicks the site’s theme. The easiest way to create a favicon is to use one of the many free online tools. One I recommend is favicongenerator.com. You upload an image and it derives the favicon from it.
3. Images. If your posts are all text, your blog will be monotonous and put your readers to sleep. Adding relevant images to an article makes it much more tantalizing. You don’t have to go out and snap digitals, or steal images from other sites, as there’s plenty of royalty free photos and graphics you can download from numerous image archive sites. One that I use that’s particularly good is sxc.hu.
4. A blogroll in your sidebar. This is your strongest bargaining tool for doing link exchanges, as sidebar blogrolls give other bloggers very credible backlinks, and are much more propitious to getting clicks from visitors to your site. Links in a separate links page aren’t as likely to be seen and may be ignored by the crawlers of major search engines, especially if you name that page “links”. That said, don’t let that blogroll grow too big or it’ll wind-up being treated as link spam. The best policy is to put those who added you to their blogroll in yours, and the rest in a resource page.
5. A RSS feed. Crawlers often do a poor job of extracting text from your pages, whereas a RSS feed will give them the titles and excerpts you want them to index. If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress, you ‘ll have a RSS feed by default.
6. A XML sitemap: This is a xml document that tells some major search engine spiders about all the pages on your site, but also ranks each for its relative importance. Googlebot looks for this document, so having one is a big asset. If you use WordPress, there’s plugins that will automatically generate a sitemap every time you add content. The “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin is one I highly recommend.
7. A contact form: A “mailto” link is a very bad idea since it will wind-up being crawled by spam bots, and also because a lot of your visitors will use webmail rather than email software. Rather than putting some trumped-up robot-foiling email address on screen, the correct way to handle this situation is to have a contact form they can fill out, and you’ll get the data via email without your address being seen by the outside world. With WordPress, an easy and flexible contact form plugin is “Contact Form 7” which requires the plugin ” Really Simple Captcha“. Never have a contact or other type of mailing form without a captcha (the image with text which only humans can “see”), as you’ll get lots of spam.
8. Spam protection for comments. Even if your site has no visitors, you’ll get oodles of spam if you accept comments. Ways to protect against this is to add a captcha to the comment form or require that users be logged-in, or use Akismet. I prefer the latter, as it’s been 100% effective in stopping comment spam on my web sites. In WordPress, the Akismet plugin is installed by default. You’ll need to get a free registration key from the Akismet site before you can activate it.
9. A site map page. This isn’t the same as sitemap.xml, as it’s meant to be read by humans, giving them a quick way to find interesting posts or pages from your blog, thus giving you more page views. A good WordPress plugin that generates a site map is “WP Archive-Sitemap Generator“.
10. A search form. Whether it be a Google search form or the default one in your blog software, this is a critical feature as people are pressed for time and want to find what interests them quickly.
Do all of the above and then you can spend more time writing great posts!
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