Archive for February, 2007

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I’ve written before about building your incoming links by utilizing various link building techniques but want to focus this article on 3-way link exchanges.

One of the biggest things to help increase your Google PageRank is to get quality one-way links coming into your site. That means that you don’t have any pages linking back to their site from yours.

At first it can be very difficult to get these one-way links. Most of the webmasters out there aren’t willing to link to you unless a. you link to them, or b. you have amazing content and other webmasters are linking to you. Then they’ll feel the need to jump on the bandwagon and link to you just so they aren’t the only ones.

However, there are ways you can get one way incoming links but still do links exchanges. You need to either have 2 blogs with similar content and solicit 3-way link exchanges, or find others with 2 blogs or sites of similar content and see if they would be interested in a 3-way link exchange.

What a three-way link exchange is, is a link exchange where person A has sites X and Y and person B has site Z. Person A can then link to site Z from site X, while person B will link from site Z to site Y. That way each site, X, Y, and Z, each have their own link coming into the sites.

Try to hit up the forums and see what type of link exchanges there are or start up another site with similar content and start linking away.

I am now contradicting myself with directory submissions. I previously said that if you want to maximize your money and your time (and we all know time=money) you should look at paying someone to submit your blogs to directories.

Well that’s a great idea and can maximize your directory submission numbers very quickly and easily. However, you have to be careful with who you go with, how you submit, and how much you’re paying.

With people who run automated submission services, or semi-automated with the advent of captchas, you can’t be 100% certain that they are submitting the correct links and descriptions for your site. You also can’t be 100% certain that the links are even going to be approved. You may get the emails for submission, but if these services are blasting 200 directories with 200 sites each, some smaller directories may begin to block their IPs from acceptable submissions.

So what do you do know?

You start the submission process yourself. It’s a long process, but this way you have complete control over what you submit and when you submit it. You’ll also know exactly what you submitted and when you submitted it so you can contact the directory administrators to find out when your links are going to be added, or why they weren’t.

While doing mass submissions to web directories you need to streamline your process so that you can be very very efficient. You need to know that your links are going to be accepted or have a very good chance of being accepted and you need submit your blogs efficiently.

First thing, finding web directories that will almost guarantee acceptance and quick acceptance, isn’t as hard as it seems. If you head over to the Digital Point Forums section Directories - Solicitations and Announcements you’ll find lots of people trying to either start their directories or build their web directory listings. Just about 5-10 directories that say they’re offering free submissions and open them in a few tabs.

Next you’ll to make a word file with the following information:

• Site Title
• Link URL
• Site Description

Make this for as many sites as you have. Now open the submit pages on each of the web directories. (I suggest the directories that offer the choice of categories on the submit page, it’s quicker) Next copy and paste the all the information into the site description section of the submit for for every directory you have open. Then cut the link from the description box, and paste it into the URL box. Then finally cut the site title from the description box and paste it into the site title box.

Choose your category. Hopefully your left the option to allow your browser to remember what you’ve filled into boxes before and you can just click on the Name and Email boxes to fill those in. Fill out the captcha and done.

This is really helpful when you have multiple sites to submit. I have 16 sites I’m submitting to directories, so I do one site at a time and submit that one site to each directory. That way I don’t have to go back to my word file and copy and past all the time.

If you do 5 of these each day, it should take you only 30 minutes to an hour to do and you’ll have 100 directory submissions by months end.

If you’re trying to build your blog pagerank and traffic quickly, then you know that saying you’re doing it quickly isn’t really true.

Building pagerank and traffic is tough and you need a lot of backlinks to help you get there. Soliciting, exchanging, all this can be fine, but it takes a lot of time. Being a part-time blogger you need to determine where your time is best spent, and what you can get others to spend their time on.

One of the newest things I’ve been reading about over at Digital Point Forums is the use of directory submissions. It seems like everyone out there has a directory they want you to submit to, some of them are payed, some of them are reciprical. There’s so many to choose from, you can waste a lot of time trying to find the right ones.

That’s where getting other people to do the submissions for you will help you out in the long run. If you look at the subforum for directory solicitation or link building, people will submit your link, manually to 100 directories for under $10. Maybe they run all these directories or maybe they have a great system for doing the submissions but either way this is cheap.

It would take me a long time to find let alone submit to this many directories. I’m going to work on getting Blogtown Press into these directories and I suggest you take a look at the possibility as well.

Google Page Rank is a numbering system that Google gives to your website based on a variety of different factors. It’s a fluid ranking, meaning that it can change from update to update, going up or down. It’s also a way that people judge your website, especially in the blogosphere.

Unless you’re well known in blog town, your Page Rank is the quickest way someone will be able to tell if what you’re saying is worth their reading.

From Google’s explanation page rank is

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important

Now that may seem a bit confusing at first look and you may be asking yourself how do I get a higher page rank. The best explanation is to get more links from better quality websites. The more often you get these links the higher your page rank will be.

It’s tough to entice a PR6 blog to link back to a PR0 blog, but when you get the link, you’ll be a happy camper and you’ll have that much more authority, as given by Google. The Google Page Rank system can make or break your blog and we’ll definitely be spending a little more time on it in the future. Especially ways you can quickly and easily increase your Google Page Rank.

I recently wrote about my new experiences in Link Building and website promotion over at my business blog. The gist of it was that link building and website promotion takes time, a lot of time. I thought writing posts took time.

Ever since I began hiring an editing team to blog for me and Blogtown Press, I’ve spent a lot of time link building. It takes time and patience to find blogs willing to exchange links, build a rep in forums and build a reputable site that people are interested in exchanging links with.

I was digging around Digital Point Forums and found a great post that some generous folk put up linking to a great SEO link-building article. The article is over at SEO Book and is from the SEO consultant Andy Hagans.

The article is packed with 101 tips to link build and some things you shouldn’t do. There are of course ones that take more time than others, but reading through all of them will spark ideas that you can apply to your particular situation.