Power Marketing

Link to me

Lately, I have received several requests to trade links.

Nothing wrong with that. Links to your website boost it in the search engines. And I am happy to exhange good links.

However, many of the requests to link seem to come from gmail or other free email addresses - not from legitimate email address. What does that say about the person requesting the link? Why are they hidding?

So I agreed to trade some links. And after I linked to them and asked for a response - no response.

We should learn from our mistakes.

This is my response to future resquests for trading links - "You go first".


George Torok
Marketing Speaker & Author
Business Speaker

Website marketing: One way links

Links to your website help people find your site from the site that linked to you and more importantly improve your status in the search engines.

The thinking is that if other websites link to your website, the other websites must think that you are an authority on your topic.

However, the reality is far more selective. All links are not equal. Some links are more valuable than others.

These things make the link to your site more valuable:
The site that links to your site is on a related topic.
The site that links to your site is a higher Google page rank.
The site that links to your site only links to other sites of related topics.
The page that links to your site has a reasonable number of links. Somewhere less than 100.
That site is linking to you without you linking back to them - called one way links.

That last factor - one way links - is tough to get. Yet it is valuable because the search engines thinking is - if you have inbound links without outbound links to that other site it must be because they really love you. It's preceived to be more that a dirty trade of favors.

Too many "web marketers" email you asking to trade links with you. There's little value if the topics are unrelated, their link page has hundreds of links, those other links are unrelated and their link page can't be found from their home page.

I tend to ignore those requests.

One Way Links
Here is a website that specializes in helping you get one way links. Haven't tried it yet - but it looks interesting. I will check it out.

One Way Link Building


George Torok
Marketing Speaker
Marketing Expert & Author

List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website

Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance.

This checklist is the most comprehensive one that I've seen. Yet it is written in a format that is easy to scan and simple to understand.

http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php

As I continue to learn more about improving my own websites I will post some of the best gems that I discover on this blog for you.

George Torok

Marketing Speaker

Co-author of Secrets of Power Marketing

Website Directories

Of course you want the search engines to find your website. You can submit your website to the search engines which simply invites the search bots to visit and crawl your site. Search engines are automated with little human interface. Theoretically the bots are constantly crawling the Internet and will eventually find every website. But who can wait? So submit your "invitation to crawl" to search engines.

Web directories are a different animal. They will never find you because they will never look for you. You need find them, knock on their door and sign their guest book. They will eventually read your entry in their guest book and might list you in their directory. There are both paid and free directories and many do both. You pay to get listed faster and more prominently. In most cases a real live human will review your entry before they list it. It is not near as automated as the search engines. Some say that the human element ensures that the listings are more relevant.

A directory listing does something important that the search engines do not - the directory listing is a permanent (subject to delisting) link to your site. And remember the search engines like your site if there are a lot of incoming links.

So for that reason you should submit your site to the search engines and list it in the directories.

Where can you find directories?

DMOZ
The Open Directory Project seems to be the best directory in which to list and it is free so that is the first directory in which to list. Plus many other directories use the results from DMOZ - including the Google Directory. You just need to look through the directory to find the best category for your site. Invest a little time to get this one right. It is worth the effort.

Yahoo Directory
Yahoo was originally a directory before Google convinced them to get in the search engine business. Then Yahoo bought Overture to have a search engine. The Yahoo directory costs $299 a year to be listed. Perhaps at one time it was worth it - today I don't think so. I'm sure that more people search on the Yahoo search engine than the Yahoo Directory.

There seem to be thousands of directories. I believe it that is worth while being listed in some of them. I suggest that getting your website listed in the first half dozen directories is a primary priority. After that - add your website to directory listings over time when you have the time.

Here is a helpful resource to find more directories:

SEO Company
This company is in the business of SEO and they have compiled a comprehensive list of hundreds of directories including helpful information such as directory page rank.

George Torok

Power Marketing

Marketing Speaker

Here are some blog directories on which to list your blog - for free.


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