Pages

Friday, September 24, 2010

Who Is Linking to You? Do You Know?

Search engines determine the importance of your site by finding out who is linking to you. If a trusted library, college, municipality, government, high ranking business or organization links to your site, you are going to have an easier time finding your desired rankings. The alternative is to get several personal websites, blogs and forums to link to your website you to get the attention of the search engine that other people (or sites) find your site important.

There are several directories that you can include your site in that can be helpful but they should only play a part in your linking strategy. Human edited directories are the most desired like Yahoo Directory and DMOZ as they have the size and scope that search engines trust. Logic being, if they trust your site, then I do to. There are many directories that allow you to input your site information automatically which can be helpful.

If you can post and keep a link on Wikipedia it can be helpful to capture traffic but the weight of page rank will not follow because Wikipedia blocks that aspect of it with No Follow tags on their links. Requesting links from private and public website can be a good strategy as many webmasters like to have the most complete listing of a certain topic.

Getting natural links from a wide variety of pages is extremely important and failure to do so will impede you in your goals. Search engines can store the date that new links are discovered. From that they can determine when an artificial link campaign has occurred. People the buy links for their domain are sure to be discovered and penalized by the search engines. The only way to benefit from incoming links is to have people want to naturally link to your site. Of course you can send people emails making them aware of your site, but do it steadily and over a long period of time.

Blue Backlinks: http://www.bluebacklinks.com - A great website for checking what websites are linking to your website. You can also use it to see who is linking to your competitors, websites you might want to create a relationship with, or websites targeting the customers you want to reach. Websites that link to your competitors are great places to start creating relationships for your website, books, or authors.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Here Wiki, Wiki, Wiki

We have all heard the term two heads are better than one. This day and age we use the term collaboration which means to work with another or others on a joint project. Collaboration is all the rage among corporate executives these days, one such collaborative device is a wiki.

A wiki can allow people on different continents to work together, or it can improve the efficiency of a multi-person office. It's all because wikis encourage collaboration. Wikis, first popularized by Wikipedia, are interactive Web sites that allow multiple writers and editors to produce and distribute content collaboratively. Wiki software automatically tracks revisions and changes, providing a convenient audit trail, and (if necessary) the ability to revert back to previous versions. While Wikipedia may be the best known example, wikis are not only becoming the first place people turn when conducting online research, but also when they're looking to build specialist online communities. Ward Cunningham, the man behind the very first wiki, described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work."

A better description would be a wiki is the simplest collaborative content management system that could possibly work. Now that we know what a wiki is, the question becomes why should anyone use them? What are the benefits? The biggest and most obvious benefit is that wikis are a great source of free information. While not every wiki is free to use, most of the ones found on the web do not charge any money. And, because they are the collaborative work of many different people, they often contain a lot of good information. In many ways, the rise of the wiki has turned the Internet into an easy-to-use library of reference material. But finding a list with all the wikis to search, now there’s a task.

Data Wiki: http://datawiki.googlelabs.com - This service allows you to create a wiki based on structured data. Most wikis are currently based on unstructured data. I haven't tested this service yet, but it seems to offer the possibility of creating a database that you can create, edit, and share (and allow other users to edit and add to). I think that might be a great way to present structured data, like a listing of book printers, a series of recipes, etc. It's not clear right now, though, how you could monetize that content.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Article Submission Sites

If your marketing strategy includes posting press releases on PR posting sites, you may want to also post articles on Article posting sites. There are many places where you can post your articles and pull in all sorts of good traffic. Just like press release posting increases your SEO so does Article posting which translates to giving your site a search engine rank boost. Most people think article marketing is just about getting links. They couldn’t be any more WRONG! Article marketing is about getting your messages (in the form of articles) out to as many prospects as possible in as many ways as possible.

No longer can you submit an article to thousands of article directories and expect the traffic to come pouring in! Whether you're just starting out in article marketing, or you already run an article marketing campaign, you have to learn how it should be done in today's world if you want it to succeed. Over the last couple of years, article marketing and article submission has evolved into a tactical marketing strategy that must be executed properly in order to realize it's full potential.

Below are some article submission sites. These sites will accept, within certain parameters, an article on any topic you want to write on. While others only want business related topics.

Some don't have any particular theme to them, but generally attract a lot of traffic and have high search engine rankings (both good things for you).

1. ezinearticles.com
2. articlesbase.com
3. suite101.com
4. buzzle.com
5. helium.com
6. goarticles.com
7. articlesnatch.com!
8. articlealley.com
9. articledashboard.com
10. selfgrowth.com/articles.html
11. bukisa.com
12. ideamarketers.com
13. amazines.com
14. isnare.com
15. searchwarp.com
16. articlecity.com
17. infobarrel.com
18. sooperarticles.com
19. articleclick.com
20. articlerich.com
21. articlecube.com
22. a1articles.com
23. articlestars.com
24. submityourarticle.com/articles/
25. abcarticledirectory.com
26. web-source.net
27. articlecompilation.com
28. articlesfactory.com
29. articlepool.com
30. EvanCarmichael.com
31. site-reference.com
32. articleslash.net
33. upublish.info
34. acmearticles.com
35. e-articles.info
36. articlenexus.com
37. thewhir.com/find/articlecentral
38. articlesalley.com
39. 990m.com
40. fourpxarticles.com
41. articlecell.com
42. articlebliss.com
43. 365articles.com
44. articlewarehouse.com
45. articlemonkeys.com!
46. articles.everyquery.com
47. thecontentcorner.com 3
48. affsphere.com
49. articlewheel.com
50. goarticles.com
51. biznik.com/articles

Once you write an article for one of these sites, submitting it to the others is pretty easy. They require, for the most part, the same information and have you fill in the same fields.