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.

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.