Building Inbound Links

Webs 4 Christ Christian Web Hosting & Christian Web Site Design has found this great article by Adam J. Thompson to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 900 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster tools area.

Arguably, the hardest part of gaining top search engine rankings is building quality backlinks pointing to your site. Getting a sufficient quantity of quality links is a challenge. In this article, we'll discuss a few methods that can help you build more quality links.

Method #1: Manual Link Exchanges Link Quality: Medium Link Exchanges, or link swapping, is an industry standard way of building incoming links. Very simply, you agree to link to link to site XYZ in return for them linking to your site.

I highly recommend that you use software to manage your reciprocal links. A good piece of software will ensure that all of your link partners continue linking to you, & will automatically organize links by category. I recommend SolvoLink, which you can download free at http://www.free-link-exchange-software.com There are others, such as Links Manager, but you have to buy them. SolvoLink is good enough for the average webmaster.

Once you install a link exchange management script on your site, you will need to find webmasters with sites related to yours that want to swap links. Here are a few free tools that you can use to locate other webmasters to exchange links with:
value-exchange.sitesell.com www.linkalizer.com www.addurldirectory.com

Method #2: Articles Link Quality: High Article marketing is an excellent way of getting free, high-quality links pointing back to your site. Here is how it works: You write a informative article sharing your expertise in an area. Include a signature in your article that includes links to your site. Then submit it to article distribution directories. Other webmasters will use your article as content for their site, & include the links to your site.

To get a list of sites that you can submit your articles to, go to www.internetsuccesskey.com I update this list occasionally as I find new sites.

Method #3: Buy Links Link Quality: Varies You can buy links, either one-by-one, or in quanities. You should be cautious buying large quantities of links, as you could be penalized if the search engines did not like it. Also, most links bought in quantity are very low quality. On the other hand, buying links individually can be very expensive. Buying links, though, is an option you should at least keep in mind.

These three link building methods are the three most dependable methods I have used. Use these methods, & I promise that you will have more inbound links than ever before!

About the author:
Adam J. Thompson Adam is a full-time internet marketer. Visit his site www.internetsuccesskey.com for more free internet marketing articles.

Simple Strategies For Surviving A Google Dance

Webs 4 Christ Christian Web Hosting & Christian Web Site Design has found this great article by Titus Hoskins to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 900 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster tools area.

Google is dancing again! A full tilt all out boogie - a long drawn out rumble somewhere near cursor heaven. My own keywords are going up, down and out the door. Take your pick. Just want the bloody thing to stop. My nerves are shot... three years of hard work may just go down the drain and there's no end in sight!

Fellow webmasters will recognize my slight desperation, my total sense of unease when Google dances. It all has to do with pre-conditioning, psych majors will know this, I am well conditioned to react. I have been burnt horribly by Google dances in the past so my panic is almost palatable. Forget Pavlov's dog, when Google dances, webmasters like me salivates.

And Google is really dancing this time, Jagger has nothing on this baby. Nobody dances like Google, even puts Seinfeld's Elaine to shame. And if you're new to the webmaster's favorite folly, a Google dance happens with Google adjusts its ranking algorithm, causing a ripple effect and adjustments in the rankings of keywords. Sites move up or down. Previous major Google dances have been called Florida, Austin, Bourbon...

When Google dances, webmasters sweat bullets. And it's not all in their heads. It's not psychosomatic. Horror stories abound, about honest hard working webmasters (not a black hat to be
seen) suddenly waking up to find their site or sites gone from Google. Thousands of daily visitors/customers to their site vanish in an algorithmic fog overnight. Swift. Brutal. Painful.

Gone, top ranking keywords nowhere to be seen. Gone, visitors, visitors, visitors. Gone, sales, sales, sales...

More times than not, the sites come back or regain their positions (rankings for popular keywords - for the totally uninitiated, keywords or keyword phrases are what people type into search engines to find what they're looking for), keywords are the conerstones of the whole Internet. Without them, the Internet as we know it, would not work.

Mastering Google means mastering your site's keywords or phrases. Get a top ten SERPs ranking for your keywords and changes are very good you will have a successful site.
Webmasters work for years getting their site's keywords up into the top keyword ranking spots. Countless fortunes have been made by those who have mastered the game. Countless fortunes have tumbled when Google dances.

Of course, the sensible thing to do is for all webmasters to unite and bring Google down a peg or two. At least in our own minds, if not in the real world. Don't place so much importance on Google. Yes, it's very important, but snap out of it. The more webmasters whine and moan about Google's erratic dances, algorithm and rankings - the more power we are giving Google.

Why is Google still so important to webmasters? MSN and Yahoo are gaining ground but Google is still the top dog and here's
why: As far as the search engine market goes, whether it's wearing a halo or a cursor, Google is still the only game in town. According to Alexa, a company that tracks web traffic, the top three sites on the Web are 1-Yahoo, 2-MSN, and 3-Google.
However, when you compare where people go on these sites - search.yahoo.com accounts for only 9% of Yahoo's traffic and search.msn.com only 7% of MSN's total traffic; whereas most of Google's traffic is search traffic. This is a big distinction.

Once burnt, twice shy. Years ago, the Florida Update totally wiped my site from the Google Radar. Hence my total apprehension when one of these dances comes along. I wanted my site to survive the next Google dance so I put some simple strategies into place that would hopefully help me weather this and future Google dances. Strategies that you might also find helpful to fight your own private battle with Google. Here's what I did and what you can also do:

Find A Good SEO Expert

Find a good SEO expert and have him or her in your corner. I found Brad Callen. One of a very few people who truly understands Google and knows how it works. I learned much of what makes Google really tick from Brad. I advise you to find or hire a SEO expert like Brad to help you out with your site or sites. Just the fact of having a SEO expert in your corner makes handling Google a little bit easier.

Link Only To Safe Sites

One of the simplest ways to keep on the good side of Google is to make sure all links on your site link only to sites that have a PR4 or over. Don't link to bad neighborhoods, avoid linkfarms like the plague.

One Keyword To A Page

The major mistake most webmasters make - they don't focus on one keyword phrase per page. Try to keep your pages separate, write on one or two closely related keyword phrases for each webpage and you will see a big improvement from Google. Don't keyword spam but sprinkle your keyword phrase and variations of it throughout your copy.

RSS To The Rescue

Creating an RSS feed and Blog for your site's major keywords is as simply as starting a free blog with Blogger.com (owned by
Google) - it can be done in a few minutes.

I favor using Blogger because it now has the Google Blog search bar at the top. Blog search will bring in a lot of traffic and your content is instantly indexed in Google. What more can you ask for. Whatever you do, don't underestimate RSS - it's going to play a major role in the Internet of the near future.
Especially when Microsoft comes out with its Longhorn browser which will be RSS empowered.

Embrace Article Marketing

If you can string two sentences together start writing articles on the major keywords or topics of your site. Place your links in the resource box of your articles and submit them to online article directories like ezinearticles.com or buzzle.com. Write helpful 'how-to' articles and other webmasters will place your articles on their sites and you will get an ambundance of one-way links back to your site. Google loves these kinds of links and since the sites picking up your articles will all be related to your site's topic - these will be relevant links.

Customer/Visitor Focused Content

Besides high PR links to your sites, Google also loves content.
Write unique content that's related to your site's topic and write a lot of it. It's the main reason anyone bothers to come to your site in the first place, so make sure you have good original content. Add high quality articles from sources you respect and your visitors will have another reason to visit your site.

Keep saying to yourself: content is king, content is king. Make sure you put that belief into practice and Google will reward you nicely. Well, maybe. Nine times out of ten.

Actually, this time my site jumped to PR5 and my Google backlinks went up. Also some of my keywords are up but most have stayed the same. Overall, my traffic from Google remains the same which is very worrisome, if I moved up to PR5 - my traffic should theoretically rise also. I saw a dramatic rise in traffic when my site went to PR4.

Such are the little puzzling mine-fields, whether intentionally or not (I can't believe anyone could be this sadistic!) Google throws every webmaster's way. Over time, if you let it get to you, it will drive you stark raving bonkers. Especially, if you are seriously building an income, lifestyle and well-being around the Internet and by default Google.

For every webmaster, Google is a never ending endurance race of strategies, positioning and planning. Keeping one step ahead of this search engine while keeping your eyes peeled for the men in white, is a never ending nightmare, I mean struggle. One every webmaster must fight and win on their own terms. Follow the simple steps above, and you will be better prepared for the next Google dance.

About the author:
Everyone is profiting from Google, find out how you can too!
Click here: Google Cash File

Are your Articles Creating an Avalanche of Traffic?

Webs 4 Christ Christian Web Hosting & Christian Web Site Design has found this great article by Scott J. Patterson to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 900 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster tools area.

One of the most popular ways to market an online business is by writing web articles. Unfortunately because of this growing popularity, many webmasters are discovering that it is getting more difficult to get ezines and directories to publish their work. As a result, this hurts their web-traffic and ultimately their bottom-line.

So how can you ensure that your articles will reach the maximum amount of potential web visitors?

The s*cret is to market your articles like you would with every other facet of your online business. It is important to be proactive and build momentum on your articles. Below I list a few simple ways that you can do this:

Submit to Article Directories

The best place to initially submit your articles are to Article Directories. Since many publishers of websites, blogs, and ezines frequent these sites, your article will be quickly exposed to people who have a large amount of traffic.

Contact Article Lists

After submitting to article directories, you should then submit your work to article lists. If you are not familiar with them, article lists are newsletters on Yahoo and Topica that allow you to email your article directly to publishers of web content. When a submission comes from an article list, publishers are more inclined to trust the article and use the material.

Search through Ezine Directories

Once you have submitted your article to directories and mailing lists, you should then focus on contacting individual publishers. The first group you should contact are the publishers of ezines that are related to your topic. You can locate these individuals on ezine directory websites. Most of the time these sites will list contact information and whether the publisher accepts articles. Then all you have to do is email each one and ask them to publish your article.

Contact Individual Websites

Another great place to submit your articles are to the individual websites related to your topic. Since these sites focus on providing valuable information to their readers, you can easily persuade them publish your work. To avoid wasting a lot of unnecessary work, you should only contact sites where the readers would have an interest in the topic of your article.

Email Old Publishers

After writing a few articles, you will notice that they are used by many webmasters and ezine publishers. A great way to quickly get out a new article is to contact them and see if they want to publish your content. Usually these individuals are more likely to use your article, because they have already shown trust in your writing.

Give the Article to your Affiliates

If you run an affiliate-program, you can help your affiliates by giving them your articles as a way to help promote your site. When you contact your affiliates, let them know that they can substitute your link with theirs in the resource box of the article. That way, they are given a monetary incentive to use your web article.

Create an Article RSS Feed

If you have enough articles, you can create an RSS Feed that people can use for their website. Then every time you create an article, you post it on your RSS feed and the subscribing websites have new content for their visitors. By utilizing RSS feeds for article distribution, you can easily expose your article to thousands of potential website visitors.

Getting your article to the maximum amount of publishers is an important step to getting an avalanche of web-traffic. Instead of writing just one article and sitting back waiting for people to come, it is important to continuously market your web articles. If you make it a point to build on the work of each article, your daily website-traffic will steadily increase.

About the author: Scott J. Patterson is a self-proclaimed Dunce, yet last month he earned $12,124 from one of his online businesses. To find out how YOU can do the same, download his fr*e ebook- The Secret-Guide to Home Businesses

Microsoft and PPC Advertising -- Not Quite a Flirt Anymore

Webs 4 Christ Christian Web Hosting & Christian Web Site Design has found this great article by Iulia Pascanu to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 900 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster tools area.

Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) face new competition from Microsoft's newly released PPC program, MSN AdCenter.

Currently, MSN still displays search ads from Yahoo! Search Marketing, through a contract that runs until July 2006, but the new technology from Microsoft is just a few steps away from being fully implemented. In the first phase, MSN AdCenter was put to the test in France and Singapore and it was launched to public access in Singapore on August 31 and in France on September 26. The results from the two pilot countries were very promising so, apparently, the paid search program will go into beta testing in the United States in October 2005.

Advertisers love the PPC system rather than others because it's cheaper and more targeted; they only pay when their ads get clicks. Until now the two major choices for PPC were Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. However, when a third major competitor turns up, one can only hope that cost per click (CPC) gets cheaper, thus lowering the advertising costs.

As to what the new service features, the competition promises to be tough, especially in the research and targeting tools area. The advertisers are able to specify what kind of audience they wish to target by demographics - geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day - and the system can provide keywords to be used in search campaigns. All these data can be accessed before the advertisers place their ads.

Even more, it seems that the Adcenter program will provide feedback related to keywords performance and advertisers will be able to switch to more effective ones during the ad campaigns. Eric Hadley, senior director of advertising and marketing for MSN, says the new platform is meant to help users drive ROI from a search campaign beyond just knowing if somebody clicked on it, but also knowing if someone is likely to click on it.

As for Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, they both provide geographical targeting but they don't have demographics features. Meanwhile, the new AdCenter platform goes more towards customer profiling and behavior.

Search engine advertisers can't wait to see their keyword based campaigns become even more targeted. However, they'll have to wait a little bit longer, because there's no serious encouragement that the full-scale deployment of AdCenter will be possible before the end of this year.

About the author: Iulia Pascanu writes for http://www.adwordshowtos.com/ where you can find how to guides and practical advice on improving the performance of your Google Adwords campaigns.

Bulk Email Marketing Is The Easy Way To Get Clients

Webs 4 Christ Christian Web Hosting & Christian Web Site Design has found this great article by Christopher Kyalo to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 900 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster tools area.

Without bulk email marketing, no online marketing program is complete. Even more important, no Internet marketing program can hope to be effective without any bulk email marketing program.

Despite all the problems caused by SPAM and even when it is clear that it has become harder than ever to effectively use email for marketing, bulk email marketing remains king and one of the most effective tools in any online marketer's arsenal.

The reason is simple. The World Wide Web is a colossal jungle - and increasingly so - where it is easy to disappear and never get noticed. Only email, and more so bulk email marketing, can help a small entrepreneur attract some attention and have a fighting chance of being a success.
Your online writing business is no exception to this rule and the single main reason why you do not have any clients yet is simply because you have not yet been able to attract enough attention. And most probably you have never used bulk email marketing.

Bulk Email Marketing Only Works With Opt-in Lists The reason why most folks ignore bulk email marketing is simply because the moment you mention it, most people think of SPAM.
SPAM or mass unsolicited email is illegal, but bulk email marketing is perfectly legal. The difference is that in legal bulk email marketing; only opt-in email lists are used. In short this means that the people receiving your email have all opted to do so.

Does Anybody Read Bulk Email Marketing? Which brings us to the next question. Why would somebody opt to receive email that everybody else does not want? Actually the only way this can happen is if the stuff being emailed is highly targeted and of great interest to the receiver. This happens when the opt-in email list is compiled from people who have already shown a deep enough interest in the subject to visit a certain web site.

People are basically interested in things for selfish reasons which as a good marker you will have to identify and address, if you hope to meet your objectives.

In our case here it is rather easy and straightforward to identify what it is that our potential market wants. As an online writer, you are providing quality content, which is critical in helping anybody make money online. So the way to attract traffic to your articles, blogs or web sites is to talk about how your client can make more money by using your content.

It's really as simple as that. Once you start generating this kind of traffic, all you need to do is find a way to harvest emails from folks who would like to be regularly updated on this subject. If you stay focused on your subject and your prospect's motivation and provide interesting and genuinely useful information, your emails will be read eagerly and enthusiastically. This is the only way to make bulk email marketing effective for your online writing business.

Bulk Email Marketing Will Attract Repeat Visits And Business Using bulk email marketing to attract attention to your articles on online writing is the most effective way to turn prospects into clients. Let's face it; it is highly unlikely that somebody visiting your site for the first time will give you business. It happens but it is rare. What is more likely to happen is that a regular visitor gets more and more familiar with your blog or site and on the seventh visit or so, decides to try you out.

Bulk email marketing is the most effective way of ensuring those valuable repeat visits.

About the author: Christopher Kyalo makes a living online, marketing his various services. Read the rest of this article at one of his blogs; http://100grandonlinewriters.blogspot.com/2005/10/bulk-email-marketing-is-easy-way-to.html He can be reached at strongwallafrica at yahoo.com

7 Shopping Tips For Smart Affiliate Marketing ROI

Webs 4 Christ Christian Web Hosting & Christian Web Site Design has found this great article by Marige O'Brien to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 900 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster tools area.

For affiliate Marketers (AMs) success is all about investing in effective advertising. That sounds simple enough. Except that, for every successful AM, there are dozens who never get past the "first base" of making an income (no matter how small) from their efforts.
Why not?

Because, no matter what the elements of any advertising campaign,one vital factor is knowing how to choose the best, most cost-effective products (advertising tools), for the investment dollar. In short, they need to learn how to shop smart.

While "smart shopping" is a term usually reserved for back-to-school moms or the choice of a ripe melon (in which case, the ladies definitely have it all over the guys in this segment of the business), for an AM to break out and start showing a profit, they must adopt the same, basic principles. They must find good, cost-effective, yet quality products and services. Here, then, are the basics of smart Shopping, Affiliate

Marketer-style:

1. THE WORLD (WIDE WEB) IS YOUR OYSTER No matter the service -- whether it's lead generators, auto-responders, links, ad trackers, you-name-it -- when looking for a product or service, enjoy the advantages of the competitive marketplace. In other words, shop around. The time is past of being blindly led, either by recommendations, past experience or, worst of all, habit. Realize the potential and look around because every day, just as in any other aspect of the internet, new advertising competitors are joining the ranks, with fresh ideas, competitive pricing, new or better offerings. For example, while many still swear by such lead generators as Lead Factory and Cutting Edge Media, SimplerLeads.com has stepped in to offer true high-quality, double opt-in leads, plus offer their own auto-responding system and auto-mail system for true auto-pilot access-- all at rates lower than the competition.

2. INVEST NOW, IT PAYS LATER Invest the time now to research and study the various companies and it will pay off richly later.
Pick a few different companies, research them, get familiar with the various features of all of them. Or, even more importantly, features that some companies have while others don't.
In doing all this -- and, yes, it often takes a week or two -- a marketer not only benefits from the education, but can can also gain a clear perspective of what's available and a product versus pricing comparison.

3. ASK AWAY-- EMAILS TO CUST SVC Never be afraid to ask questions. Even stupid ones. It's all part of the educational process. And that's what Customer Service -- bless their CS little hearts! -- are there for. And, too, CS gives a marketer a good idea of the quality of the company. It a good idea to note their turn around time. By and large, companies go out of their way for their newest and/or prospective customers. So if their response is anything less than stellar, keep looking. After all, if they treat new customers shabbily, how will they treat existing customers. Note, however, two things about CS: 1) They MAY have a good reason for a poor response rate (such giving preference to existing customers); 2) Never bother a company with truly silly questions. Don't, for instance, ask their cost, when it is clearly visible. Find questions that are relevent and genuinely add to your information. Then wait for the response.

4. NOTES, NOTES, NOTES While it sometimes happens that one company stands out among the rest, it's more common for the differences to be slight or the offers varied enough to leave a marketer dizzy. So note-taking becomes essential in the research process. For anyone who never kept good notes in school, the marketing version is simply a matter of deciding on the key factors in the proposed business, then keeping track of those factors from prospective business to business.

5. COMPARE COST VS. SERVICE This is when those notes become elemental in the process. Once several different companies have been explored and notes compiled, it simply becomes a matter of choosing which company offers the best product/service for the money.

6. TRIAL PERIOD Once chosen, the process is far from complete, however. As the old saying goes, "the proof is in the pudding," meaning that a marketer will see how a company/service performs only once they begin using it.

The next step is to follow a company closely for the first 1-3 weeks, making a note of any problems, delays, etc., that might arise. This doesn't necessarily kill a company's possible success, but a bad experience at this point does not bode well. If there is a continued or repeated problem, the company should be re-evaluated, based on the new information.

7. REGULAR REVIEW Okay, so the AM has all the marketing they need, the business is well-established and the advertising has performed well. The AM's smart shopping has been successful and the job is done, right? Wrong.

As mentioned in Tip #1, above, the market is constantly changing and so are the advertising options available. Plus, while a company may perform well initially, their performance could change. Sometimes those changes are sudden and dramatic. But more often they experience a gradual decline that only becomes discernable when analyzed overa period of time.
So, unless a marketer decides to *opt-out* themselves, it is essential to continuously monitor and regularly review their advertiser's performance. And, when necessary, begin the process of smart-shopping all over again.

Does it ever end? Expert marketers know this is just one part of the on-going process known as affiliate marketing.

About the author: Marige O'Brien has worked as a writer, web designer and, most recently, affiliate marketer. Her own website can be found at www.trackermo.com, where she actively lists the best opportunities and affiliate tools available.