Dyno Domains Center

Many webmasters spend a lot of time tweaking their sites for the search engines because they think that search engines will bring them the most traffic for the time and money spent. It is a good use of time but combine a link building campaign and competitive intelligence and any webmaster can triple the traffic they currently have. With good competitive intelligence you may triple your conversion rate as well by bringing very targeted traffic.

Strategic Link Building

Link building is directly related to search engine optimization. Because of this many webmasters fail to think about link building as a strategy of its own separate from search engine optimization. Strategic link building can bring in a lot of targeted traffic to your website. There are four good methods for obtaining quality links. Each method becomes more powerful.

The first method is simple and easily implemented. You go surfing for sites that you like, and would appeal to your visitors, and you ask for a link. It helps to offer a reciprocal link in exchange but it is not always necessary.

To get results, you’ll need to send your request to about ten sites for every one positive response you get. Once you get some experience, these odds will improve. So, expect to do a little work. The results will be worth it.

Please Note: In approaching the prospective website’s webmaster, make sure you are sending them a relevant link request and make it personal. Let them know you visited their site and why a link would be valuable. There are a few link building software programs that send spam to webmasters. You want to make sure that the email you send is sincere. Link building is a legitimate marketing strategy and approached ethically it can have significant impact on your bottom line. It’s worth taking the time to do it right.

The second link strategy is also very powerful. It is also simple. Submit articles to free content sites to be included in other websites and ezines. The free content sites will post your articles on their websites and offer your article to webmasters to reprint on their sites and newsletters. This is a great strategy. The reason it works so well is that each article has a resource box that contains your website name and a link. The article can be reprinted only as long as it also contains the resource box. If you have a popular subject, your article and link can get published on thousands of websites this way.

And talk about targeted traffic. If you’re selling fly fishing rods to an upscale audience you can write an article for that audience and by the very nature of the article it will get picked up by websites that attract your clientele. They will read your article and click over to your site. This is quality targeted traffic.

As you have probably already thought about, the links are also great for your search engine rankings. The link in your article is surrounded by your site keywords. The article itself will populate the search engines and the links to your site will support higher page rank. It’s all good.

The third strategy is very similar and that is to write a press release. If it is newsworthy a good press release can do wonders. It will not only get published on many websites you may get a few interviews and be on TV or in a national magazine.

One relatively sure way to get some publicity is to hand deliver your press release to your local media. They like local stories and if they like you, you are bound to get some good press.

There are two important points on using press releases to promote your business. First, be persistent and keep submitting new press releases. If you are creative there are many newsworthy stories about any business. You just have to find them and promote them. The second point is to be personal. “The Media” sounds big and impersonal. There are thousands of media outlets and getting to all of them is nearly impossible, if not cost prohibitive. Well, that is one of the nice aspects of getting press. The best way to get a national story is to start local and build. The Media prefers to get their news from the news. If you have a story of national interest and it is first published in your local newspaper, you can bet that many astute editors will pick it up and take it national before you know it.

So, get to know your local press. They’re good people.

The fourth strategy has been around since the internet began. It is to post to forums and news groups. It’s easy and fun plus the links are valid and hold a lot of weight. The search engines like forum post links a lot. In fact, the best way to submit your site to the search engines is to post your website link in a popular forum. The forum will be spidered within 72 hours and your site will begin the submission process on it’s own.

Here too, stay on topic and be honest about your posts. You can buy a spam poster and post to ten thousand forums automatically but, being about the oldest trick in the book, it will get you in a lot of trouble. It’s not good business. Seek out forums you like and get involved. That’s all there is to it.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence will supercharge your link building campaign.

Wouldn’t it be great to know what links are sending traffic to your competitor’s website? Wouldn’t it be great to know which sites were sending the most traffic to your competition? How about what keywords drive the traffic to your competitor’s websites? There are ways to know.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A lot of knowledge can be explosive. You can take your pick here. There are two methods. Both methods work to identify the links that exist for other websites and allow you to target them. The first method will get you going and the second method will give you a mighty edge.

The first method is free and easy. Download and install the Google toolbar. Once installed, you will see a link called “Backward Links”. Now, go to a website that appeals to your target market and use the “Backwards Links” toolbar link. Google will show you a list of websites that link to the site you’re visiting. This is a great place to begin your link building campaign.

While you are working this list of websites you can begin another list. As you visit the websites look for a link directory on the site you’re visiting. Once in a while you will find a site with an industry directory or a resource page that has links to related websites. This is another nice list for you to work. This method will generate a lot of quality links and bring you visitors that are looking for what you have to offer. If you’re critical of the sites you send requests to, you will build a network of quality sites sending you targeted visitors.

The second method is to employ some competitive intelligence tools. Would you like to find out which sites are responsible for sending traffic to your competitor’s pages, including search engines and the search keywords that were used? Competitive Intelligence tools provide you with the means to monitor your competitor’s web sites and to identify their major traffic sources. By using these tools you maximize the use of your time by targeting quality websites. It is easy to see the value here. Knowing what sites to target is valuable knowledge indeed.

Enough said about competitive intelligence. I’m sure you’re more than just intrigued.

Link building using competitive intelligence should be considered an integral part of your ongoing marketing effort. It should not be a quick test that is shoved aside because it did not have an immediate return on investment. It works and it will grow with time. It is one of the best investments you can make in marketing your website. Done in earnest, you just might consider it more effective and more deserving of your time and attention than search engine optimization or any other online marketing method six months from now.

Resource Links:
Competitive Intelligence Tools
Digital Point Forums

- JD
Blog About Retail

Every webmaster who has personally tried promoting his or her site understands in some sense the value of reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking refers to the agreement between website owners to mutually link to each others’ sites in order to increase both exposure to each others’ visitors as well as link popularity to search engines. Traditionally, this process has been very labor-intensive involving a number of steps to initiate contact, establish acceptable link parameters, and verify and police the reciprocal linking arrangement. Now, a controversial new linking tactic has emerged called “the cooperative reciprocal linking network.”

The purpose of these reciprocal linking networks is ostensibly to utilize “unused advertising space available on the web.” Here’s how it works: the site owner puts a bit of code on each page of his or her site and it serves up hyper-linked text or graphic ads promoting the sites of other cooperative members. Each time a coded page is loaded, the ads change. This is much like how Google Adsense ads work except there is no correlation between the pages’ topics and what ads are served–in other words, the ads are not contextual.

Although dynamically generated, these text ad links can be crawled by search engine spiders. In this sense, the ad linking network can be thought of as an automated method of reciprocal linking capable of providing a boost to each member site’s link popularity.

Participation in the reciprocal linking network is generally free (hence the term “cooperative”) and what one gets out of it depends on what one gives into it. If a webmaster agrees to display five ads per page and his or her site has 100 pages indexed by Google, then that webmaster’s site is given a weight of, say, 500 (5 x 100). The higher one’s “weight,” the more often one’s ads will show on other sites in the network. In order to be an eligible page, the page has to be indexed. The reciprocal linking network checks this using Google’s application program interface or API.

So what’s the controversy? Reciprocal linking network critics contend that because the links are crawl-able by search engine robots and the fact that ads may be irrelevant to the page’s topic area, this is akin to having some sort of reciprocal link farm or scheme designed to influence the web page’s link popularity and search engine ranking. Indeed, one well-known individual’s web page showed up for a while in Google at No. 4 for the term, “eBay” purely because he designed his link ads so that the anchor texts had the word “eBay” in them. Carried across thousands of reciprocal linking participants in the network, it had automated the reciprocal linking process and, at the same time, boosted his page’s link popularity for that particular term.

One would think that this is a bad thing from the search engines’ perspective, right? Not quite. GoogleGuy, the unofficial Google spokesman who regularly posts to website marketing forums, responded to a thread at one forum on this topic. GoogleGuy said he was concerned about linking out to “bad neighborhood” participants in the network (like some Polish site that was apparently cloaking the cooperative ads). GoogleGuy did not say that the network was bad because it had the potential of manipulating rankings, rather he said the worry was “bad neighborhoods.” So, does that mean that if the bad neighborhood problem was under control then the reciprocal linking networks are sanctioned? Maybe…

Here’s how I look at these cooperative reciprocal linking networks: what if Google didn’t exist? What if no search engine existed? What would I do to advertise my site? I would have to participate in reciprocal linking with other sites. But reciprocal linking willy-nilly would not cut it; it would have to be targeted, topic-based reciprocal linking. I would link reciprocally with other like sites. Would I participate in reciprocal linking networks if there were no search engines? Absolutely! It would greatly ease my reciprocal linking time. But the reciprocal linking networks are untargeted as they are currently configured-this is clearly something the operators need to address.

In conclusion, reciprocal linking via cooperative ad networks is a great idea. Google and the other search engines should not have any issues with them in concept. But concept is not reality; in reality, people are joining these networks and trading “weight” to influence link popularity and rankings in the search engines. So, it’s not a perfect solution to the busy webmaster’s reciprocal link management problems. Is participating in a reciprocal link network spamming the search engines? I don’t believe so because the search engines have not clearly defined exactly everything that is or isn’t a spamming technique, and in this business, whether a technique constitutes spamming or not often comes down to a question of degree.

(c) 2005 Philip Liu – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Philip Liu is a freelance author and publisher currently based in New York City. Philip publishes regularly on his websites, Cell Phone News + Reviews (focusing on cell phone news, rumors and reviews from around the world), and DTVScoop – Plasma, LCD TV Reviews + News (focusing on digital television news and reviews).