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  1. Link Building: What Websites and Cities Have in Common

    Every city is different.  Some have multiple
    opportunities for adventure, others are known for a certain culture,
    and some are known for particular types of commerce, but they all have
    one commonality – numerous streets, highways and interstates bringing
    traffic in and out of them. A well-marketed website has a lot of similarities
    with a city. The roads leading into and out of the city are comparable
    to links on a website. And just as having more roads facilitates more
    traffic for a city, the more links to your website, the greater the
    traffic as well, resulting in greater revenue for you.

    Implementing Link Building

    A web link is a connection from one web
    site to another, or even another place in the same website. Link building
    is the process of building a large quantity of incoming links. "Incoming"
    means that another website links to your website, and not the other
    way around. Effective link building is best done by using the following
    approach:

    1. Set aside a regular block
      of time to dedicate to link building.       Although link building is
      not tremendously complicated, it does take time. In addition, it is
      critical to consistently review your link building and actively seek
      more links on a regular basis. Unfortunately, link building is never
      "done" as there are always more things you can do to build
      links, so setting up a regular time devoted to link building will enable
      you to avoid getting complacent with your link building efforts.
    2. Evaluate link building
      partners.        Use tools like the Google Toolbar (with page rank enabled) which identifies what
      search engines think of a sites quality/reputation. The higher the page
      ranks (from 0-10) the more a link from that site to yours is worth in
      boosting your search engine ranking. Just like a positive referral from
      a previous employer would be more valuable to your resume than a referral
      from your mom, websites also have varying levels of value.

      Find potential link building partners
      by searching for phrases that you would like to rank for. You want to
      look for reputable sites, such as professional organizations that offer
      articles and news posts on their site. Then write an article and submit
      it to them to use. If they approve your article, they will most likely
      be happy to credit you at the bottom with a link back to your website.

    1. Use directory services
      such as the       DMOZ Open Directory Project and the Yahoo Directory. These sites feed thousands of other
      directories, so being listed in them will result in building a mountain
      of incoming links to your site over time.
    2. Set up a blog. This
      is one of the best ways to build traffic to your site. It is done by
      creating a lot of good content that other people would want to link
      to. A blog is a great way to informally build pages of content to your
      site over time. Make sure to have your web developer install the blog
      locally on your site if possible (i.e. website.com/blog), rather
      than using a free external blog to get maximum results.
    3. Post articles and press
      releases.       A great way to build links is by writing articles and
      press releases then posting them on numerous article syndication or
      press release websites.
    4. Use social media. Social
      media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn all can be used
      to build more traffic to your site. Experiment with a few social media
      sites, find one that you like and dive in. Become an active participant
      – read posts, answer people’s questions, actively look for opportunities
      to link to other people and for opportunities to promote your blog or
      other articles. However, be careful not to come across as only caring
      about promoting yourself as nothing will turn people off faster than
      that.
    5. Be patient!
      Link building is an ongoing process and it can take time to reap the
      benefits of your hard work, but rest assured that if you keep at it
      you will find significant boosting for your site on search engines.
      And the best part is that most of these things don’t cost you a penny.

    Forms of Link Building:

    There are several forms of link
    building to consider.

    • Contextual links– These are links that are found within large blocks of content. These types of links have high value to search engines.
    • Cross linking – When 2 or more websites simply exchange links, but the sites do not have any relevance
      to one another and is done only for the sake of building links;
      although this used to be a valid and commonly used link building
      practice year ago, this is not highly recommended anymore as the links
      often cancel each other out as far as page rank is concerned.
    • Deep linking– Deep links are links that go to a subpage within a site rather than the site’s home page. These are very valuable when link building.
    • External links– External links simply mean they are linking to a website other than your own.
    • Link bait- Targeting,
      creating, and formatting content to encourage others to direct links to
      that specific page. Often this is done with polls, contests, really
      good content or other materials that other pople find valuable.

    When you take the time to implement link
    building, the roads into your city can become numerous. Yes, link building can be time consuming, but link building is one of
    the keys to high page rankings. The key is to get started, jump in and manage your time wisely!

  2. 3 Great Ways to Analyze Incoming Links to Your Site for SEO

    One critical element of planning for a link building campaign or to do some competitive analysis is to find out how many incoming links you have to your (or a  competitor’s) website and what those links are. There are a ton of great resources out there that help you do this. Here are three free ones that we have found to be very useful.

  3. Improve Your Business Using Twitter and Facebook

    One of the aspects of link building that we tackle for our clients is making sure that they are effectively using social media apps like Facebook and Twitter. These are the two really hot social media apps right now and not getting up to speed on these fabulous services can be a detriment to the success to your business. One of the things I hear a lot is "Those things will never impact my business" and I cringe a little, because the people usually saying that know very little about what these websites actually do. I’m not saying that these sites or any social media is going to double every business’s revenue every time, but it could…and it’s free to use, so why not at least give it a try? Once you know what these services are capable of, I’d be suprised if you don’t see the value in it for your company. Here is a basic description of what these services are and a few reasons why all business owners should be in the know regarding the two currently most popular social media sites out there.

    Facebook for Business

    Facebook is a website that lets you connect to friends by entering the high school and college you attended and finding other people that may have been in your class. You can also enter tons of other information about yourself like where you work, what church you attend, movies you like, etc. and that helps other people to find you and request to be a "friend" of yours. When you become a friend with someone, any updates they post on their account will show up to you when you log in, so you’ll see if they uploaded a new photo from their vacation in Tahiti or if they’ve posted a status update saying they are "on their way to an internet marketing workshop." There are also functions that allow you to post notes (which are similar to blogs), photos, videos, events and even other 3rd party applications that let you play games, rate movies, identify all of the places you’ve ever travelled to and much, much more. Every aspect is centered around other people following what you do on Facebook and commenting on it. For example, if you updated your status saying that you are a Twitter addict, one of your friends may reply and welcome you to the club 😉

    One important aspect of Facebook is that you can create causes, groups, and more importantly "fan pages" for a company or organization that allows other people to become a your "fan." This is a good way to get more exposure for your business, share information about your company and interact on a more personal level with your clients or customers.

    Twitter for Business

    Twitter, in my opinion, is a very simple way for people to get a taste of how social media can affect your business. Twitter is, by definition, a "micro blog." That essentially means it is a way to share very short thoughts with other people. It could be a recommendation of a company, or movie, website or it could be a reply to a post that someone else has made (which is called a "ReTweet.") Blogging can be a very valuable way to build your online presence and establish your authority in your industry but many people are intimidated by the thought if writing a daily, or even weekly article. The great thing about Twitter is you are limited to 140 characters, so all rules of grammar (okay, maybe not ALL ) are thrown out the window in favor of brevity and it requires MUCH less of a time commitment.

    One of the more powerful aspects of Twitter is that people can search for relevant tweets and find people. So if you "Tweet" about a new special that you are offering at your business, someone may be searching on Twitter and find your post and then decide to start following you. Just like becoming a friend of someone on Facebook, when you follow someone on Twitter, it means you will see their posts when you log in, so you can keep up with what they have to say, and they will then see your posts from that point on as well.  This is very powerful for a business owner as you can follow other experts in your industry and grow your knowledge (not to mention more personally connect you with anyone in the world – even the President), but it also establishes you as an expert as well. The key thing to remember is to keep your personal posts to a minimum and try to remain focused on your industry, if you want to keep the attention of your followers. Chances are, they started following you to find out more about your industry expertise than what you had to eat for lunch 🙂 Read our article on Twitter for more information.

    Great, Why Should I Care?

    One interesting development of how people have responded to the increasing popularity of social media is they now check these sites when determining who they want to do business with. Having a Facebook fan page for your business with a ton of fans and positive reviews speaks a wealth about who you are and many people tend to trust this non-biased feedback over brand identity alone. So this means that you need to be careful to put your best foot forward when you post on any social media site, because they are public, afterall.

    Be polite, be relevant and keep it short and sweet.

    If you plan to use Twitter for a great deal of personal updates, great! BUT, create a separate account for you personally that is separate from your business account so you can create a distinction and allow people to follow what they are most interested in – you personally or you professionally.

    Another thing to be wary of is that there are people out there that use these social media apps for sending junk or solicitations. So it is best to get email notifications when new people follow you or become your friend and check them out to make sure you approve their association with you. And if you don’t like what you see, simply block them. 

    In conclusion, these tools are only as good as you make them. If you do not use them, they won’t help you. But if you do use it, it’s important that you keep up with your friends or followers and make sure that you are protecting your brand and actively participating with them. There are a lot of ways to burn your time on the internet, and these two can definitely fit that bill, but as long as you use these with a purpose in mind, you can build your business. Also, you can’t keep up with every social media site out there effectively, so pick a few to stick with. These two mentioned in this article are good ones to start with, and if you are feeling particularly spunky, another good social media site to check out for your business is LinkedIn.

  4. 2 Ways to Find Out if Links to Your Site Carry Value

    There are two things to look for to see if a link TO your website from another website is sending you Pagerank value to boost your position in search engines. Both methods keep search engines from following that link. However, keep in mind that even though a link may not pass Pagerank, no link is a bad one (unless maybe it’s a link from an unscruptulus source), as it can still still drive a live person to your site. Most social media sites use one of these two methods, so they do not provide true links back to your site which improves your ranking in search engines (Links back to your site improve your ranking in search engines – Read more here), BUT there is still value because people can see the link and if they like what they see when they visit, they may elect to manually link to your site themselves or socially bookmark it which shares it with their friends and increases your exposure.

    1. NoFollow – View the source of the website you are on. If you use a
      web browser that allows "View Selection Source", like Firefox, that
      makes this easier. If you use Firefox, highlight the link back to your
      site and right-click and select "View Selection Source." You’ll see
      some HTML code, but you want to look for something that looks like:

      rel="nofollow"

      This tag tells search engines to not follow that link, although people can still click on it.

    2. Redirects – Many sites will use redirects to avoid passing Pagerank
      to your link. You can identify that by turning on the "Status" bar at
      the bottom of your browser if not already on (Look in menu "View –>
      Status Bar") and then hover your mouse over the link on the page
      without clicking on it, look in that bottom status bar to see where the
      link points to. If the site is redirecting, you’ll see something like:

      socialmediasite.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eyoursite%2Ecom

      What this effectively does is links to themselves with a parameter
      telling their site to then forward to your site. Again, search engines
      will not see the redirect to you and instead just sees a link to the
      site linking to you.

  5. 7 Great Articles on Link Building

    Stepforth is a great website with tons of resources on online marketing. Here is a a page of theirs that lists seven really good articles on link building. If you have any interest in improving your ranking in search engines by building links to your website, give these a read:

    http://www.stepforth.com/blog/top-posts-on-links.php

  6. Another Good Site to Syndicate Articles

    3 Things to Look for When Syndicating Content

    One of the best ways to market your website and get more traffic and links pointing to it is by writing great articles about your field and then syndicating them. We’re always on the lookout for good places to syndicate content. But there’s so many sites to choose from…how do you know where your time is being well spent? Read on to find out!

    We recently ran across a site, Go Articles,  that has a good page rank, allows links back to your website (and they don’t use nofollow tags) and is free to post to – the three main things you should look for in an online syndication site.

    Page Rank

    Google assigns a page rank from 0-10 on all pages on the internet. That score gives you an idea of how well linked that page is. Building your own page rank depends on you getting links from other sites that have a decent page rank, which you can find out by using the Google Toolbar for your browser.

    Links

    Although it is suspected that you do get some minimal boost to your site for be simply mentioned on another website, but actually getting a link from another site to yours is where the real value is. But, in addition to having a link from a site with a decent page rank, you want to make sure that the link to you does not use the rel="nofollow" tag. That tag basically tells Google not to follow it, therefore removing any "link juice" that you may get from that incoming link. To check a site to see if they use nofollow tags on their links view your page source in a web browser and wade through the jibbersh until you see something like:

    <a  href="http://www.yoursite.com">This is a link</a>

    What you don’t want to see is this:

    <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.yoursite.com">This is a link</a>

    If you do, don’t bother getting a link from there. It’s mostly a waste of your time and you could be spending it at sites with more link "bang for the buck." Read this post for more on link building.

    Free

    There are plenty of places to pay to syndicate articles or post press releases, but in our experience the paid ones are only marginally better than the free ones, so if you can find free ones that meet this three-rule criteria,they are a good place to start.

    Also, don’t forget to check out an earlier post of ours about syndication that lists WAY more places to syndicate your content at! Note, every site in that list has not been checked for our above three-rule criteria, so use at your own risk!

  7. 5 Ways to Market Your Site Using Social Bookmarking

    Social bookmarking is a relatively new concept that allows people who visit a website to share information that they find with their friends or associates that they are connected to in a variety of social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious and more.

    This post will cover 5 ways that you can get more traffic to your website using social bookmarking as well as bleed over into link building in general as the two are closely related.

    1) Make it easy to share. Make sure every page on your site that you want to get links to has an easy way for people to share it with others – news articles, pages, ecommerce products, etc. There are a number of tools out there, such as Sharethis.com that will give you a snippet of code that you can easily drop in to any page on your site. Also, many content management systems have this feature built in.

    2) Share your own articles. Once you write a killer article or press release, share it with your group of contacts in the social media sites that you participate in. Don’t be afraid to endorse your new article on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

    3) Bookmark other sites. Use a service such as Delicious to develop your own directory of useful links. Other people who trust your opinion will see what other sites you’ve found to be interesting. This also works with link promotion sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati (if it’s a blog post) and many, many other sites.

    4) Comment on other people’s bookmarks. If other people are alredy drawing traffic from a great link, post a comment if you can to get your branding associated with that person’s success as well. This is great for blogs in particular. Comment on other people’s posts (but keep it pleasant!)and offer additional thoughts or just some encouragement.

    5) Ask people for links. If you know that your article or post would be particularly of interest to another website community, trade organization, etc., ask them if they would mind linking to your article. In fact, use our free link-building tool to make sure you get the best formatting for that link. If it is truly a good article or post, there’s a good chance you’ll get good links to it.

    These are just a few tips to demonstrate how you can leverage social bookmarks to better promote your site. Stay tuned for more tips!

  8. Page Progressive Now Offers Internet Marketing Writing

    Page Progressive is now offering article and press release writing specifically geared towards drawing more traffic to your website. This is accomplished by writing interesting articles and press releases that include key search phrases that you want to build an association with your website and then syndicating that content on the internet in order to get as many incoming links as possible to your site.

    “Well-written press releases and articles are one of the best ways to build quality links to your website,” says Daniel Trimpey, CEO of Page Progressive.

    This new service adds to the list of several services available for small businesses in Raleigh, NC who want to use internet marketing to acheive better exposure for their company.

    —

    For more details, you can contact Page Progressive online here or call at 919-374-3014.

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