| Back Linking This month, let's talk about how Back Linking, or a link campaign, will help your website gain higher rankings with the search engines. Back linking involves getting other relevant websites to create links to your website. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Just send out requests to other web site owners asking them to link to your site, you in turn link to theirs and VIOLA: instant web site success. Ah, but it's not that easy. Last month, I shared with you my tale of the search of back links going horribly awry. A poor unsuspecting web site owner who had registered his domain name with Go Daddy found himself in a no win situation. His link request sent to another site was reported as S-P-A-M to his domain name registrar. He found himself without the use of his 24 domain names and facing a $4,776 ransom request for their safe return. That was just one of many pot holes on the road to successful back linking. This month, we'll look at bad neighborhoods. When I was a kid on vacation with my family, I could be assured that my father would make a wrong turn and we would end up in the worst neighborhood any city has to offer. The tell-tale signs that we were entering a bad area were easy to spot. From my vantage point in the back seat, I learned to quickly recognize the deteriorating condition of the roadside buildings and the increasing frequency of graffiti, not to mention the appearance and demeanor of the residents, as a prelude to war in the front seat of the car. What many web site owners find surprising is that those "bad neighborhoods" also exist in the digital world, however unlike their "real world" counter parts, the signs of an internet "bad neighborhood" aren't as easy to spot. While in the "real world" bad neighborhoods occupy a geographical area, online it's not that easy. It's possible for two sites to reside on the same IP address and one can be deemed a "good" neighborhood while another finds itself categorized as a "bad" neighborhood. So if it's not physical location of the web site, what determines a "bad neighborhood?" One of the defining characteristics of an internet "bad neighborhood" web site is links. It's a matter of quality not quantity when it comes to back links. Key factors in defining a web site as a "bad neighborhood" include: -Too many links. A web site with hundreds of thousands of links may be deemed a "link farm" by the search engines. Link farms include lots of links but little information. I'm sure you've seen them, those sites where there is just one hyperlink after another. There is no text surrounding the link to "define" it, so if you happen upon the page, you'll find yourself clicking on those links at your own peril So your web site's link on a page of dozens, even hundreds of links is going to be viewed as a link from a "bad neighborhood." -Too random links. A web site with hundreds of links to coaching web sites is viewed differently by the search engines that a web site with hundreds of links to hundreds of different and random web sites. Other techniques that will get a site the dreaded "bad neighborhood" moniker include spam, both the email variety and the search engine variety. If a site is blacklisted for spam, then it is automatically deemed a "bad neighborhood" web site. However, there's another sort of spam and that's called "spamming the search engines." Spamming the search engines is basically using unethical techniques to get a web site to rank highly with the search engines. Sometimes known as "black hat" techniques, these include some ingenious tricks such as setting text so that it matches the background color of the page. That way, the search engines "see" the text in the HTML code, but the human visitor is unaware that the keywords are littering the page and the code. Links from sites that engage in black hat techniques WILL hurt your standings with the search engines. So what do the search engines like to see when it comes to back links? Search engines prefer to see links to your website coming from websites where the page content is relevant to yours. For instance, if your web site talks about leadership, a link from a web site on parenting isn't going to "count" favorably for your web site. While the link from a parenting site is not considered "relevant" it won't help nor will it hurt you. You can get backlines to your website using a number of different methods. You can write to other web site owners and ask them to link to you. (If your domain names are registered with Go Daddy, use this with extreme caution.) You can post to forums and include your domain name in your signature file. However,the absolute best method is to begin writing articles and submitting them with your website link in your resource box. Include these articles on your web site and be sure to include a link to the sites where your article can be found. If done properly, building backlines can
greatly increase your website traffic. Just remember, it's not easy. If
someone promises you an "easy" way to develop back links, chances are
good that you'll find yourself in a "bad neighborhood," which is the
last place you want to be. |