This is the seventh in a series of articles detailing my personal experiences with internet marketing.
Of all the avenues for internet marketing, the most important is a backlinking strategy. At a basic level, the more links pointing to your website from all over the network, the better your page rank, search engine indexing, and site traffic.
It’s obvious really. As search engine crawlers traverse sites following link after link, they will visit your site more often if there are more incoming links. The higher the number of incoming links, the more seriously search engines will take your site. Therefore, it has a beneficial effect on the popularity of your website.
With recent refinements, Google seeks to clarify the service or product that a website offers. They will scan keywords and content, match against incoming links, identify your niche and index accordingly.
The higher the number of relevant inbound links to a page, the higher the position in search engine results. This is the general rule. So it’s not just about having tons of incoming links. It’s all about having relevant incoming links. Remember that it is also called Page Rank and not Site Rank. Therefore, we are talking about links to an individual page, not the entire site.
Second, it is important to link to sites with a higher Page Rank than yours. Install the Google Page Rank tool in your browser and every time you surf the net you will know the Page Rank of a website.
Backlinks can be obtained in many different ways. Join forums, create a profile with your URL and submit posts. Each post will give you a link back. Search Google for websites or blogs that match your keywords.
On websites, see if they have a link exchange service. SEO experts will say that a reciprocal link is meaningless as the links cancel each other out. If this is true, it would have no effect on Page Rank. My point of view is to exchange the links. It still helps Google identify your website and might provide a small amount of traffic.
For blogs, read articles and post comments. Blog sites must have the ability to display their URL.
Submitting links to directories is probably a waste of time these days. But if you find some software that allows you to manually submit to 40 or 50 free directories, then it’s worth spending a day on this strategy, but no more.
Of course, submitting to article syndication sites is essential and is one of the first avenues you should set up. Over time, each article will create more inbound links to your web pages. RSS feeds create inbound links for each person who subscribes to the feed.
Social networking sites are growing in importance for link building. Search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo will index live results from microblogging sites like Twitter.
These sites create a large number of links every day.
I guess this will really shift the focus of link building more towards relevance and niche, but with recent activity being a new factor. Search engine results will fluctuate from day to day.
At the same time, Google has stated that Page Rank should no longer be taken as the final focus of SEO campaigns. Page Rank will still provide authenticity to site visitors and will greatly aid in link building, but I think search engine results will be smoother and newer niche activity will show up higher in results.
I’m going to continue with my backlinking strategy as outlined above, but gradually put more and more emphasis on social networking sites. There are many services like hulu and ping.fm that can help automate the posts to your Twitter feed. This is very important and will allow you to spend your time fine-tuning your niche backlinks.
In terms of time spent promoting a website, 80% of my time is spent building backlinks as this is the path to tons of free organic search engine traffic.
Right now I have not focused on online marketing and yet I still have a site that has been online just over a year with a page rank of 3.
This site has about 30 percent of the links pointing to the home page and the rest to subdomain links. Only a few of the inbound links come from sites with a higher page rank. But 99% of sites contain relevant niche content. In this case poetry.
I have other sites with lower Page Rank but more traffic from search engines. These sites have more indexed pages and this is probably the reason for the higher traffic. These other sites also have more incoming links. So why is Page Rank lower?
I guess there are two factors that affect Page Rank. These other sites contain less relevant inbound links. Therefore, not all of them are considered important by search engine crawlers. The second factor is competition within the niche. I guess poetry sites are less competitive than business directories or online marketing sites. Page Rank could be more difficult to build in highly competitive niches.
