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Posts Tagged ‘Backlinks’
10 Ways to Promote Yourself on Web 2.0
After reading about how various indie musicians promote themselves in a NY Times magazine article this past weekend, and meeting Scott Ginsberg for the first time, I have a series of Web 2.0 epiphanies.
Ginsberg is the Nametag Guy, a smart young man who wears “Hello, my name is Scott” nametag on his shirt all day, every day, for the past several years. He has a blog, a podcast, a Squidoo “lens”, an email listserv, an RSS feed, Digg and Technorati references, Myspace and Facebook entries, YouTube snippets, and probably one or two other things too. In between updating all these things, he writes books and is a professional speaker. He totally gets how to promote himself using the latest tools.
People and businesses that will succeed in this brave new world have a lot of work to do to. The old days of putting together a few pages (or a few hundred) of static HTML are so over. The good news is that most of the tools are free for the downloading. All it will take is your time. The bad news is that the time investment is non-trivial. You can’t farm this out to someone to just do it for you. It has to become part of your own online psyche and daily activities. Like the Katie Couric ghost-blog debacle, it isn’t something you want to delegate.
Here are my top ten tips that I have learned along the way:
1. Email is still the best way for anyone to enter your ecosystem
I have been doing these essays for more than 10 years, and many of you are still reading them and responding. Email is the best way for people between 30 – 50 years old to contact you and stay in touch. Why not younger than 30? Because these people are using IM, Facebook, Myspace, and probably 13 other “social network” sites. They certainly have email addresses and spend time with email, but probably not to the extent that you would want to count on this form of communication. Why not older than 50? Well, I am just putting an arbitrary age here, but eventually, you are getting to the non-typing pre-war generation that doesn’t want to communicate via email – until all of their friends or grandkids get on it. These are still people that have their assistants print out their corporate emails – don’t laugh, I have seen too many situations.
2. You don’t just want to focus on email, you still need to be approachable in Web 2.0-space
List all of your electronic coordinates in one place on your Web site, and include a phone number for good measure, because that makes it all real. Don’t do a “contact form” that hides your email address – that is so old school and off-putting, and anyone worth their HTML code can figure out what the embedded email address is anyway.
3. Give something away for free
Really. You do this to build credibility and also to give people a taste of what you will charge them for. Ginsberg is giving away his latest book on his blog, and he is so comfortable with doing that because he knows this will build word-of-mouth and drive sales. The indie musicians profiled in the Times are giving away MP3s. Some have taken this a step further and are even experimenting with demand-based pricing that turns out to net them more than the 99-cent download standard at iTunes.
4. Think about lists of useful stuff that you can offer others
I have a page of links to various Web conferencing tools on my site that used to be in the top four sites when you searched on Google (today is down to #13, I guess I am slipping up). I have had this page on my site for about a decade, and started it on a whim. Now I get vendors who want me to list their stuff there. Squidoo has institutionalized this with their “lens” approach, and Pageflakes has something similar with their shared pages (You can see my RSS feeds and sites that I frequent here). Each of these approaches takes something that you know, and filters that you apply to the Wide World, and puts a very small amount of your own stamp and value to it. http://www.pageflakes.com/david90
5. Remember the Web is all about short attention spans
Call it the 4-4-4 rule: The average person spends less than four seconds looking at a Web page. They abandon a site if they can’t find something in four clicks. Any video should be shorter than four minutes, or people won’t bother watching it.
6. Video matters more
Speaking of videos, start to think about ways that you can put more content into (short) video segments on your site, and then post them to YouTube and other video-sharing places.
7. Don’t just Digg
Sites like Digg.com and Technorati.com that point people to your content are terrific ways to spread the word, but need care and feeding as you post new content – you have to add the entries on their sites to point to your new stuff. But also consider other places such as EzineArticles.com that will promote your content. If you post enough content on these other sites, you can leverage them better too.
8. Titles and keywords matter
When you add content to these pages, think of snappy headlines and catchy keywords. Because that is what people are going to be searching for and seeing when they scroll around.
9. Exploit your readers/fans/listeners/viewers
Everyone is big these days on “user-generated content” but there is much more to this than meets the eye. The people that consume your content are your best promoters. Leverage them, take care of them, and they will make you rich and famous. Or at least amongst your own ecosystem. The NYT article mentions how the musicians have cleverly used their fans to generate tracks on their songs, schedule concert dates in particular cities, and other activities. I try to answer every email that you send me, even if it is just to acknowledge receipt. Part of this is respecting your readers, part of it is a new way of interacting with them. I remember when we started Network Computing magazine back in 1990 and put our author’s email addresses at the end of the articles. We were fearless! But we got some great feedback.
10. Think about all the communities you belong to
Does each one have its own equivalent of an A-list blogger? Someone who has a page a mile long of MySpace “friends” or LinkedIn “connections? A common calendar of events that is easy to subscribe to via RSS? A list of recommended books/videos/music?
There is so much more to do with Web 2.0. I have to run, and post this article on the various places mentioned here, and get the emails out.
About the author – David Strom is a noted speaker, author, podcaster and consultant who has written two books and thousands of magazine articles for dozens of IT publications such as Computerworld, eWeek, Information Week and Network Computing. His blog can be found at http://strominator.com, and he can be reached at david@strom.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Strom
10 ways to gain quality backlinks
When it comes to creating backlinks, quality is key. Even if you have the most backlinks on the net, if they are poor quality, from irrelevant sites with questionable material or SEO tactics, your rankings will be penalized. To make your marketing efforts pay off, you need to take the time to build a quality backlink network that will drive relevant traffic to your site and tickle the fancy of the search engine spiders. Here are 10 ways to gain quality backlinks:
1. Use articles directory sites
You can submit articles with relevant content to articles directory sites and include backlinks to your site. Search engines love this type of link because it is one-way to your site, and one-way links from quality content sites show that your website is also quality. The key here is to make sure that your content is relevant. Although writing good, rich content articles is time consuming, don’t waste your time by submitting tons of poor-quality articles. It will only hurt you in the long run.
2. Submit your website to a links directory that will establish one-way links to your webpage
Start with the free links directory pages you can find online, and manually submit your webpage to the correct category. You can pay links directory sites to post your website in their directory, but be careful here. You want them to still do it manually – automatic submissions will not help you as much as gradual, carefully categorized submissions.
3. In any backlink that you create, wherever possible, use keywords in the link itself
Never use ‘click here’ if you can help it. Instead, insert the link naturally as part of the text of the article. For example, if your website is dedicated to plants that attract butterflies, and your article is on how to create a fantastic butterfly garden, choose some of the words (butterfly garden, for example) as the link text. This is another signal to the search engines that your backlinks are quality.
4. Establish your own webpage on Squidoo
You can easily create a page on any topic you’d like on Squidoo, and include links back to your web page. You can even earn some additional revenue through the site’s revenue sharing program.
5. Create a free blog on sites like BlogSpot or Blogger
Google actually owns these sites, and scans them frequently for quality content and links. Build your blog over time, submitting numerous posts each week or month, all of them with a backlink to your site. Again, think quality - be sure the content of your blog is relevant to your site.
6. Post backlinks on other people’s blogs
that allow comments and that discuss topics relevant to your site.
7. Set up your own forum on a site that lets you create them for free
You can create topic categories that include your keywords, and post backlinks to your site from here as well.
8. Create a page for yourself or your website on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites
Be sure that you include content on your profile that is related to what you talk about on your website.
9. Try to create backlinks that link to your inner WebPages, not just the home page
Search engines like to see this level of specificity in your links. Remember, take the visitor to the most relevant information with your backlink and the search engines will rank it higher.
10. Finally, no matter which of the strategies you use, establish your backlinks over time
Search engines like to see ‘older’ backlinks as well as ‘newer’ ones. If you suddenly have 100 new backlinks all in 24 hours, the search engines will notice and may either disregard them or consider them as less important when ranking your site.
Jean Asta is a full-time writer & management analyst. She has produced thousands of articles, e-books & operational report. eCasinoDirectory is a free articles and links directory where you’ll be able to freely submit gambling articles and gain valuable inbound links.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jean_Asta
10 ways to attract web traffic to your blog
The beauty of creating a blog is that you can add it to your current web site or use it as a standalone website. If you don’t constantly market your blog you won’t attract many visitors or make many sales.
Here are the top 10 ways to attract web traffic to your blog:
1. Add fresh content
If you consistently add new content you will not only attract regular readers but also the search engines. Try to add new content to your blog at least 3 times a week.
2. Optimize your content
Make sure you optimize the titles, paragraphs and links within your content. This means you must first do keyword research to incorporate keywords related to your content.
3. Include keywords in your tags
WordPress allows you to include tags below each post. Place your most popular keywords in these tags separated by commas.
4. Add meta tags
Use the headspace or seopack plugin to add title and description meta tags to each post. Search engines place great emphasis on title tags that contain your keyword at the beginning.
The description meta tag is what visitors read about your site when they find it in the search engines. Make sure the description of your page will get the reader to click to your content.
5. Create internal links
An individual post won’t get much traction in the search engines unless you get links pointing to it. If you have related content from other areas of your blog create a text link (anchor text) within that post that links to your current content.
Your blog post ranking will increase in proportion to the number of links pointing to it.
6. Encourage commenting
Include questions within your content and encourage readers to leave a comment. This increases blog interactivity. Readers will see it’s an active blog and will want to read the comments and provide their own feedback.
7. Leave comments on other blogs
Find blogs that have content related to your own and write a comment that compliments their post or is in response to others’ comments. With each comment include a link back to your own blog.
8. Use trackbacks
A trackback is a procedure for notifying the original blog poster that you have linked to their blog post from your blog. Create lots of trackbacks to popular blog posts from your own blog. This will encourage those you trackback to do the same for you and will increase traffic to your site.
9. Submit to blog directories
Google "top directories to submit your blog" to get a free list of the top 100+ blog directories you can submit your blog to.
10. Submit RSS Feed to RSS Directories
To submit your blog or RSS feed to a list of RSS and blog directories, Google "top rank RSS blog directories."
Blog marketing is a process that must be done consistently to reap great benefits. By employing the strategies mentioned above you’ll see a steady flow of web traffic that will increase over time.
Need help driving traffic to your blog or web site? Please visit Search Engine Optimization Services
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com Affordable Web Site Design, Web Hosting and SEO.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Herman_Drost
