Besides search engines, the next most common way people move
from one website to another is through links on other sites.
The reason that the Internet is often refered to a the "Web" is
because it exists so much as a web of links running from
one site to another in a maze more complex than the spider
web from which it is named.
GETTING YOUR LINKS ON OTHER SITES
If you submit your site to search engines, provided you
get good results on the keywords being searched for, you
will get good results.
If you write articles that will be published by ezine publishers
and webmasters, then the externally placed links to your
website through your resource box can be very profitable.
The resource box is an "about the author" paragraph, that
you will attach at the end of your article.
If you are willing to share a certain amount of your profits
with others, you can set up an affiliate program for your
offerings, and then you can rely upon your affiliates to
provide your inbound links for you.
If you participate in online forums dedicated to a certain
topic, then your links placed with your signature can be
very effective.
If you leave reviews for others to read on sites like Amazon
or Cnet, then you will find a certain number of click-through's
(CTR's) to your website.
If you sign guestbooks with your own link in place, you
might be a little disappointed by your results.
If you use Free For All (FFA) pages, you will certainly
be disappointed. The reason for the failure with FFA pages
is two-fold. First, your link will be placed on an external
site that rotates links. Your link may only be in place for
ten minutes or two hours. Secondly, your link is often placed
on a page that will likely never be seen by human eyes.
THE YIN AND THE YANG OF THE INTERNET
The Internet is a prime example of the benefits of the Yin
and the Yang. What goes around, comes around.
The truth is that if you help others, others will help you.
If you provide outbound links on your site to resources
that are not on your site, people will flock to your site
to find the resources they are looking for.
What is more, if you provide a good resource to others,
then webmasters, reviewers and publishers will be lining
up to tell their people about your website. Thus, giving
you more inbound links.
BEWARE THE DEAD END
If on the other hand, you construct your website as a dead
end, you are bound to fail.
People who do website reviews and publish ezines do not
tell their followers about dead end sites. The value of a
single website is drastically reduced by a lack of outbound
links.
After all, no one person is so brilliant that they can deliver
everything their visitors want.
By the very nature of dead end sites, they will not be linked
to by others, so their success or failure is entirely reliant
upon search engine and email success.
If the owner of the dead end site does not send out tons
of email advertising and it does not have good placement
in the search engines, then the site will not turn big profits.
GOOGLE PAGERANK (PR)
Besides traffic earned by inbound and outbound links to
a website, one should also consider ranking schemes like
the Google.com PageRank scheme.
Because Google wants to provide their users the very best
in information from their search results, Google employs
a program called the Google PageRank. The basic premise is
to provide a rating for a given website, based in part on
the value of the content on the website, and more so, based
on how many external sites with a PageRank of four or higher
actually link to the given website.
To review the Google PR for any one domain, one must use
the Google Toolbar ( http://toolbar.google.com ) in their
Internet Explorer browser.
INBOUND LINKS ARE CRUCIAL
In order for a site to get a good Google PageRank, the site
must have inbound links from other rated sites.
Let us return for a moment to the dead end site. We have
already shown that the dead end site that has no outbound
links, will very likely have few inbound links, if any.
When a site can boast of no inbound links, then the webmaster
can rest assured that their likelihood of getting a good
Google PageRank or decent Google Ranking is almost nil.
In order to build one's inbound links, they should strongly
consider employing outbound links also.
PROTECTING YOUR INTERNET ASSETS
Most people who build dead end sites do so from a fear of
sending their hard earned traffic to another domain.
Given the short attention span of many surfers, we always
have to be concerned that redirected traffic may never return
to our websites.
In order to protect your hard work and losing the distracted
surfer, you should always place a target="_blank" inside
of the href tag for all outbound links on your websites.
This ensures that a person who clicks on an outbound link
will see the new page in a new browser window. So, once the
surfer has reviewed the new site, they will have to actively
shut down the browser window that your website still resides
in.
This is extra special good news for people who have provided
a great resource for web surfers. The more valuable a website
is considered to be as a resource, the more likely that the
web surfer will bookmark the website for future use.
BROKEN LINKS ARE NO GOOD
Some people have ventured to provide reviews of external
sites or to publish articles that are targeted to their marketplace,
but they have provided the information with broken links
to the external sites.
This method serves no real protection for the webmaster,
since the search engine spiders and publishers know that
all of the outbound links return a "404 error, page not found."
A phony resource is not really a resource at all.
BUILDING YOUR INBOUND LINKS
To ensure the success of your website, you need to get to
work building both your inbound and outbound links for your
website.
Remember. What goes around comes around. Honor will bring
you many rewards.
Copyright Bill Platt - All Rights Reserved. Reprints allowed
with article and resource box unedited. If you post this
article on a website, you must set the links up as hyperlinks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com
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