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An Overlooked Fr~e Advertising Opportunity
When you have an online business you need to utilize every possible avenue of advertising and promotion. As I sign up for more ezines and discussion groups, I am finding numerous publishers are overlooking a very effective and fr~e...
Are You WASTING Valuable Web Real Estate?
I sat at the lunch table, turning every shade of red the mind could conjure up. I had to do something, and do it fast.
My aunt was chaperoning my eighth grade class on a field trip to the local amusement park. Then she did it...
As we...
EXIT Marketing Strategies... "keep selling after they've left."
EXIT Marketing Strategies... "keep selling after they've left." Marketing ONline or OFFline is about your MIX. MIX means the variety of strategies you use to promote yourself/ your site/ your wares. The purpose of a Marketing MIX is to attract...
Is Your Web Site Ready For Its Visitors?
There’s a great interest among the Internet entrepreneurs about how to promote their business on the Web. There’s always a quest for new and innovative ways of promotion that promise greater results at lower cost and in shorter time. Yet...
Yahoo's Back!
I was all set to write an article predicting the future of search engines, when Yahoo dropped Google and replaced it with its own engine. Now that's big news. In less than twenty-four hours, Google went from about 79% of the market share to...
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Link Swapping - The Best Traffic Generator
In an article I wrote recently, called Five Point Plan for
Promotion, I suggested swapping links with people already linking
to your competitor's sites and this generated a few questions
about how to do that specifically, which is what I shall attempt
to explain here.
For the benefit of those of you who have come in half way through
this conversation, swapping links benefits you in two significant
ways. Firstly in generating highly targeted direct traffic from
those links and secondly in making you "popular" to the search
engines' algorithms, thus improving your rankings.
Don't worry about the technicalities of this, just know that the
more links you have back to your site, the better off you are
with some of the engines. They all work differently, they all
change their way of working - develop - so it is impossible for
those of us who come under the heading of "average" to keep up
with the finite detail.
Why Competitors?
Don't get me wrong. It would be a mistake to go out on the net
with the attitude of beating the competition into submission with
unfair tactics. That is not what this game is about. The net has
opened up the possibility for more bartering, sharing and
cooperation and in the long run that will get you further. It is
a method especially suited to low-budget marketing.
By all means study who is popular at what you do and strive to be
better than them. The top reason I suggest linking to those who
link to your competitors is because, intrinsically I am lazy! I
am assuming that it will be less work to persuade those people -
who are already in the business of linking - to do so again.
Nuts and bolts ...
So how do you do this exactly? First, find out who comes up at
the top for the keywords you use to find your site. Do this by
searching several search engines at once using WebFerret or
Copernic2000. You'll soon see who keeps scoring again and again.
Now you want to find who links to them and those will
be the
people to whom you write requesting a link-swap.
One way you can try it is by using the little add-on that Alta
Vista provides. That kindly adds an option (in Internet Explorer
5) to the Tools along the menu, called "Find pages linking to
this URL" - thus go to your's or your competitor's page and hit
the button. Download the tool here:
http://doc.altavista.com/help/search/linksearch.shtml
There is also specific syntax you can enter into each search
engine's box, which will make it look for a URL, rather than for
keywords. They all seem to have different requirements.
Many of those are listed in an excellent article, Web & Search
Engine Facts You Need to Know to Win the Marketing Game, By David
Gikandi. The article has a lot of information on each of the
major search engines and how they work, including "How to check
how many pages link to your site". David is a programmer at
SearchPositioning.com. (www.searchpositioning.com). A copy of the
article can be found at:
http://www.tucats-design.com/news/issue9.html
Also, there are several of these specific syntax requirements
listed in Boogie Jack's Webmaster Tips program, FREE download and
well worth it, from:
http://www.boogiejack.com ipaday.html
Once you have found your targets, visit the sites, find the
webmaster's email address and write offering a link swap.
Personalise the email, stress the benefits to the other party -
it will benefit their traffic and search engine rankings too -
and you should have a reasonable success rate.
One quick boost, following along the principles above, is to
participate in a simple system called Search Engine Beater
http://www.ismy.net/searchbeater.html
About the Author
Pamela Heywood is webmistress of http://www.tucats-design.com
- Building Your Online Business Instinctively. Subscribe to the
weekly TuCats Mewsletter (sic) mailto:subscribe@tucats-design.com
and get regular FREE hints, tips, articles and resources.
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