SEO TOOLS

Although links exchange is not the best effective way to improve your ranking, its still has some effect on your website ranking. I am not going to try to estimate how effective it is. You will here lots of pros and cons about this method.

What I am going to do in this post is to give you some useful tips that can help you to take out the maximum of your exchange links work. Read those link exchange tips carefully. They will save lots of time and afford.

1. The rule number one is: consider your back links as a source to get traffic. If you don’t see any point to get traffic from a specific website, there is no point to exchange links with it. The behind of this rule is very simple. The search engines (SE) are looking for logic in the overall links map. If your website topic is about SEO it will be a waste to get traffic from mobile phones website. Most likely the users will not find any interest. Not doing so will scream to the SE that there is something fake with this links and your website will not get a voted = no effect on your ranking. In some rare situation, meaning, you made lots of links exchange with irrelevant website, your ranking could be dropped drastically.
2. Be very careful to whom you are link back. Not many are aware to the fact that your out links has a major effect on your ranking. Its not just harm you’re ranking but in some cases it can even improve it. Although I did not figure out yet how exactly an outgoing link can improve a website ranking, but I’ve been witness to a situation where we launched a new brand website that was index within few days after we add to it a link to GoDaddy website. At that point we did not have yet any back links, at least not that we were aware about. Link back to website that you believe that your visitors will find interest. Ask yourself why they came to visit in your website initially. Then figure our whether a specific website will give them benefit. I like to call it the “visitor test”. Some will tell that you are not suppose to link back to websites that are not in your niche. My experience proved that the “visitor test” can make your SEO effort much easier while keeping your website natural as possible.
3. Check if the website that you are exchanging links with is been indexed by Google. In most cases of its not it’s probably because it’s a new website. In rare situations it means that the website was banned due to some violation. Since you can’t really tell at that point why the website in not indexed you can postpone your link exchange with it for a while. If it was not banned it will be indexed within 2-3 weeks. If you don’t see it indexed within 8-10 weeks then most likely it was banned. Be politely correct in this kind of cases. You don’t want to loose any good potential back links.
4. Most of the people will look for high PR (page range) website to exchange link with. There is no doubt that a high PR website will give your website a good chance to get a high PR. However, there is no guarantee that a high PR website will give you more credit with your ranking. Don’t forget rule #1. A PR 1 website that has lots of traffic will give you more benefit: you will get quality traffic and most likely that as its traffic will increase, its PR will also improve. Don’t get underestimate PR 0 websites. Someday they will have PR other then 0. You will find that it’s much easier to exchange links with webmasters who own PR 0 website rather with those who own PR 6 website. PR 8 website webmasters will probably delete your link exchange email at the moment they will see it
5. To improve your chance to get a successful link exchange deal, list the other website on yours website then ask for a link exchange. Within your link exchange email include the URL where you placed the link on your website. Now it’s a time for some patience. You will find that most webmaster will not reply within 1-2 days. Some of them will react to your email up to 60 days. In any case do not remove their link from you website. If they will look for it and will not find it then you lost your chance for link exchange. Beside, remember that you put their link because you believe that it will bring benefit to your visitors. If you will remove it they will start to ask why…? And also the search engines crawlers. Again, keep your action natural as possible.

Many are looking for the right tips about links exchange. There are more factors that I will write about in another time. However, the links exchange tips that I mentioned above are the most basic and the most effective that really makes the difference. They are must above any other tips that you might find.

One of the most effective things that improve any website ranking is the total number of one way text links it has. Text link, in oppose to banners are “readable” by search engines. Any SEO beginner learn this fact in day one. Text link not only vote for a website, but imply to the search engines about its content. In this article I would like to discuss about the efficiency of articles submission as a way to get a one way text link.

Today you will find many articles directories on the web. Most of them will allow you to post your article free of charge. The idea is simple, you contribute a content in return to a link to your website. Many webmasters are using those articles directories as a source of content. An easy way to enrich their website with refresh content. Its a win win situatuation where both parties are happy. If webmasters likes your writing, you will get more and more free one way text links.

You will find that to write an article can be an easy task if you are familiar with your website topic. Alternatively you can hire a professional writer that will do this job for you. In both ways its worth the effort. Each article will eventually gain your website some one way text links.

Some people are claiming that due to the Google’s duplicate content filter, articles submission is not effective any more. I don’t agree with this argument. However, I wouldn’t recommend to publish on your website the articles that you are submitting on other websites.

You have to make sure to submit articles while keeping the same “density”. Don’t submit ten articles in one day and then rest for thirty days and then submit again mass of articles. In SEO you have to keep things natural as possible. You have to stay below radar otherwise your ranking will be dropped or even your website be banned by the search engines.

There are lots of articles directories on the web. Though it will be wise to start with the most popular, keep submit your articles to any directory that you can find. It can take hours to submit one article to several directories but consider it as a long term investment.

There are some tools in the market that makes the articles submission more easy. I use SEO Elite for this purpose also. Using SEO Elite to submit my articles save lots of time and effort. With SEO Elite you need to enter the article content only once and from that point SEO Elite does most of the work. It simply the submission process and for me its save lots of hours of work.

I hear many times people asking how they can get links to their website. The old simple way is to purchase an ad space on other websites. If you put behind the ROI (return over investment), though its one of the most expensive ways to get back links, it’s the most effective one. You get the golden link – one way link.

The most common FREE way is links exchange. The process is very simple: Two webmasters are deciding to exchange links. They both put a link to the other website, usually on a dedicated section on the website.

Webmasters learned the potential of link exchange very fast. Each link gave them another vote; more votes helped them to get a higher position at the SERP. Links farms started to spreads around the internet like flowers in the spring.

Google engineers did not seat on the bench while webmasters infecting their SERP. Webmasters started to gain profits from non qualified websites. As soon the webmasters noticed Google actions, they got panic. They were so in panic that some of them actually send emails to those links farms webmasters asking them to remove their website from their links page.

Webmasters now looked for niche websites to exchange links with.

Google enhance its algorithm and reduce the effectiveness of back to back links. Again…webmasters got into panic. They came with what so called three way links exchange. In that process two webmasters meet to exchange links. One of them owns at least more then one website. Let’s take an example: Suppose webmaster W1 own S1 & S2 websites. Webmaster W2 own S3 website. S1 links to S3 while S3 link to S2. This is a classical three ways links exchange.

What do think guys, doesn’t Google can easily recognize it?
Don’t fool yourself. The answer is simple: YES!

If you are Google, and you have the web spread on your table, you can run a simple algorithm that will look for patterns. Patterns are the easiest thing for a computer to find. No matter how time it will take to scan all the information, at the bottom line a pattern would be found. Unlike lexical analysis, patterns behavior is a pure mathematical issue.

So… shouldn’t we exchange links?
I wouldn’t say that. However, I wouldn’t pay much effort on it. There are better free ways to get links to your website. Later on I will show you some of those methods.

In my last article I mentioned that you have the option to purchase a new domain or to purchase a “second hand” domain name. I also mentioned that you need to be very careful when you are buying a “second hand” domain names.

Allow me to give you some useful tips how to protect yourself from buying the right domain for your website. I will show you how to stay away from those domains that are banned by search engines.

Before we will get into that, let me explain why you should consider purchasing a second hand domain in the free market. In this article I will only deal with the SEO aspects.

Back in the old days webmasters learned to use the power of search engines and the power of been ranked high at their SERP. Webmasters use to trick the search engines and launched many websites that were optimized for a specific keywords. Sometimes those websites has nothing to offer other then commercial ads. It didn’t take long till Google and the other search engines developed a mechanism to fight those search engines spammers. Google developed what so called “Google SandBox”. New registered domain got into the SandBox. For popular keywords a new domain will not be listed in SERP for some period of time. Usually that period of time can be between 6 to 9 months and sometime more then a year. Google developed this mechanism in order to examine the quality of websites and their content before they gain a traffic from their SERP. At the beginning the SandBox effect was just a rumor that Google did not officially approve. Although it took time, but eventually Google gave the SandBox effect an official conformation.

As a webmaster you want your website to be listed at SERP as soon as possible. You have to choose whether to be patient with the SandBox effect or to purchase a “mature” domain name. To find our about the age of a domain you can use one of the “whois” command that many online dns info websites offers. One of the websites that I use is DNSStuff website.

If you made a decision to purchase a second hand domain, I would recommend to buy a domain that was purchased at least 18 month before.

One of the things that you will find very difficult is to find out when a domain was first introduced to search engines. You will need to do a good research after this data. You can find yourself buying a domain that was registered 2 years ago but was listed by other websites only few months ago.

The most important thing that you need to be aware of is whether the domain was banned by search engines. You can’t really tell if he WAS banned, but you can check his current status. A rule of thumb: Do not buy a domain if he is not listed by all of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo & MSN. In order to check this all you have to do is to type the name of the domain in the search box. Make sure you get the domain URL itself in the SERP and not the domain name as it was mentioned by other websites.

Ok…. We came to a step where we have a good idea for a website. We checked the most popular search keywords in our niche market. We did the math and came into a conclusion that our website worth its effort. Excellent, you are truly ready for the next step.

Now it’s a good time to make some technical decisions or what I liked to call them engineering decisions.

In order to have a website it would be preferred to have your own domain. Although you can use many of the free hosting options, I wouldn’t choose that options. The main reason is simple: if you are going to put some effort to build your websites reputation, better to own it. For example: You can easily open a blog at Blogger.com but all the SEO work that you will do, eventually will credit Blogger.com.

It doesn’t cost big bucks to have your own website. You can use a service like GoDaddy to purchase your brand new domain, or you can look for an old domain that someone is offering to sell. In most cases to purchase a “second hand” domain is preferred. That way you will be avoiding from the Google sand box effect that I will talk about later on. However, please note that there is also a big risk to purchase a “second hand” domain if you don’t know how to check his history. Its might be a banned domain name by some search engines.

Now you will need to host your website. It will always be preferred to host your website on a dedicated server. It cost much then a shared hosting server but it guarantee that your websites IP address will not be shared by any other website. It’s not a crucial parameter but as many of the other SEO parameters that count, you will have to choose between the alternatives.

I have to warn you… the SEO marathon is full of decision that you need to take. It’s not an exact science. Some will support an argument that the others will oppose to.

Depends on your website nature you can use some of the popular open source system available today. If you considering opening a blog, I highly recommend to use wordpress open source blog platform. It takes less then thirty minutes to set it up. If you don’t sure you can install it yourself, asks someone else to do it for you. He shouldn’t charge you for more then few hundreds dollars for this task. If you need a more flexible context management system try Joomla. A good e-commerce system will be OSCommerce or ZenCart. They are all open source platforms but for the last that I mentioned you will need some professional help to set it up. You can always experience that fun of writing html code. The big advantage of doing so is to have a full control about the source outcome. It’s nice thing to do if you are planning 7-8 static pages on your website, but not if you need to be able to add pages dynamically.

One of the things that I was asked so many times is whether to have a one static page website or to have a multi pages website. I can tell you that form my experience some one page websites generate income much more then a multi pages websites. Forget about search engines when you ask this question. Think about your visitors. In most cases you will find that what you find most suitable to your visitors, the search engines suitable as well. Keep in mind that ALL the search engines try to track after how the human mind is searching for information and not the opposite opposed to some will think