|
|
|
|
 |
Should You Be Linking for Traffic or Rankings?
Just for a change, rather than a technical article, I would like to tell you a story. To begin, imagine your website is a little country bar, now let's go back to when the internet began, and reciprocal linking was being done properly. Now just sit back and picture the following..... There you are running your bar, it's a fairly busy little bar with plenty of regular customers. You also get other customers who come from all directions. Some make their way to your bar using all the little country back roads (from links on other websites), others come on the big highway (the Internet) from the big bars in the city (The Search Engines). Your customers usually stay and have a beer or two (read a few pages of your site), then decide they'd like to try somewhere different. Because you realize your customers are bound to leave at some point anyway, you recommend the bar down the road, telling them it is a great bar too. You even show them a little leaflet you made (your link section), which gives them directions on how to find it. The bar down the road also has his regulars, plus a few visitors from you, and a few from the bars in the city. He knows you send him customers, so when his customers have had a drink or two, and fancy going somewhere different, he returns the favour, recommends your bar and gives them directions how to get there. In fact, there are 10 little bars in your area that are all doing this and the local back roads are alive with customers going from bar to bar (The World Wide Web). Occasionally, when someone comes from the big bars in the city (the Search Engines), you recommend the other local bars and all your friends benefit from that visitor too. Then one day the big bar in the city sent all the local bars a letter saying: "We are a much bigger bar than you, we have thousands of customers, and they are all looking for nice little country bars like yours. We would be glad to recommend your bar, however, we need to know that your bar is popular before we tell our customers. The busier your bar is, the more customers we will send you. We will of course be sending one of our employees to see just how busy your bar is (Search Engine link spiders). Great you think, more new customers, more business, more profits. Oh no! Wait a minute! If you send your customers to the bar down the road, he would be busier than you, and get all the new customers from the city. Better stop sending them there. So you stop recommending his bar, and hide the little leaflets that gave directions. (You feature your link section only with a tiny little text link right at the bottom of the page.) You can't get rid of your leaflets, or the other bar may take you off his leaflet, then when the employee from the city visits the other bar he will think you are not popular, because you are not listed. Maybe you could change the title of your leaflet, so it doesn't look like directions to other bars, that way your customers won't pick it up. (Call your links page "resources" or "partners"). Now, when your customer has had their first beer or two, you don't recommend your friend, and they don't find the leaflets, so they don't know there is a back road that leads to other bars. The result? They take the highway (the Internet) and go back to the big bar in the city where they came from (The Search Engine). When they get to the big bar in the city, they don't stay there long, because they know the barman can recommend some other great country bars. Why does the barman do that? Because they are his busy friends, but he also recommends a few bars who pay him to give them a plug (Pay Per Click or advertising). Meanwhile, the bar down the road has been thinking the same thing as you, he wants to be the busiest bar and get the extra customers from the city. He has hidden or renamed his leaflets, and stopped recommending you, like you stopped recommending him. That road that used to carry customers between your two bars is now very quiet and no longer buzzing with customers driving up and down to the different bars. Eventually, it becomes unused, because the customers don't know it exists. (Hidden link sections). You never get customers from your friend, because they too go back to the city to ask the barman's advice. Your bar is much quieter without his referred customers, and his bar is much quieter without yours. What can you do? Your bar is not as busy as it used to be, and you still want the customers from the city. Hey, that's it! Pay the barman to promote your bar (Pay-Per-Click or Advertising). Now what happens? The barman sends you a visitor and makes himself some money. When the visitor has had a few drinks at your bar, he goes back to the barman in the city who recommends your friends bar down the road. Why? Because your friends bar was empty, so he too paid the barman to send customers. The WEB of back roads is closing down, and being replaced by a network of highways, all leading back to the barman who is making lots of money. Who is paying him that money? You, and your friend, who used to share those same customers for free. Meanwhile, the customers think the only way to find a good bar is to see the barman in the city. NOT TRUE IS IT? Both your bars are good, and before you had lots of people recommending you, not just the barman. If a child read that story they would probably say how silly it is. This is what linking JUST for rankings produces. The alternative?? Link for traffic first, link only with sites who understand their visitors are leaving at some point anyway, sites who are willing to send their leaving visitors to other sites not straight back to search engines all the time. I am not search engine bashing here, they are excellent and useful resources. However if webmasters are not careful and continue to hide link sections they will give the big search engines a monopoly on traffic. Try turning things around. Exchange only quality visible links, that will bring you visitors. If the current method of "Guru" thinking is correct, this will automatically increase your popularity and search engine rankings at the same time, the difference being, you get visitors while your rankings improve not WHEN they have improved. Just because Google or any other search engine does not consider a site important, it does not mean that site does not have great content, it does not mean that site is not busy, and it does not mean the site will not send you visitors. There are millions of great sites with no PR and millions of great sites who are not on the first page of search engine results. The only people who have the right to judge a sites importance, and indeed the only people who's opinion REALLY matters, are the users of your site. Gary McHugh is co author of HonestLinks.Net, a site dedicated to teaching webmasters to exchange links that bring traffic. He also runs his own web design and hosting company 2001web.com
MORE RESOURCES:
SEO - Google News |
|
|
|
Page Rank Purgatory - Simple Things You can Do to Keep Your Web Site Out of Search Engine Hell! Are Meta Tags Really Dead?Right in their Guidelines Yahoo Tells You that Meta-Tags are Not Totally Dead and Buried(The Below Information was Taken Directly From the Yahoo Help File http://help.yahoo. Cache in the Bank: Understanding Googles Advanced Operators If you would like to know when your site was last indexed by Google, you can find out easily by using the Google cache command. By typing "cache:www. Google Gunning For Directories? Why is it that webmasters are so quick to blame Google if their website falls down the search rankings, or out of the rankings altogether? Can it never be their own fault?I read an amusing forum post headed "What's up with Google?". The writer had a website just 2 months old, which had only had 2 visits from Googlebot, a Google robot. Why Top Search Engine Placements Never Move? #1 question when it comes to web advertising is how do I get top 10 search engine placements for the terms I wish to aquire?Without getting into how to aquire #1 placements (Since there are virtually 100's of articles explaining these techniques), let's instead look into how companies who do end up aquiring them, never seem to loose them.. How to Pick an SEO Firm If you're looking for an SEO firm, we recommend that you weigh 10 factors that can save you trouble down the road.1. Optimize Your Site Pt1 Listed here you will find the five of the most important points to remember when optimising your site and individual pages for the search engines.If you optimise your pages by working through these points one by one you will see a significant rise in your search engine rankings. The Sandbox Effect What once many people thought they had a penalty, is now being called the Sandbox Effect and is causing new web sites not to rank very well in the search results of Google, not even for the least competitive phrases. Meaning that a filter is being placed on new web sites and cannot rank very high for most words or phrases for a certain amount of time. Are You Getting Nuked By Google Lately? Since the last Google update, there have been many instances and examples of the Google Nuke Bot! This is what I call it anyway. Have you visited a favorite website lately only to realize they've been nuked by Google?More and more we are seeing internet marketing / SEO companies getting nuked, by Google completely removing them from their data banks. Have You Been Dropped By Yahoo? Yahoo has fairly recently updated its guidelines. You can read the full list at:http://help. Local Customers Know Where to Find Local Businesses... the Internet Through search engines and directories, the Internet provides a quick and easy place to choose a local merchant or business.Just because the Internet is worldwide doesn't mean local businesses can't benefit from having a website and a presence in the search engines. Why Does The Link Page Have A PR Zero? For beginners, link exchange campaigns can be a minefield of problems. For example, here is a question I was asked:"Hi Andy, I have noticed that a lot of sites that request a link exchange from me may have a PR 5 or 6 on their home page and when I click through to the links page there is a PR 0. What Constitutes a Complete and Effective SEO Campaign? Unfortunately, not many Search Engine Optimization companies know what this involves. You may see a "one size fits all" package, link popularity development in the form of submitting to link farms, or even the dreaded "Submit Your Site to 1000's of Search Engines" scam. Goofy Mistakes that Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings One thing is for sure, you don't want to spend hours, perhaps days, months, or years on a website to have some stupid little mistake get your site dropped or never even listed in the search engines. There are a lot of rules that search engines have created to block out what they call spammers, so don't kid yourself by telling yourself you are not an evil spammer. Keyword Research Made Simple! Keyword Research is the first task in optimizing your web site and pay-per-click campaign. Here you need to know what keywords your target group is using. RSS Feeds - a Website Owners Friend in Disguise We've all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you're a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site's content fresh. Search Engines - The Dominant Factor Let's face facts - Search engines are starting to rule and dominate the way people advertise their products and services.Gone are the days of low-cost, no-cost advertising. SEO Tips - Google Has Changed - Learn Why And What To Do Google now checks the year your domain name was first registered.This just makes sense. Are You Hung-Up on Page Rank and Back Links? It's unfortunate that many website owners are so hung-up on Page Rank, they'll rarely if ever, link to a site with a page rank lower than their own.I'm frequently approached by other website owners who it's clear want to exchange links with one of my websites for no other reason than its Page Rank and so they can get more back links to their own website. The Need of Popularity In very simple words, the link popularity of your site meansthe amount of links coming to you from another sites.Every major search engine heavily weighs the link popularityof sites when ranking sites. How To Design A Search Engine Friendly Website There are many websites that fail to target their required traffic, even if they've had some search engine optimisation work done. One of the main causes for this is simply because the website isn't search engine friendly.
|
|
||
|
2007 Copyright InstantFileDownload. All rights reserved.
|
