ies which might bring you useful traffic e.g. local business directories. But dont spend too much time doing it. Your time would be far better spent writing and submitting articles. TIP If you really feel the need to add your site to directories take a look at httpwww.webproworld.comviewtopic.phpt21900sidaea99f48670ee336f2b922 c79983e394 for a very comprehensive and regularly updated list of directories that accept links. Look for link partners Probably the most well known method of generating links is rankmaniac 2012 to look for link partners. This is done in a variety of ways ask customers to link to your site possibly in return for a link to theirs ask suppliers to link to your site possibly in return for a link to theirs look for relevant high ranking sites and ask them to link to you possibly in return for rankmaniac 2012 a link to theirs buy SEO software which locates high ranking sites and automatically emails their owners asking them to link to you possibly in return for a link to theirs Interestingly looking for link partners tends to be the least effective method rankmaniac 2012 of increasing your search engine ranking because 1. Its normally done via email and unfortunately webmasters of high ranking sites receive many link partner requests each day not to mention hundreds of other SPAM emails. Theyre normally automated and irrelevant. As a result most email initiated link partner requests are deleted. 2. Most link partner requests are sent by webmasters of low PR sites to webmasters of high PR sites. Although the link would be very beneficial to the low PR site it wouldnt help the high rankmaniac 2012 PR site at all and may in fact hinder their ranking. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 34 Step 5 Generate links back to your site 34 3. Even if you offer a reciprocal link a link back to their website most webmasters of high PR sites will not be interested because its extra work. Whats more they rankmaniac 2012 wont want to obscure the purpose of their site with hundreds of links relevant or not they dont want to look like a directory to their customers. TIP If you decide to manually look for link partners one way of assessing a sites importance is to look at their Google PageRank PR. PR is how Google scores importance. rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 It gives all sites a mark out of 10. Any site with a PR of 4 or above is generally considered a worthy link partner. By downloading the Google Toolbar from httptoolbar.google.com you can view the PR of any site you visit. How long will it take A long time Its impossible to say how much time youll need to spend generating links rankmaniac 2012 but you can be sure itll be a while no matter which method of link generation you use. You just have to keep at it until you have achieved rankmaniac 2012 a high ranking. Even then youll still need to rankmaniac 2012 dedicate some ongoing time to the task otherwise your ranking will drop. Is it possible to generate links too fast Yes its possible. But using the methods outlined above its extremely unlikely. The search engines dont like to see links generated too fast. For instance if you had 100 links to your site yesterday but you have 2100 today the search engines will assume youve done something a little shady and sandbox your links i.e. delay their full impact until it establishes their validity. You may even be penalized more harshly than this. Thats why its not a good idea to set up multiple independent websites all containing dozens of links back to your main site. This would get you lots of rankmaniac 2012 links very quickly rankmaniac 2012 but it might also see you blacklisted Paying an SEO company to generate links for rankmaniac 2012 you Generating links takes a long time and involves a lot of work. Like any other form of promotion it requires investment either in time or money. If you decide to outsource the task of generating links be careful. There are some companies which generate links to a domain of their own and pass the value of these links on to your site. This does NOT result in a permanent increase in the ranking of your site. These companies charge a monthly fee and so long as you pay the fee your rankmaniac 2012 site may rank highly. But as soon as you stop paying
their fee e.g. you find another SEO company that you prefer your site's ranking will drop back to rankmaniac 2012 where it was when you started out. Effectively they hold you to ransom. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 35 Step 5 Generate links back to your site 35 Don't get caught out When you're researching SEO companies to generate links for you ALWAYS ask them how they will do it. If they can't or rankmaniac 2012 won't tell you DO NOT engage them. If they tell you but rankmaniac 2012 you are unable to rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 completely understand DO NOT engage them there are no link generation methods which are too complex for the layperson to understand when explained properly. Also always be clear in your own mind rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 on exactly what you're paying for. Remember that there are rankmaniac 2012 two parts to obtaining a high ranking optimizing your site and generating links back to your site. Always get your SEO company to explain exactly which parts they
will do for you and how they plan to do it. Chapter Summary Generally speaking the more links you have back to your site the higher your ranking will be. Some links are better than others. Dont use autolinkgeneration software Dont set up websites simply to host links to your main site Add your site to DMOZ Yahoo Directories Check where your competitors links are coming from Write and submit articles for Internet publication Submit your site to local and industry directories Look for link partners but dont spend too much time on it Link generation takes a long time no matter how you do it SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 36 Step 6 Monitor your progress 36 Step 6 Monitor your progress Now that youve done the lions share of the hard work you can sit back and observe the results of your handiwork. Its very important that you monitor your progress. Keep an eye on how many links youre generating where theyre coming from and rankmaniac 2012 the overall impact on your ranking. Monitor how many links youre generating Its important to monitor how many links youre generating because you can crossreference that information against improvements in ranking to estimate how much effort your SEO push is going to take. e.g. If you generate 300 links and your site goes from number 150 to number 15 you know that you should be topping the rankings before too long. If on the other hand your ranking has only marginally increased you know you need to work a lot harder. You can monitor how many links youre generating in a number of rankmaniac 2012 ways Search Google for www.yourdomainname.com. Google will then display a screen which says Google can show you the following information for this URL At the bottom of the list of option is Find web pages that contain the term www.yourdomainname.com. Click on this option. Google will display all the pages it can find that have www.yourdomainname.com on one of their pages. Normally this indicates a link to your site. TIP Bookmark the search results page so you can perform this search quickly and easily as you will probably find yourself doing it quite often. Go to httpwww.marketleap.compublinkpop and type in your domain name. This tool itemizes your links by search engine i.e. tells you how many links each search engine has found and also provides graphical trends. Go to httpwww.alexa.com and type in your domain name then click Sites Linking in from the left of the page. TIP Alexa can also be used rankmaniac 2012 to track your ranking metrics. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 37 Step 6 Monitor your progress 37 TIP Youll notice that each of these tools return different figures. Dont worry about this. Just pick a tool and stick with it this way youre always comparing apples with apples. Monitor whos linking to your site Always keep rankmaniac 2012 track of whos linking to your site. rankmaniac 2012 Apart from simply being interesting it will give you some idea of who is interested in your site and your material you can assess their importance PR and also more rankmaniac 2012 accurately target their needs with future link generation tactics. Probably the easiest way to track whos linking to your site is to set up a Google Monitor at httpwww.google.comalerts. Google alerts notify you when your URL has been published on a web page. Google doesn't pick them all up but it picks up a lot. TIP Whenever you receive an alert you can visit the page to make sure the article in unchanged and the link back to your site is functioning. Monitor your ranking Obviously you should be monitoring your ranking to ensure that your hard work is not wasted and to adapt your SEO and link generation strategy as needed. Manually You can check your ranking manually simply by doing a search for your keyword at the appropriate search engine. TIP If you prefer to check manually make sure you bookmark
the search results page as youll rankmaniac 2012 probably find yourself performing this search fairly frequently. Dont perform it too frequently though as this can impact the perceived desirability of your keywords and it is argued that Google takes exception to repeated searches of this type. Automatically You can check all the major search engines AOL Google HotBot MSN Netscape YahooFastAltaVista at once using MarketLeaps verification tool httpwww.marketleap.comverifydefault.htm. NOTE This tool returns a page number e.g. it will tell you your site appears on page 2 of Yahoo. There are plenty of other tools out there that you can rankmaniac 2012 use to monitor your ranking such as CleverStats Free Monitor for Google see httpwww.cleverstat.comgooglemonitor query.htm. Shop around until you find the tool that suits you best. The important thing to SEO
Secrets V1.3 Cop