Advanced Link Building: Hosted Content, The Quest for the Perfect Link - Bart The Bear SaysNo Website Is An Island - Back Linking is Essential for Success

Submit Your Articles
To Moxie Drive Expressions

Bart The Bear Says Home Page

Click here to email me

Exchange Links

The official NowSourcing blog

Marketing Blogs - BlogCatalog Blog Directory

Ask Google, search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others. For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn't have as much value to search engines and so, it doesn't receive the same weíght as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link – the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.

Article Syndication

In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offër these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the "about the author" section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the frëe use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.

Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It's a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.

The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author's site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links – somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.

In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author's site. It's still more valuable than a plain link exchange, but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what's a site owner to do?

Hosted Web Content

It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content – all basically the same idea.

The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the "eyes" of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.

Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hostíng site get useful content.

This strategy isn't new. It's simply doing what search engines want us to do – produce content that's useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.

Designing a Hosted Content Page

You're paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.

Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword savvy title, header (h1), subheads (h2) and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be "spamish" regardless of where the content appears.

Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article's text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it's also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hostíng your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offër real value to readers.

It's Not Quantity, It's Quality

It's no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It's not quantity, it's the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.

Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more "natural" from a search engine's perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site's pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links - the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.

Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today

It's being done everyday, successfully building small sites into largër sites, providing frëe advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hostíng site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers – exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards – so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.

Start searching for websites that might be interested in hostíng your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that's unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won't even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers – exactly how it should be.

About The Author
Frederick Townes in the owner of W3-EDGE. W3-EDGE is a Boston-based web design company specializing in W3C compliant and search engine friendly web design. Whether your needs fall into the Web 2.0 category or if you just need an attractive design that will convert your visitors into buyer, we have the solution for you.

Technorati Tags:

web2.0 web 2.0 search, engine article content hosting syndication search engines reciprocal link, link exchange SEO

Labels: article, article syndication, content, engine, hosting, link exchange, reciprocal link, search, search engines, SEO, web, web2.0

By Trey Pennewell (c) 2006-2007 Links And Traffíc

Creating back links to your website is one of the best ways to gain a higher ranking in the search engines. Almost any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert will agree with this point. The SEO experts will also tell you that your placement in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) can make or break your website.
It is commonly thought by many that if your website does not rank on one of the first two pages of the SERPs that your website will rarely be seen by visitors. For most people searching the web, this means that you must be in the top 20 search results. Think about it, when you do a search and you cannot find what you are looking for after a couple of pages, what do you do? I know what I do, I type in a different keyword or a variation of what I was looking for in hopes of getting better results.

Google and Yahoo love to see a website that has back links leading to it. You can chëck this for yourself, take a look at a popular keyword phrase that everyone is trying to get ranked for. Most likely you will see that the top few sites have a large number of back links leading to that site. Conduct your own case study and look at your Number 1 competitor; does that site have more back links than you do? You can determine the number of back links that a site has by entering the following into the search engine of your choosing: link:http://www.yourdomainurl.com

Of course back links are just one part of the equation, but they are a big part of the equation in getting good SERP results. So, if creating back links is such a good idea, why isn't everyone doing it? Well, not everyone is doing it, because it can be a real pain to create back links.

Let's look at some of the more common methods of building back links:

Email A Fellow Webmaster
It is recommended that the back links that you get to your site be from a site that is relevant to the topic of your own website. Having a website about cars linked to a site about fishing does not help you in the SERPs, as much as having a site about cars linking to a site about tires.

The problem here is that you can literally spend hours upon hours emailing various webmasters and asking them to give you a back link. In addition, it is common practice that you offër a reciprocal link to their website. This is fine for some people, but others do not want to clutter their pages with links that take visitors away from their website.

Additionally, you will want to look and see if the site that you are trying to get a link from has a good Google page rank (PR). Google says that a back link from a related site with good PR counts as a strong "vote" for your site; the more votes that you get, the higher your SERP and the higher your PR will be at the next update.

Once you create a salës pitch to a Webmaster for a link exchange, you have to hurry up and wait. You can email 100 webmasters and get a varied response, that is, if you get a response at all. It has been cited that reciprocal linking campaigns have about a 2-5% acceptance rate. In other words, out of those 100 people you took the time to research and to email, only 2-5 of them will give you the back link that you are looking for. Of course, a few more may be willing to do it for a fee.

Directories
Directories are another "tried and true" method of generating back links to websites. Again this is a process that will take hours of work. The two most popular directories are DMOZ.com and the Yahoo directory.

DMOZ is human edited; this is good, because they work hard at only approving quality sites. The downside is that they often lack the actual human beings to approve or disapprove all of the sites that are submitted. There simply are not enough people volunteering for DMOZ to stay on top of all the submissions.

Yahoo will allow for directory submissions for frëe if your website is not deemed to be a business website. If your website is deemed to be a business website, plan on shelling out about $300 to be "considered" for a listing in their directory. They do not guarantëe that your website will be listed in their directory. Yahoo only guarantees that they will consider your website for inclusion in their directory.

You will find that many webmasters operate their own directories. You can find a líst of many directories on message boards like the one at DigitalPoint.com. Many of these directories provide frëe listings, or they wish for a reciprocal link in exchange for placing your link. At many of these directories, you can also pay for a sponsored link.

The problem here? These directories are usually operated by software and are not human edited. This means that your site could end up in the wrong category or that your site is simply listed and forgotten about. These link directories often boast of having decent PR on their homepage, but the actual page that your site will be listed on usually has a 0 PR. These small directories also have numerous requirements, and you need to read the fine print. One mistake and the 15 minutes you spent constructing your submission could be wasted, when your submission is rejected.

Reprint Articles For Back Links
This is an option to create back links that many webmasters overlook. Probably the primary reason that webmasters do not take full advantage of this is because they do not feel comfortable with writing articles. Another reason is that the Webmaster may not have the time to write a quality article.

Consider this, one well-written article can be submitted to literally thousands of publishers of ezines and newsletters, niche webmasters, and frëe reprint article sites and can result in dozens, hundreds or thousands of back links. Now, not every publisher will pick up your article, but for the ones that do use your article, you will get a back link from their website. The back link is achieved in the "about the author" box that is required to stay in place with your article.

The more informative people find your article, the more linking results you can expect to achieve from your reprint article.

A webmaster that says he or she doesn't have the time to spend an hour or two writing an article needs to take a look at how many hours have been spent submitting to directories or writing to other webmasters asking for back links.

Don't feel comfortable writing your own article? Then hire a ghostwriter.

Once the article is written, then you should consider paying a distribution service to distribute your article for you. Again, this is a relatively small price to pay in order to get those all-important back links.

Some recommended article distribution services in alphabetical order include:

ArticleSubmissionSites.com

EzineTrendz.com

PRLeads.com

SubmitYourArticle.com

thePhantomWriters.com

In the end, you can save yourself time, monëy, and a lot of headaches by using articles to create back links to your site. You may be surprised by how many websites are starving for content and are more than happy to place your frëe reprint article on their website. Odds are that if they are placing your article on their website, then they are in your same niche market --- which only adds to the value that the search engines will place on that back link. Don't forget that people actually read these articles, and you can gain a boost in traffíc as a bonus to all of your new back links.

In Conclusion...

I know, you don't want to shell out the monëy to use reprint articles as a linking method, but how much monëy have you spent on being listed as a "sponsored" website in directories?

How much time have you wasted in trying to drum up new back links through other methods? After all, your time is your monëy. You can spend your time or your monëy to do the tasks that you need to do to be successful. And literally, sometimes it makes a whole lot of sense to outsource specialized tasks to experts in their fields.

No website is an island. You cannot just build your website and expect people to be knocking down your door to buy your products or services. You have to advertise. People have got to have a way to find your website.

If you take the time and expend the effort to build your website in such a way as to attract the search engines and to provide what the search engines consider to be a good website, then you will find that the search engine companies can be your business' best friend. And whether you like it or not, one of the ways that the search engine companies deem a website to be a good website, is by the number of back links pointing to the website.

You can have the best website on the internet, selling the best products and services at the best prices, but if people cannot find you, then your website is pointless. If you desire to be successful, then you need to do whatever is necessary to build links to your website. Give the search engines what they want (back links to your website), and the search engines will give you what you want (targeted traffíc).

About The Author
Trey Pennewell is a writer who writes for the "Links And Traffíc" guaranteed link building service. They use reprint articles to develop quality links from quality websites. Their writers know what it takes to write informative articles that generate above average linking results, and they put their monëy where their mouths are, by guaranteeing their results. Learn more at: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com. Feel frëe to reprint this article on your website, so long as this About The Author information and all live links remain with the article.

Labels: article, back, back links, back-links, directory, email, link exchange, linking, search engine result pages, search engine results, SERPS, success, website, website link popularity