Forum Moderators: martinibuster
So, in this interesting environment, how are you changing your link development plan for 2004? Are you staying the course, tweaking a bit, or incorporating one or more new strategies?
>>Are you staying the course, tweaking a bit, or incorporating one or more new strategies?
Tweaking- I'm better utilizing mailing software by connecting it with collected website data for the purpose of personalization, with the goal of higher results per link campaign.
So, I'm going to go the tired, old "content is king" route and develop more good, relevant content. Have two new major sections going live in January, one more in February, with continued refocusing of existing sections. And where a couple of these good links already exist am considering targeting other specific areas to encourage new links from other sections of these major sites.
I'n not going to actively solicit links; if somebody wants a reciprocal I'll consider as always have done. But now will actively try to get the link to internal pages.
Slow and steady, in for the long haul.
On the off-chance that so-called LocalRank may have a bigger influence, I'll perhaps spend a bit more time on keyword-related sites, but these tend to be topically related anyway.
Jim, way to go....that is how true success is achieved on Google. I've never asked anyone for a link, and I ain't starting now.
I will reciprocal link with people I feel are suitable, following their request and typically a phone call or personal email, but that is as far as I will go.
If my sites don't add value to yours you should not be linking to me, if they do, you should link because you want to, I will do the same....'nuff said:)
Regardless of what G says, I'm still a little concerned about watering-down the relevence of the main site for its target terms, but I guess time will tell.
And...
>>So, I'm going to go the tired, old "content is king" route and develop more good, relevant content<<
...definitely doing this also.
That is definately one thing I will be striving to do this year is add more "variety" to anchor text instead of using just one phrase. I'm going to place a randomly rotating selection of link descriptions that people can use if they are interested in linking to me....
Dave.
To answer the question, I'll stick to my old link strategy, as it has done me well. My two biggest sites have directories, so people always find me. I do free links for information sites, but ask for reciprocal links on e-commerce or affiliate sites. I've racked up quite a few links that way, and instead of pursuing them, I can spend my time writing more content.
There ya go! The days of artificial linking are over and now we can all get on with better things :)
"You could always let Webmasters write their own descriptions instead of giving them canned ones"
Spot on... every time I write descriptions of what the page is actually about, I wonder why I bother because my accurate, spell checked, informative 12-15 words of prose is discarded in favour of a snippet that is mostly an assortment of words that have little if any literal meaning.
If the <descr> tag is ignored for rankings purposes, and this seems to be the common argument, then what is the harm in showing it as written by its author? Its unlikely to be any more contrived than the title, and they are displayed in all their various forms.
Those who take the time to write descriptions properly are improving the viewer experience as well as getting some satisfaction for a job well done. Applaud the effort and provide tangible support to encourage more of it.
By all means use a snippet for pages where the author did not provide a description. And when the description is keyword stuffed nonsense.... that would start to vanish very quickly once the site owners/webmasters realise their nonsense is on public display and the viewer is making informed decisions on which type of site they prefer to visit.
A little bit of public spotlight is a wonderful cleanser.
In my experience, even if you steer link sites toward specific title wording, only half will get it the way you asked for anyway. To get a high percentage of links worded identically (if you didn't control the link sites) you'd have to keep correcting your link partners until they got it right (Florida logic, perhaps?). I've never worried too much about this unless there was something actually incorrect in the link. (As an aside, it's a good thing to check every link - I've found links with perfect anchor text and a nice description that had a wrong or defective URL.)
I just started learning about SEO in June and from what I read, it was cool to link to anyone with the well known exception of bad neighborhoods, etc. I joined the Linkpartners.com scheme and linked away! It worked.. it got me to the top for a pretty major keyword within a month.
After Florida and loosing my ranking across the board, I was forced take a step back and rethink what a link's purpose really is. Is it for search engine ranking or is or for the benfit and usefulness of my customers? Would someone coming from a site (hypothetically) about swimming pools be interested in my site that is about computer monitors? What about the other way around?
With that, I canceled LinkPartners.com, removed all non-related links from my site, stopped worrying about recipricols, and am re-designing the entire site to encompass more content and strictly on-topic links to quality sites for my customers.
I may also build a directory for strictly on-topic sites with a personal review (paragraph or two) of each one. In my opinion, this is the only way to go if you are going to build a links directory.
depends on which areas i am doing link campaign. For normal competetive areas am doing reciprocal link campaigns. One thing different is asking for more generic anchor texts and mixing and matching the anchor text and description in such a way that there is not same exact <html> code on each link partner site.
For my own site have been lucky to get 25 one way home page links. They provide good source of traffic. So more like diversifying traffic to different sources.
I am currently working on my companies SEO project and realized quickly that it is better to find reciprical links yourself, creating your own keyword phrases that are relevant to each page of you site, and most important, research.
Since I started, early Dec. I have increased our PR from a 3 to a 5. I am happy with the progress so far.
Are there any suggestions that I may be able to implement.
Josephsims77
