The Management Consulting Group

Unlike Reciprocal Links, One-Way Links also known as Inbound
Links are obtained by you or in fact given to you with Love and
for ever. Yes,they have come to stay. One-Way Link is a link
pointing to your website from another site. You do not have to
link back to that website. In other words you need not
reciprocate. One-Way Links play a vital role in increasing your
Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a measure of the number of
sites of quality and relevance that point to your website. The
more number of such sites, the higher will your page rank be.

Search Engines consider One-Way Links superior to Reciprocal
Links because the website that links to your site without
getting a link back, endorses the fact that yours is a website
of quality.

Webmasters are known to adopt various methods to artificially
increase the Link Popularity of their websites, such as
purchasing of high PR links. Search Engines have now become
aware of this and hence major Search Engines appear to be
devaluing sites that solely depend on reciprocal links.

Good Reciprocal Links are often obtained by begging and are in
some instances not permanent due to unethical practices of some
webmasters. On the other hand One-Way Links have a different
story to tell.

1. If your website has good content and valuable information,
other webmasters will link to your site, because they Love and
appreciate the contents of your site. You thus get a permanent
One-Way Link more often with the same theme as that of your
website.

2. I have posted about 550 articles in my website written by
other webmasters, because I Love those articles and would like
my visitors too, to appreciate and benefit from these articles.
Similarly several hundreds of webmasters have published my
articles in their Directories, Ezines, Newsletters and Websites
for the same reason. Writing expert articles of quality, that
are informative and educative, sincerely from your heart is
appreciated by the audience. The result is that your articles
are often sought after and published by webmasters. Thus you are
given a permanent One-Way Link with Love.

3. Listing in Web Directories is another great way of securing
One-Way Links. In addition to well known Directories such as
Yahoo Directory (charges a fee for guaranteed listing), The Open
Project Directory (DMOZ), and Joe Ant Directory, there are
several other Secondary Directories that Love to list your
website without requesting a link back. A list of these
Directories can be obtained by going into the Search Engines. By
submitting your website to the relevant category in these
directories you are assured of a high quality relevant One-Way
Link that will be there for ever. Furthermore there are several
high PR Directories who Love to list your website but charge a
fee for listing. Get listed and you are again assured of a
quality relevant One Way Link for ever.

4. If you have purchased a product and like the product, write a
good testimonial about the product and send it across to the
webmaster or vendor concerned with your URL in it. He would be
thankful to you and would Love to publish your testimonial,
thereby giving you a One-Way Link.

In addition to these methods there are additional ways in
obtaining one way links by posting relevant comments in Forums,
Blogs and submitting Press Releases etc.

To increase their link popularity, webmasters endeavor to
acquire as many quality reciprocal links or one way links. For
reasons already indicated Webmasters Love one- way links and
Search Engines appear to Love them even more. The manner in
which One-Way Links are obtained can be viewed from a different
perspective altogether. Webmasters Love your website and link it
to theirs. They love your articles and post it in theirs. They
love your product and write a glowing testimony. Directories
love your quality website and list it. You love them in return
for giving you a One-Way Link for ever. On the other hand in
reciprocal links exchange or link trade as some term it the
whole approach revolves around begging and bargaining.

The more number of relevant one way links you obtain, the
greater and faster your chances of increasing your link
popularity and climbing up the Page Rank ladder. The benefits of
a high page rank are numerous. So the earlier you start to
capitalize on these On-Way Links that are given for ever with
love, the happier you are going to be.

Here is a classic example of what NOT to do when conducting
business online. That is, unless you can afford to throw away
millions of dollars.

Have you seen those ads by x10 for that tiny camera that you can
hook up to your computer?

It is estimated that as many as 1/3 of ALL people surfing online
have been exposed to their advertising campaign. Those are HUGE
numbers.

Visit their web site if you need to refresh your memory of them
and their ads: http://www.x10.com/

If they were to be judged by exposure alone, then you might
think that the advertising campaign has been a great success.

However, it has largely failed to convert surfers to buyers and
that is the true test of a successful online ad campaign.

So what happened to x10?

They sunk an enormous amount of money and faith in the pop-under
window form of advertising through Yahoo, the online version of
the New York Times, at the MSN web site and via the pop-up
window that opens as you download something off the Internet.

The pop-under or pop-over windows are not a problem in and of
themselves. The problem with x10 seems to have been the narrow
focus of their product offering.

X10 has too narrow a focus.

They are getting a lot of hits on their web site with over 25
million visitors monthly. Yet 70% of their visitors leave in the
first 20 seconds!

That is a LOUD chorus of people saying they find NOTHING of
interest or value at that web site.

It says a great deal about the products they offer and the
design of their web site.

Since then, x10 has tried to bring in a slightly larger range of
products but it still seems very narrow.

What went wrong?

X10 failed to partner with a significant array of related online
businesses that could have brought it an added source of revenue
via commissions.

Such a huge flow of traffic and they cannot tap into the
pocketbooks of their visitors.

Even small business online can partner with the likes of Dell
Computer, Delta Airlines, Visa Nextcard and American Express
through such affiliate programs as are offered by Linkshare,
http://www.linkshare.com/

Our web site is TINY by comparison to x10, yet we have managed
to increase our overall revenues by over 1000% directly because
of affiliate commissions.

Better to sell something for a commission that to lose your
visitor forevermore.

What else could they have done with such a huge amount of
traffic?

They could have offered visitors a referral affiliate program so
that they could refer friends and family and perhaps earn a
little something for their trouble.

X10 got off to a slow start here also.

They now have a program in place but all they offer you to earn
is a credit to be used on those products that no one seems to
want to buy anyway!

How about some entertainment?

They completely lost sight of the “sticky” value.

Here you have a company that offers these great looking little
cameras that will fit into the palm of your hand yet all they do
is DESCRIBE it!

They could have easily become a major “ENTERTAINMENT” center for
those millions upon millions of visitors.

All they had to do was to hook up those cameras to “SHOW” people
how they worked!

Visitors would have had a reason to stay longer than just 20
seconds and they would have had a great reason to come back for
more.

The “Viral” effects of word-of-mouth, (or is that
word-of-mouse?), would have kept those millions of visitors
coming to their web site daily yet also it would have also
allowed them to scale back on their advertising campaign
expenditures.

And seeing practical example of how a product works helps the
product to sell itself.

A little creativity at x10 would have gone a long way.

It just goes to show you that even if you have millions of
dollars to spend for exposure and you get millions of visitors
to your web site, it won’t do you any good if you don’t know
what to do with them.

As I look through my various forum links and review some of my
company email, I keep coming across questions relating to
generating inbound links to increase web site ranking. No matter
who you are, if you have a web site online you are always
looking for ways to improve your link popularity. While most SEO
practitioners will tell you that getting other related,
non-competing, websites to link to you should be high on your
priority list if you want better PR from Google or better
rankings, most web site designers miss the most obvious way to
get these valuable one way inbound links. There is a way to do
that plus generate additional content for your web site at the
same time. You can get those quality inbound links while
expanding your content which will bring the search engine
spiders to your web site more often. By following my
suggestions, you will be able to kill two birds with one stone,
and make your visitors happy while increasing your rankings and
making the spiders happy all at once.

Everyone is an expert at something.

It’s true, everyone has many years of experience at something.
Maybe you have been in a job for the past 20 years and know just
about every aspect of it, or maybe you’ve been making paper
airplanes as a hobby for just as much time. Either way, you have
20 years of knowledge about something that others could be
looking for information to read on those topics. Maybe you have
already built a web site taking advantage of that knowledge and
are looking to use it as a means to make a living, or maybe it’s
about a hobby and you want to make a living with that. Either
way, each of us has valuable knowledge that other people might
want. Why not take some time, sit down and think about your
business experience or hobby, and then write some “How To”
articles about it? If you have a web site that already uses that
hobby, or work experience, then it is a good way to add content
to your web site, and it’s also a good way to help you get those
inbound links you need to increase your rankings.

Using the Knowledge to Gain Link Popularity through Article
Writing.

Let’s say you have 20 years of experience with a company where
the only thing you did was to conduct interviews to hire new
employees. Let’s further say you were so good at this that it
was the only thing your company wanted you to do. Because your
results were so good, it’s the only thing you did do. Maybe your
prospects always worked out and were some of the hardest and
most competent workers your company ever hired. You could write
some articles on how to interview job candidates to get the best
employees, or maybe write articles telling job seekers what
companies are looking for in their potential employees. If you
have a web site for job seekers, or a web site for learning how
to interview employees, you could then use the articles for
additional web site content. It’s already a known and proven
fact that the search engine spiders can be conditioned to visit
your site more often through your patterns of adding content.
The more often a site updates, the more often the spiders come
to visit. The more often they visit, the better chances that
your web site will begin to jump in rankings because it is
viewed as a fresh content site that updates frequently and would
be more valuable to visitors.

Some might think there are just some topics so vague or
uninteresting that it wouldn’t be worth writing anything in that
topic area, but the professionals know there are readers for
almost any topic area, and no one topic is to be avoided because
of poor readership. It all comes down to your writing style,
ease of reading, and your credibility. If you can write gripping
content that pulls your readers in and informs them, then it
doesn’t matter what you write about. In the end, the reader will
be looking for you and not your article. This is not something
that happens over night. It takes a lot of writing and a lot of
time to hone your skills to that point. It takes writing daily
and forcing oneself to try different topics. It’s good to start
out with what you like, but to become a professional and have
flexibility, you have to write about other things too. Not only
will this experience help you become a more professional writer,
it will also help to develop your communication skills in the
written format. As you continue to use better forms of writing
and grammar, you will begin to write content pages for your site
that rank better with the search engines. It’s a win-win
situation all the way around.

Articles to Increase One-way Inbound Links and Web Site
Ranking.

Speaking of those rankings, that reminds me of those one-way
links I spoke about earlier. After you write your article, you
can submit it to other places online which will post it to their
web site, offer it to other web sites as free content, or both.
Most of these places will allow you to submit your own
information for an “Author’s Box” or “Author’s Bio” area which
they publish at the bottom of each article. These are things
like information about you, your web site, and LINKS you can add
back to your site. There you go, instant high quality in-bound
links without the need to add the other web site’s link to
yours, no begging, no paying extortion amounts of fees for an
ad, just good old fashioned content to promote your own
abilities and web site. It’s the easiest way to get a one-way
in-bound link to your site IF you can develop your writing
skills and your content viewed as valuable to another web site.
If you write garbage, your information isn’t credible and is
full of factual holes, or your writing puts people to sleep,
then chances are that your articles aren’t going to do anything
more than waste your time. That’s why it’s critically important
to get into the habit of writing often and learning the flow of
your chosen language.

You see, the more you write, the more you train your ear to
listen to the written words, and the more you learn what
“sounds” right and what doesn’t quite seem to make sense. As I
write an article, I am talking within my mind while I write.
Yes, maybe I am a bit strange, but it works for me. I add my
intonations and elevate my voice for emphasis, and I try to find
ways to convey that in my writing. I’m no “expert”, but this is
what works for me, and I have a decent amount of articles
published, which means I must be doing something right.
WebProWorld and WebProNews seem to like me, or at least my
writing style or the topics I cover. Maybe it’s just my
sincerity LOL. Hey, I do my best. I try to offer the facts and
ensure that I do my research before I write any article outside
my field of knowledge. Character helps to build a writer, and a
healthy dose of commitment to the reader doesn’t hurt either,
but you have to find ways to build credibility and trust.
Without those two things, nobody is going to read what you
write, and if they do, they aren’t going to be likely to click
on links back to your site. You have to get their attention and
compel them to want more of your writing. That’s what will make
your one-way inbound links even more valuable.

The Most MISSED Secret to Link Popularity through Writing
Articles.

OK, so now you have the knowledge to write articles and submit
them as a means to gain valuable one-way links to your web site,
what are you going to do with it? Are you going to sabotage your
own web site by failing to pay attention to the link you
formulate in the articles submitted? The more articles I read, I
tend to find a common error repeated by authors all over the
internet. Now granted, these are writers, not SEO specialists,
but this is just an example where it pays to round out your
knowledge in many areas of web site promotion, ranking, and
design. The BIGGEST mistake I see authors make when attempting
to gain inbound links is the keywords they FAIL to use within
those links. You see, so many writers worry about branding their
name. That works just fine for writers building portfolios for
selling their copy writing abilities where name recognition
becomes the search term a searcher looks for, but if you aren’t
a writer and are just using your knowledge to gain inbound
links, then you need to use your keywords in those links back to
your web site. It’s so simple that most times it’s overlooked.
Many will also use a company name as the link back to their web
site. Many of my articles have ended up that way because I
overlooked the obvious too. Nevertheless, by following this
method, it is a sure way to increase your company name, or your
name, but does NOTHING to increase the link popularity for the
keywords applying to your site.

Take for instance Sanders Consultation Group Plus. That’s my
company’s name. We provide web site design services, image and
graphical art services, business consultation services, SEO
services, and just about anything else to get your web site
promoted, up, and running. I tend to take a page-by-page view of
our site and link popularity. What I mean by that is I take
various areas, choose specific keywords, and search terms I want
our site to gain in rank popularity. I have recently done some
page optimizing for our web site design area; incidentally, web
site design has been the most searched term for web site design
services. It corresponds to one of the services we offer, and
it’s the most popular search-term people use when searching for
that type of service. Let’s say I write an article talking about
web site design. The next article I write on web site design
will include the company name, Sanders Consultation Group Plus,
but it will also include the term “web site design” linked to
the page we have recently optimized for our web site design
services. As I already said earlier, this is such a simple
concept that most people often overlook, and it can be a
detriment to your link popularity goals. And as we optimize each
area of our site, I will continue to write articles based on the
area keywords and phrases, and will then place links in my
Author’s Box to link back to those optimized pages.

It’s a reported fact that one-way in-bound links are worth more
than reciprocal links. However, for many web site designers and
webmasters, the ways to gain them has been somewhat elusive.
Many fear that imparting their knowledge will give competitors
an edge over the writer’s own business. What most fails to
consider is the number of people that start out as the “do it
yourselfer” and then realize there is more work than they
intended to do. When they find your articles, you become a
source for them to get their work done without their need to
invest large amounts of time on the project. This is where the
benefits of article writing will pay off, especially if you gain
credibility and trust through your readers. Even if a competitor
does notice one of your articles, sometimes they can be so
impressed and overwhelmed that they’ll write things about you,
include links to you, and you still come out on top. I’ve seen
it happen before. Someone reads something so profound that it
changes his or her life. They tend to tell others about the
change and how the change occurred.

Articles are a valuable way to get recognition, gain reputation
and credibility while increasing your link popularity. Done
wrongly, and it will do nothing but increase your reputation and
credibility. Done correctly, and it can raise your ranking
popularity and bring you added customers on top of the other
benefits. Take the time to learn how to write effectively. Write
daily and learn the flow of your chosen language. Write
truthfully and credibly. Make sure to give provable facts while
keeping the hype to a minimum. Use keywords in your Author Boxes
and find highly trafficked sites to submit to. Learn to write in
such a way that engages your readers’ minds and makes them want
to read more of your writing. If you can do all this, not only
will you become a trusted expert, but you will also gain
increased traffic to your web site and leverage your web site
income goals through increased link popularity and higher search
engine rankings. At the least, it will give you plenty of
content to update your web site and increase search engine
spidering.

This is an extremely useful tool that will help you get an idea
of how your site will look in google search engine results. See
how search-engine friendly your site is, and can the spider
crawl it easily? This will determine whether or not you will get
good rankings.

By using Google Poodle you will avoid making errors that can
stop your site from getting a good listing. It will also show
whether or not you have a useless description of your site in
the search engine results.

What Poodle tries to do is duplicate the rules used by major
search engines as they spider your site. Of course it can’t be
exact due to different algorithms used by different engines but
it does give you some insight into where you need to make some
corrections.

With over 80% of people coming to your site through search
engines this is something you can not afford to pass up as one
of your most useful tools in search engine optimization.

What Poodle attempts to do is to show you 4 different views of
how your website is viewed by search engines. The spider view
will show results that show what you would see in a search
engine if you searched for your site by URL.

Below that there will be a list of crawlable links that the
google poodle spider found on the site entered. These links have
been spidered and it gives you a simulated search engine view.
Then if you click on these links you will crawl that site. You
will not go to it.

Beneath that you will see the Poodle Diagnostic’s view. When you
click the Diagnostics view link, there will appear a color coded
representation of what the search spider sees at that URL. The
colors separate the various elements that are important to
search engines and will give you an idea of where you can make
some changes.

Next you will see and can click on the source code view and see
a color coded representation of your HTML code of your URL. This
is usually used to de-bug a site when it does not show as it
should in the other views.

If when using Google Poodle you run into error problems this is
also an indication that the googlebot will also encounter a
problem and your site will not get indexed properly. For a
complete list of google tools to help you please visit my
website at:

http://www.emailpromotions.net/articles/article46.htm

This article explains in detail the various issues related to
the linking campaign that you will need to mount, to establish
your worth in the algorithms of search engines . Some of the
issues that we will be tackling in this & subsequent articles
are:

-Creating one way incoming links to your site.

-The identification of resources to link.

-Evaluation of the resources identified.

-How to approach others with your link requests( some samples).

-Where to put the link the link in your web site.

-Where should the incoming link to your web site be placed in
others site.

-The almighty anchor text.

-Linking software evaluation.

-The donts of linking campaign.

-Sundry tips & trips.

-How to maintain the linking ledger.

Before we begin with the details of your linking campaign(LC) we
are assuming that your site has some great content or some good
tool or something which creates unique value(UV) for visitors.
Remember to keep the UV as the lynchpin of your web site linking
strategy. Think about is like this. Would you want to link to
someone who doesn’t have anything of merit on his or her site.

Hence the first step should be to set up your house properly
before inviting others (SE, editors & web masters).

Now that you have created noteworthy inducements lets get
started with the LC. Pls remember that one good quality incoming
link is better than 100 inferior quality incoming ones. The
quality of the linking campaign is very (allow me top add one
more very) very important.

First item on the agenda is to generate & create one way
incoming links into your web site. These links are at the
highest priority as far as our LC goes. This is because the SE
sees them as they are: one way links. This gives it a
significant vote. In other words the SE knows that you have not
traded a link Some one has found genuine merit in your web site
& has linked to you. They value that link higher than others
(all others remaining equal).

Hence our first effort should be directed towards creating
these. Now some of the ways to do this is:

Get the directory listings first. There are numerous
directories( Dmoz, Yahoo, Zeal) etc which one can submit a site
to. With some one like dmoz you can aspire for more than one
incoming link as well. You can try some of the paid options of
URL inclusion if your budget permits it ( business.com,
yahoo.com etc) Then there are multiple, regional & topical
directories which one can look for & get the site submitted to.
Then of course there are some portals which are hubs for the
theme that your web site is on. Find them & submit to them( a
great way to look for them is to go to Teoma & give your key
search term in their search box .On the results page look at the
resources sections. The hubs of your theme or domain area will
be listed in there)

Once you have found & listed into these directories, hubs,
portals etc what do you do. Take the next step for creating one
way links.

That is become the internet guru on your subject matter. To get
yourself to that status write articles & columns on your subject
matter of expertise. These articles should be genuine content
which adds value to the reader & are not just under cover
publicity campaigns for your product or service. Once these
articles are created include your bio ( obviously with your
hyperlink into it- this is great place to control your anchor
text so be judicious ) & submit that article to various online
resources & content providers.

To find a listing of those do an online search for the keyword
Article banks.( the most cited resource for this is
http://www.coachmaria.com/articles/articlebanks.html) Choose you
targets & start to submit articles.(Don’t forget to host that
content on your site as well). This is generally what people
will link to.

Another place to contribute these articles is to the sites which
are ranking ahead of you on your key search phrase. Most
probably they will also have quality content on their site. So
if you have genuine content, they will welcome your
contribution.