Archive for July, 2010

10 Easy Ways to Get More Links to Your Website

Written by , July 22nd, 2010

Here at Out-Smarts, we often get asked to assess company websites from a search engine perspective, to ascertain why their page isn’t appearing higher on Google. Often one of the main reasons is because they don’t have enough back links to their website: links from other websites tracking back to their site.

The Chain
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: links are like gold online, the more your website has the better its ranking will be. Link building can be extremely time consuming and can seem like a fruitless task but its worth it. Here are 10 ways that you can easily build links back to your site:

1. Blog Comments – find blogs that are relevant to your industry and business and post appropriate comments with a link back to your website.

2. Directories – there are gazillions of websites that simply list the URL’s of other website (rather like the Yellow pages but online). Submit a link to your site on the ones that have a good page rank. Avoid the ones that ask for payment or reciprolinks to save you.

3. Articles – if you blog regularly or write articles then use that great content and submit your articles to online articles sites. Again, choose articles sites that have a high ranking like Ezine articles.

4. Events – if your business is a service that regularly hosts events then list your events and link back to your site in so doing. Read this blog post for more.

5. Social Networks – use your social networking presence to link back to your site. These links count and are really easy to create.

6. Relationships – ask partners, clients and organisations you are a member of to place a link on their site back to yours.

7. Bookmarking – sites like Delicious or Stumble Upon allow you to submit sites that you like. Submit your own (carefully) to build valuable links back to your site. Read this article for more.

8. Press Releases - if your company regularly creates promotional pieces or press releases, use free PR release sites: submit your press releases to these sites with a link back to your website. Here’s an article all about how to go about doing so.

9. Content - make sure that the content on your website or blog is great. The better it is the more likely people will find it and link back to it.

10. Advertising - consider advertising online: Craigslist can be a valuable way to to this – not only does it bring visitors to your site who might link to your content (see 9 above) but it also gives you the ability to link back to your site from another high ranking site.

Thanks -wink- for the great Flickr image.

RSS 101

Written by , July 05th, 2010

When you subscribe to a blog or podcast or use portal like iGoogle the technology that brings the information to you is called RSS. It is a way of publishing information easily making it available to subscribers in a central on-line repository. Just like getting your newspaper delivered to your door, RSS delivers your online content to you.

Why take advantage of RSS? There are many reasons:

  1. Pull rather than push – articles come to users rather than them having to hunt them down;
  2. Subscribers get the latest and greatest information as its posted;
  3. An RSS link encourages traffic to your site;
  4. Users can have a bunch of sources of info in one place – much like a newspaper;
  5. RSS can be used internally to disseminate information too.

How to set up an RSS feed?

  • First get your site set up to support RSS by adding a few short lines of code.
  • Place code on your site that the RSS feed readers can find your info.
  • Publicise your feed by telling the world and everyone you know in it at every opportunity.
  • Add the RSS feed button to your site so visitors know you the can easily subscribe. Feedburner has widgets to support this on their site.
  • Submit your feed to syndicators and search engines to make it easier for your audience to find you.

Once that’s done, your good to start publishing your own data feed over the web.

rss-icon-collection.gif