As you may know, part of getting ranked high on Google or many
other search engines depends on who links to you.

This short article will explain how to find out who is linking
to your website, using simple search techniques.

The basic way is to open up Google.com and type

link:yourdomain.com

This will show who links to your home page, including any of
your internal pages. However, this isn’t always the best link
search, since Google actually only will include websites that
link to you if that site has a Google page Rank of 4 or above.

Another way to look is to type

inurl:yourdomain.com

This should show a bit more accurate results. If you look at the
results though, you will probrably see a bunch of your webpages
as the link results. To stop this from happening, you can type.

inurl:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

OR

link:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

This should exclude your website from being included in the
results.

Also, you can try using “yourdomain” as a search item which will
show sites linking to you as well, make sure you include the “”.

In addition, play around with these search tools. Include the
www in your search and try it without the www as well.

These search tools also work great in other search engines. Like
Yahoo, Altavista, Alltheweb and others. Keep in mind that each
search engine has different particulars and some will give
better or worse results.

You can also try to use this with domains that get top ranking
for your search terms. If you do a link search on those sites,
you can try and trade links or get a backlink from your
competitors links. This will help you rank higher, since the
links all wind up going to the same place.

Remember, search engine ranking is an ongoing effort and once
you can obtain good ranking, it will increase your visits,
targeted sales and your sites exposure. All Free.

If you want any help with these, drop me an email at
jhoffman@inetgoodies.com

Crucial Success-Question: “WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
POLITICAL ELECTIONS AND A SUCCESSFUL INTERNET BUSINESS?”

Answer: “Actually there is no difference. In both cases votes
are the inoculation; Politicians get the power by popularity,
and Web businesses receive traffic, higher search engine
rankings plus visitors, by link popularity.” George Papazoglou,
October 15 2001.  Web-site-promotion.gr 2001 Agent
seminars:Thessaloniki/Greece.

The comeback is obvious. Looks like that the most prevailing
businesses’ secret on the Web, just like the real world, is link
popularity. 

Google also has a very specific answer on “What is Link
Popularity?”.

Text taken from the Google site: Google explains quite
characteristically its ranking algorithm (Pagerank in name):
“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by
using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual
page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A
to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at
more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives;
it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by
pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and
help to make other pages “important.” As you probably know, Link
popularity can be enhanced via: ->Link exchange strategies
->Site popularity services ->Site popularity promotional tools
Link-farm services (not recommended) ->Associate programs
->Posting articles

Putting all the above into a strategic schema, your web site’s
popularity will surely improve. But here’s the catch-22 again…

Your almighty competitors are already using these tactics and
they’re using them good, actually severely good. As the Web
grows at incalculably paces, you’d need far more than saturated,
conventional methods.

What you really alarmingly necessitate, is unconventional
methods to drastically promote your business in the battlefield
of severe competition.

Your business *screams* for unused and “Virgo” site-promotion
schemes to march your business to the next level, and skip-over
profligately programs, which millions of disaster-prone business
models are gummed to.

Elevated Link Popularity is your roadway to a fruiful online
business.

Article writing and distribution creates free one way incoming
links back to your web site. Link building in this manner
increases your web sites exposure, visitors and you overall
search engine rankings. By using the following techniques you
can dramatically improve your web site traffic in a very short
period of time.

1. Create Viral Content For Your Web Site - Add your own
resource box/byline to your articles and post them on your web
site. You could allow your visitors to publish the articles on
their web site if they also include your resource box and keep
your hyperlink active. This will spread your link around the
internet like a virus and increase your link popularity fast.

2. Submit your articles to free content web sites for other
webmasters to reprint for publishing. When you include your
resource box at the end of the article with your website URL you
will not only get free advertising but you will get a link back
to your site. This will increase your link popularity and cause
your site to rank higher in the search engines.

3. Combine your articles into a free e-book. You can place your
business ad and hyperlinks back to your site in the e-book.
E-book creating software is inexpensive and easy to use. By
giving your e-book away to visitors and allowing them to link to
your site to give it away to their visitors will multiply your
web site traffic, exposure and link popularity.

4. Create an article directory on your web site. People will
visit your web site to get the free information. By allowing
them to reprint your articles with the stipulation that they
keep the resource box and hyperlink active you will increase
your link popularity. Also allow your visitors to place a link
on their web site that links back to your article directory. By
providing your free “instant article directory” to their
visitors you will increase your web site’s exposure and receive
a percentage of their visitors as well.

5. Offer other web sites, that are relevant to your own, free
content articles about your area of expertise to post on their
web site. Include your link on all of your content. Your article
should be related to your web site because it will bring you
visitors that are interested in your product or service.

6. Use an article distribution service that distributes
articles to thousands of web sites, newsletters and ezines at
one time. Your article will be published on dozens of web sites
almost immediately. I used this technique with an article
distribution service called thephantomwriters.com and got
literally thousands of links from only four articles. Distribute
your articles several times and you will increase your exposure.
Change your article’s title and redistribute it several times
more to maximize your article’s potential.

As you can clearly see, writing and distributing articles can
have a profound affect on your web site’s exposure. There is
absolutely no better or faster way to increase your web site’s
exposure, link popularity and search engine rankings.

© Copyright 2005 Affordable Concrete Cutting, Inc.

Link Exchanging has long been a standard practice for webmasters
and SEO specialists. Many webmasters have chosen to
automatically exchange links with hundreds if not thousands of
sites at once. This practice will often pair up polar opposite
sites. Not only is this method not very effective it is also
boarder line spam.

There are a few decent category based link exchanges but to the
best of my knowledge there are no contextual link exchanges. This
means if you have a mystery book site you might end up getting
paired with sports magazine site. Even though these site would
technically be in the same category they are not very closely
related. In the end this is not a very good exchange.

For years one of the best methods has been the slowest. You
simply go to a major search engine, plug in terms related to
your site and start fishing. You have a huge pool of sites you
would like to get a link on but there is no guarantee any of
them are even considering exchange requests. So you either call
or email webmasters with your request. Eventually you find a few
sites willing to swap links.

I would like to help give the manual process a little push. I
propose that webmasters who are seeking an exchange add a simple
work to their content, “Clepzo”
(contextual link exchange program). This way when other
webmasters search for a link exchange all they need to do is
type in their target keywords in a major search engine and
accompany that with the word “Clepzo”. This will return highly
related pages which are owned by webmasters who seek an
exchange.

On-page content and optimization by itself is no longer enough.
Unfortunately, link popularity has become a dominant factor in
deciding who ranks the highest within the major search engines,
especially within Google. If a competitor of yours is both
optimized for the same target search terms and has a higher
quantity and/or higher quality of back links, they are going to
outrank you: period. Even if your website is perfectly optimized
for an extremely niche search term and no other site in the
world even mentions your exact phrase, you may still have
trouble finding your website if you do not have at least a few
back links to “validate” your website.

If it came down to a contest between on-page optimization
efforts against link building efforts, links would win hands
down. You may find it shocking to hear a President of an
optimization firm saying such a thing, but its true. I would
challenge anyone to outrank a website that has a massive number
of quality back links by using on-page optimization efforts
alone with zero link building efforts. Whereas, you can easily
outrank a website that is extremely well optimized by focusing
heavily on link building efforts. An interesting example is
Apple.com. One of the most important elements of optimization is
to place the target key phrase within the meta title tag.
However, search for the word “computers” on Google and you will
find Apple.com on the first page of results. Apple does not even
mention the word computers in their meta title tag. How is this
possible when there are literally millions of competing websites
that are aggressively trying to show up for this term by
applying various optimization efforts? The answer is that
Apple.com has a superior volume of back links (over 70,000 in
Google alone). And a large percentage of these links include the
word computers within the anchor text (i.e. Apple Computers, Mac
Computers, etc.).

Does this mean Optimization is dead? The answer of course, is
no. Search engines still love websites that have tons of fresh
and relevant content. It is the basis of what search engine
results are all about. Copywriting fees are worth every penny
when it comes to adding well written descriptions of your
products and services onto your website. Professional
optimization companies still flourish because of the success
they bring to their clients through increased rankings and
traffic. For optimum results, you need both optimization and
links to succeed today.

It’s not just the quantity of incoming links, but the quality
and relevance of the websites from which they come, as well as
what words are used within the visible text portion of the
hyperlinks, i.e. “anchor text.” Reciprocated links have less
value than they use to and can potentially hurt your rankings if
you are exchanging with too many unrelated websites, i.e. bad
neighborhoods. One-way links are the best links.

During the last few Search Engine Strategies conferences, I
could not help but notice an increasing number of link-related
workshops, including a class dedicated to purchasing text links.
Matt Cutts, official spokesman and software engineer for Google
shared how he personally believes that buying links is like a
politician buying votes and that incoming links should only grow
naturally. He shared that the best way to receive incoming text
links was to offer something truly helpful and/or unique and
interesting to the public and that this would generate free
unsolicited, incoming links without even asking. He offered some
extreme examples of very creative websites, which caused a
national media stir. Within minutes frustrated attendees spoke
up about how the search engines started this whole thing by
giving too much criteria to links in the first place, and that
buying links on other sites (be it through banners or text
links) has been a conventional form of advertising well before
Google even existed. Some commented that if Google was
considering penalization for sites that buy or sell links, they
should start with Yahoo, since Yahoo earns a good portion of
their income from selling paid text links (i.e. $299/year
directory listings). Interesting enough, Google actually
recommends on their website that you submit to directories such
as Yahoo.

I am sure that a majority of website owners today would love to
come up with creative ideas that would generate a ton of
unsolicited media attention. The truth is that coming up with
something exciting to say about reverse vacuum pumps, or
single-mode fiber optic tool kits, or Batesville real estate is
easier said than done. Most of the clients we work with offer
clear and simple information about their products and services.
Waiting around for other websites to give them free, one-way
text links may very well result in additional years of continual
poor search engine rankings and a lack of sales.

So how do you build back links? Below is a short list of some of
the most common ways to increase your back links: - Offer
something truly helpful that may inspire others to link to you
without even asking. - Hire a website positioning firm to help
you write and distribute press releases and articles to
thousands of sites. - Ask business partners, vendors,
distributors, family members, golf partners, etc. to link to
you. - Ask non-profit organizations if they would post a
“contributor” link to you in exchange for a small donation. -
Offer quotes and testimonials to sites you are comfortable with
in exchange for a direct link to your site. - Exchange links
with websites (but stay within your industry and away from
automated programs). - Purchase text link ads (costly, typically
$20/month each and up - but may be worth it for the right
industry). - Submit to quality directories whose listings are
known to show up as valid back links (excellent value).

Do you need thousands of links? Not necessarily. You may not
even need hundreds. Everyday, we perform competitive back-link
research and people are often shocked at how little it would
take to rise above their competitors. Even if you are in a
fairly competitive industry, there are often select search terms
that may be far less competitive than others. This is why it is
helpful to partner with an experienced search engine positioning
company who can aid you in strategic decisions.