links

3 Common Link Building Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

March 24, 2009 By Dee Barizo

Many webmasters have realized that a big part of SEO is getting links to their site. Armed with this knowledge, they make an effort to build links to increase their traffic from the search engines. However, their link building efforts are often ineffective because they make common mistakes. Here are three of those mistakes.

1. Quantity over quality

If one link is great, then five links is better, right? Not so fast. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on the quality of the links. A link from a popular site is much better than 20 links from low quality, spammy sites. In fact, no amount of low quality links can be as effective as a link from an authority site in your niche.

You could even get penalized for having too many low quality links. Don’t take the easy way out. Go after quality links and ignore low quality sites in your link building efforts. Think of it this way: the harder it is to get a link, the more effective that link will be. Do the hard work (networking, creating great content, guest posting, etc.) to get those links from quality sites.

2. Not using relevant anchor text

If you have a chance to choose the anchor text, use keywords instead of your site name. For example, instead of this link devlounge.net, use this one web design info.

Now, if someone links to you without them asking, don’t ask them to change their anchor text. That’s annoying and bad practice. They already linked to you. No need to bug them. But if you submit an article to an article directory or write a guest post, you’ll usually have control of your anchor text.

Many people will link using the titles of your pages, so try to add keywords in your titles.

Also, don’t use the same anchor text for each link. If you vary your anchor text, you’ll rank for more keywords.

Update: My friend, Ryan, left this useful comment.

I would like to just throw in the idea that with Google’s recent shift towards Brand emphasis, it can actually be a good thing to get lots of links with A) your site name and B) your site domain as the anchor text. Obviously its also good to mix things up and get varied anchor text, but I think that if there is too high a concentration of varied anchor text it looks unnatural.

I think Ryan has a great point. It’s a good idea to repeat anchor text if your anchor text is your site name or your site domain. Many people naturally link this way anyways. Plus, you’ll get more mentions on the web for your name and domain, which will make your site look more like a well known brand.

For more info about Google’s brand emphasis, check out this article.

3. Only linking to the home page

If you just link to the home page, then your home page will have a chance at good rankings. But what about the other pages on your site?

Each page including the home page can only target a few keywords effectively. You need links to the other pages to rank for a lot of keywords.

Also, I like getting links to the other pages since they are usually better pages for your visitors to land on. The other pages have more specific information than the home page and that information can make a great first impression to your visitors.

Finally, it can be easier to get a link to the other pages. For example, you could create a really great piece of content, give it its own page, and then email other webmasters and ask them to link to it if they like it. This could be hard to do for the home page.

Over to You

These mistakes are not the only ones. What link building mistakes have you seen?

Friday Focus 02/27/09: Peeking Through

February 27, 2009 By Sophia Lucero

Transparency, translucency, opacity: we have designs that are peeking through this week on Friday Focus.

Designs of the Week

The combination of robin’s egg blue and bird silhouettes is becoming more popular these days—dare I say because of Twitter, but this design is beautiful in its own right. I love the treatment on the hyperlinks, a graphical element also found in the logo, the “contact me” sign, and the handwritten blurb.

If you’re playing with transparency, why not use a striking background image that’ll show through? I like that the logo is centered at the top, while the background is a one-point perspective shot. Great warm hues, too.

Interesting use of the coverflow effect: instead of scrolling vertically, you’re browsing through a virtual stack of pages. (Not exactly sure why, but it makes for an interesting experience.) The changing background colors are an interesting touch.

So where’s the use of transparency here? It’s not very obvious, but when you use the javascript scrolling effect by clicking on the arrows, you’ll notice that striped wavy lines seem to fade in and out. Now that’s an interesting use of an overlaying translucent PNG which also doubles as a transition animation as you move from one screen to another. Bravo!

Social Media Weekly

Design – 7 Interface Design Techniques to Simplify and De-clutter Your Interfaces
Because simplicity is always trickier than complexity.

Programming – 7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility
From screenshots to actual apps, ensure your sites are working to the T with these tools.

A Preview of TNX: A New Text Link Service

October 14, 2007 By Devlounge

I was recently asked to review TNX, a new text link buying and selling service, similar to Textlinkads or other text link marketplaces. There have recently been a lot of reviews about this service, so rather than try to cover everything, I’m going to focus on the one side of TNX that would beneficial to people like me who own sites and are trying to monetize – the website publisher section.

Selling Ads on Your Site

Upon first visit to the TNX site (which I like to pronounce “Tee-N-Ex” although the actual pronunciation is “Thanks”), you are presented with two options: one for website publishers, and one for advertisers. Each link will take you to a FAQ about the service from the specific angle you might be interested in using the service for. Let’s take a look at a few of the Website Publisher FAQ’s:

Note: These are straight from the FAQ.

Q:How do I benefit from adding a TNX system code on my website?
A: When system code is placed on your website all the links that are purchased by advertisers will be automatically displayed on all pages that have TNX system code included. Whenever link on your website is sold to one of our advertisers, you get paid. The more pages you have on your site, the more links you can sell. Price of each link sold to our advertisers is calculated upon you page’s search engine rating. Links on all pages of your website are sold automatically, all you need is to place the TNX system code on all pages you want to sell links from.
Q: What is TNX commission?
A: TNX charges its members just 12.5% both, advertiser and webmaster to cover all expenses including web hosting, moderators salary and the most important – advertising all over the Internet so more people join.
Q: Can I control link ads on my website?
A: Yes! Once ad space on your website is sold, you can see list of all links and URLs in your control panel. You will have an option to block ads, delete them or ban the entire website which advertising you don’t like. We guarantee you will never see advertising of pills, drugs or any kind of ads that do not follow advertising policy. Every day we deny over 10,000 ads that do not comply with our policy.

On the left side of the FAQ page, I happened to stumble upon a Profit Calculator. I figured, what the hell, let’s see what’s possible. Upon entering in your url, the tool will calculate the amount of pages on your site and the link popularity. Once that is done, you have to adjust the PR for those pages. I set all of ours at PR6 (although we recently slipped to PR5). The calculator estimated I could make $8971.88 a month if I sold 2 ads per page.

TNX Calculator

Enough messing around – it’s time to register.

After registering, either as a website publisher or advertiser, you are presented with the TNX Dashboard. From here, you can generate the code to add to your site, add a new site, sell your TNX Points (used to buy links), create a new campaign, and view and manage your current campaigns (among other things).

TNX - Dashboard

TNX - Quick At A Glance

You may have noticed how I said you can sell your points. Well, what exactly do points have to do with all this? Points are how advertisers purchase links on your site. Points currently cost $1.20 for 1,000 points.

To get your site setup, you first need to ad the appropriate ad code to all your pages which you want to have ads on. The ads will be placed their dynamically, so once you ad the code to the pages you want, you won’t have to go back and manually edit them every time you have a new advertiser. Once you have added the code to your pages, you have to add your site to the system. It will take about 1-3 days to get approved.

TNX - Adding A Site

Other ways to make money

Maybe you are not interested in having text links on your site. That’s alright, because TNX also has an affiliate system which will allow you to place banner ads or your own links to the TNX service, and earn “TNX Points”. Now, you might be thinking, what do I want points for, I want cash! You can either turn around and use those points to purchase some link ads for yourself, or you can sell the points, either back to TNX themselves, or to another user.

Concerns with the advertising policy?

Many people get nervous with text links, especially a dynamic service where the code controls what is and isn’t shown on your page. No one wants to see their pages littered with links to purchase Viagra pills or anything like that. TNX does have a good advertising policy, which states that they will not approve links that “have nothing to do with the chosen subject or contradict it. Also, we will not approve campaigns that advertise pharmaceutical products and gambling.” Plus, because you can manage what ads get approved or not for your website, you have even more control over what kind of ads will be shown on your valuable pages.

Overall, if you are looking for another link marketplace alternative, give TNX a try. Have you ever used them? Let me know in the comments below.

Styleboost blasts off

August 6, 2006 By Devlounge

Styleboost, the lovely quality link provider since 2001, has traded in its dark black look for a combination of greys and blues, for an updated “web 2.0” look, and some great some great new additions.

While Johan has been teasing us with screenshots on his flickr account, the new version, dubbed Reboost, is finally out of the bag. Extremely easy to navigate, SB continues to serve up great looking links in a greater looking site. The new version also has promises for some included ajax goodness in the coming days / weeks.

The mini screen below gives you a small preview, and we couldn’t help showcasing it when our buddy and contributor Colin Cameron is at the top with his newly launched Wecreatethings.

Styleboost Screen - Capturing our own Colin Cameron

Text Linking To Your Feed

June 19, 2006 By Devlounge

The following article was originally written at Cory’s Weblog. For more articles like this either read Cory’s articles here at DevLounge or visit his personal site.

I recently read a post on a fellow blogger’s site, JohnTP about why making sure that you have a text link to your feed is important. Basically what he says in his article is that some people surf the web with images disabled by default. So, if you only have a shiny image saying, “Subscribe to my Blog”, that reader isn’t going to see it. Now, making a text link to your blog feed doesn’t have to be boring. In this tutorial, I am going to teach you how to make a nice link to your blog’s RSS feed without using images, so that you can be assured that your readers will see it.

First off, remember that you never want your users to search for something that they are looking for. If it takes them too long to find it, they may just say, “Forget about it” and decide its not worth the hassle. I would suggest looking at your blog, and deciding where the best place to put it is. Remember to place it somewhere that is easy to find, but at the same time, isn’t in their way bugging them every second.

Now that you have found a good place, lets get started on designing that button.

By using an element’s border-style CSS attribute to outset, you can easily create a 3D looking button. Taking it one step further the button can also appear depressed if desired, by switching from a border-style value of outset to inset. The below examples are 100% CSS based, not to mention lightweight:

Lets look at the CSS code that’s going to power this nice button:

[css]
.rssbutton{
background-color: #ff6600;
border: 1px #ff6600 outset;
padding: 0 2px;
text-decoration: none;
font: bold 10px Verdana;
}
[/css]

All you have to do is copy the above code into your CSS file, then when you call it up with the HTML code I’m about to give you, it will look all nice. But first, let me explain what all this code does. I am going to assume that you already have some type of knowledge of CSS. So I don’t have to take it line by line. You already know that it is assigning the color #ff6600 as the background, etc.

[css]border: 1px #ff6600 outset;[/css]

The above line is making a 1 pixel border using an outset property to make it look more 3d, as you can see below:

And when you hover over the button, it will make the text change. You can customize this code to your liking, but I do want to go over one example that is pretty cool: making the button look depressed when you hover over it.

For this mod, you need to add the following code:

[css]
.rssbutton:hover{
border-style: inset;
background-color: #000;
padding: 2px 3px 0 5px; /*shift text 1px to the right and down*/
color: white;
}
[/css]

What the above code does is shift the text 1px to the right and down to give the impression that the button is really being pressed. It also changes the background to black.

The color scheme can easily be changed to match your theme. Now, lets incorporate this into your blog.

Add the following code where you would like your buttons to go.

[html]

RSS
XML

[/html]

And there you go. Make sure to change the links to your own pages. I hope that you have found this tutorial helpful. I would also like to say that this can be easily modded to match your site. Of course your suggestions, feedback, and questions are always welcome in the comments.

~Cory