Submitting articles to article directories can get you a lot of targeted traffic, there are many online resources that you can use to increase the traffic to your site. Here are a few of them that I have found to be effective and how to use it.

Yahoo Answers

This is the place where people get answers to questions.   If you find a question related to your niche, post a useful but incomplete answer. This entices the readers to follow your link to your website or blog for the full scoop.  The other thing you can do is go in and create a niche question.  Then find the answer and close the question.  There are many ways to use Yahoo Answers to get links and some traffic.

DIGG.com

This site is ranked number 124 in Alexa as of this writing. Which means it has a lot of traffic. Digg is a Social Bookmarking site.   If you post a article and it lands on the first page of DIGG, your server can crash from the tidal wave of traffic.  Problem is how do you get enough people to digg your article.  Again you can if you work it right create DIGGs to your article, site or what ever with either software or by creating a number of accounts.  Be careful how you use DIGG cause they are very watchful of spam attempts.

Squidoo.com

Having your article on the first page of Squidoo has two positive effects. You get lots of traffic.  You also can get plenty of Google Love from them as well.  Essentially Squidoo Lenses are nothing but information pages that users create.  Create some with your keywords and then a lense with information along with links to your site and you can increase your sites presence on the net.  For my coffee site I currently have 5 lenses pointing at it and all of them show up as backlinks in Google Webmaster.  A powerful source of link juice.

WordPress.com
Blogger.com

Both WordPress.com and Blogger.com have been around for a long time. Both sites receive a lot of visitors each day and thus it makes sense to post some useful there.  Just make sure your profile in WordPress.com contain a link back to your site and bingo you have link juice coming from two powerful domains.

Myspace.com

Facebook.com

Twitter.com

These are three of the largest social networking sites online. Even you just focus your attention on one of them, you can get tons of link juice to your site. Make sure to set up a good profile that links back to your site. Users of MySpace and Facebooks frown upon promotional materials and so post only useful content and let your profile do the work of driving them to your site.  In some of them you can create groups, use your key words and make groups and let others join as well.  Twitter is a different beast.  You get a profile where you can put a link and if your careful you can put in other links as well.  Twitter will ban your account for two many links so always nice to re-tweet things and send out lots of non-sense posts to cover your links.

Traffic exchanges

Few traffic exchange online are really worth the effort actually. But there are still a few that works very well. One of them is of course TrafficSwarm. I have not used this yet, but have heard good things about getting your site put into a part of an article.

Hubpages

This is another site that hosts a lot of useful content. Much like Squidoo if you get into the top pages you get serious link juice and traffic to your site.

Ezine publishers

Thre are many ezine publishers that are looking for good and unique content. All you need to do is search ‘ezine directory’ in Google and you can find many sites that list the ezine publishers looking for content.   Put in unique content about your niche and you can get a link or two in as a resource. Just make sure you submit unique content.

This is realy good and I usually see a google alert for the domain name within a short period of time.  This tells me that google has seen the link and indexed it.

After that then what? Make another lenze if you like with other links and other keywords but as with any site the link is only as good as the PR of the page.  BUT if your going to create more than one lense then you need to create more than one account.  Then with each of your accounts you can go to the other pages you created and get them favorited or other things that make your lense more popular.  By making your lense appear more popular your going to get more indexing by google and more juice as more of your pages interlink with each other through the bookmarks you create within each of your accounts.

Then you can go out to the Social Bookmarking site and bookmark your lenses.  This is effective in sending more link juice to your Squidoo page which then sends even more juice down to your main site.  Essentially this is part of a link wheel that creates things that google likes linking to your site… CONTENT….

Sparky

PS If you have a Squidoo page leave a comment with its url and the next time I am in tweaking my lenses and adding content I will check yours out and give you a boost in traffic, and rate your lense.  Of course I would like you to do the same and here are a few you can do if you would.

http://www.squidoo.com/Gourmet-Flavored-Coffee

http://www.squidoo.com/Gourmet-Organic-Coffee

http://www.squidoo.com/Free-Gourmet-Coffee-for-the-Troops

http://www.squidoo.com/Gourmet-Coffee-Production

http://www.squidoo.com/Jamaican-Blue-Mountain-Coffee-Production

high quality links from other sites, ie backlinks,

I have an extensive listing of profile sites

where you can get good links.

As I go along and find a site in one form or another I bookmark it and save it.  You never know when it might be valuable again for another site that needs a link.  Does your site need a list of High PR web 2.0 Social Networking Profile Sites?

Well I have over 800 of them, well over 800 probably closer to 1000 or more and if your interested I am offering a couple of services.

• 1. Sale of the urls to the sites. I will provide you with an HTML file that has links to the various sites that you can then use as you see fit.

• 2. Site submissions to the Sites. I can also have people create profiles for you if you don’t have time.  If you looking to get them done and get them done now, I have people who I have build links for me that know what they are doing and how to make a good profile complete with picture and a better about me than you will find elsewhere.  We make them look natural and can build them at what ever speed you want. I suggest you do not create more than 50 per day per keyterm.

The basic price for just site links to sites that you can put a link in is 25 cents per site with a minimum of 100 ordered at a time ($25 paid via Pay Pal).  I will then personally email you your links for you.

The price for profile submissions is $0.75 per profile with a minimum of 100 ordered at a time ($75.00 USD paid via Pay Pal).  I will get your information and pass it on to one of my AMERICAN workers and have them create your profiles for you and give you a listing with links to your profiles.  Now this is 75 cents per profile. If you want to have links to 4 different sites with 4 different keywords, that is fine this brings the cost down to less than 19 cents per site.  I do not recommend more than 4 sites per profile.

You can hire people in other countries and outsource this.  We outsource it as well, but we outsource it to Americans who are stay at home or unemployed, need the extra income kind of people.  So your not only getting an excellent service, for a very reasonable price, but your also helping someone out.

Number of Links

100 $75.00 200 $150.00 500 $375.00

If your interested in this service please contact me.  sparky@birrenbach.com

Sparky

sparky@birrenbach.com

I had a WOW moment. Sites that are listed linking to a home site or page in either Webmaster, Site Explorer, or backlink checking of various means are it would seem to me to be sites that google, yahoo, bing or what ever have decided are important to your site and giving it significant enough juice to show up in the results no matter where you get them.

These sites, pages, should be social bookmarked and given even more juice to them which in tern gives more juice to the home site. Take a look at the following page for a diagram of what I am thinking about.

In the diagram below you will see the home property and how it is linked according to the link discovery devices out there.

Link Juice

Step 1:
This is the home page, and splash pages, they each have articles,  sites, etc…  that Webmaster or Site Explorer have discovered linking to you.

Step 2:
These sites are bookmarked by various users increasing the amount of juice each of these things carry.

In this way you take links that are already giving your site energy and energize them even more so that they become more important and thus what they link to, your home properties, becomes more important.

Think about the juice that could be added to your site by turning something that is linking to you from a PR 1 into PR3 or more?

Sparky

For a long time, and some still swear by it, that it was send out comments to blogs with links back to your site.  This works  remarkably well, however there is a drawback to degradation.  You eventually loose your links so unless your always making hundreds of them a day eventually your fighting a loosing battle.

The next big thing was to get into the social networks.  Many of them allow you to create links or put things in your about me that contains a link back to your site.  Theory being google crawls the profile and sees the link.  There is lots of evidence that this works remarkably well.  I can stand as proof that links like this do work.  I pulled my coffee site up using a number of links like this.

Video submissions is another sought after source of links.  Usually when you post a video you get to put up a an about this video where you can put links or you create a profile and get links.  I find this to still be remarkably effective in getting links.

You can create articles and with spinning services or your own hard work you can send them out to the various Web 2.0 sites that allow you to post blogs and articles like Ezines and the like.  There seems to be little being followed in this area unless your article gets posted to one of the big sites.  There is value in that no doubt the blogs are being indexed (and hopefully with the caffeine update to google more so) that this is worthy of doing.

What seems to be the next step or the next big thing that the Big G is gonna pay attention to? There is one thing that I have noticed a very real trend in and that is Social Bookmarking.  Social bookmarking is where you set up an account with one of the hundreds of services out there.  It allows you to create a list of links to sites you like and even leave comments so that when your not at your computer you can access them from someplace else.  Remarkably stupid concept yet I am finding that it is much more powerful than I first thought.

I say that I think it is much more powerful is that I have been researching this since before the announcement about Caffeine and the buzz about what google is going to be watched to index faster.  I looked at Alexa for my coffee site.  I looked at Site Explorer for my coffee site, I looked at google webmaster tools for my coffee site.  I started to look at what each was saying I had in the way of backlinks.  Understanding that each is not telling me everything but each is giving me a piece of the picture of what they think means something to them.  I quickly began to notice a recurring theme in all of them.  Backlinks from Mixx (a social bookmark site), links from Digg, Links from all kinds of places I had been bookmarking in the past couple of months with friends and software.

Thinking about these bits of information and thinking how google might think something is important and currently hot, and of interest by a large number of people I thought where better to gather that data than from sites that are providing that service?  The Social Bookmarking network sites.

These sites are ever changing, people are constantly adding new sites, bookmarking sites for friends, bookmarking what THEY THINK is important and interesting enough to want to pass around or keep track of.  Well what is important to users of the internet is important to google to determine real time, relevant search results.

I think given what I have heard about the upcoming Caffeine update to Google, what I am seeing with regard to my own sites and their links, rank and position in search results I can say that parts of Caffeine are being employed now and that part of the update is to look more and more at these kinds of sites for relevant information.

Sparky

Without links there would be no web. Links are what make the web the web.  They are what take you from one site to another searching for what ever it is your finding.  Links are one of the most important parts of the internet and your site.

There are a number of types of links you can get. Some are good, some are not.  Good links are links that are coming into your site.  You only have limited control over who links to you.  There are no laws on the internet that forbid people from linking to you. While some incoming links are better than others and certainly better than none, the right kind of link will bring you a better result.

The Best links: The best kind of link you can get is one from a website that ends in .EDU or .GOV these are, it is believed, to be links that are the best to have.  Part of the reason is that they are next to impossible to obtain due to the nature of the sites.  EDU sites are educational, and usually only have links to sites or pages that they know are of value.  The same is true for a GOV or government sites.  If your able to get a link from any of these kinds of domains take it, it is worth gold to the search engines.

Great Links: If your able to get a link from a news organization you can expect that you will not only see traffic increase but also a boost to your sites ranking.  News sites are generally ever changing and checked very often by the SE’s the more times you show up in links in News sites, especially the big ones, the better your going to rank and the more traffic your going to get.

The Next Best links: The next level of links are links that are one way to your site. The more people linking to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The SE’s keep track of how many links come into your site, the more links coming in the more important they believe your site to be. To a certain degree you can not control what sites link to your site so there is no real disadvantage to having an incoming link from any site.

Links in Directories: I will explain further in another article the value of registering your site with as many directories as you can find out there.  Suffice to to say that it falls into the category above where the more links coming in the better.

Link Exchange: This is where you seek out sites that will trade a link on your site for a link on their site.  This is also a subject I will discuss in another article in greater detail as it is an art form all to itself.

Sparky

The main key to links is to trade links with sites that fit the theme of your site. Take a look at my coffee site.  Down near the bottom you will find a links of interest link which takes you to an index of my link categories.  You will notice that the links are with sites that are related to coffee.  These would be things like Kitchen stuff, Dinning Room things, Coffee sites, Gourmet Foods, and other sites that are related in some manner to coffee, the theme of my site.

The other thing is to not link with what we call link farms. Link farms are sites that link with just about anything.  They are easy to spot because before you ask for a link from a site you want to look at their links.  If they are links that are relevant to their site and your link is relevant then you have a fit, pop them a message asking for a mutual link.  See links that do not fit their theme, stay away and look at another site.

The second thing you want to do is have different kinds of links out there. You do not want to have the same link everywhere on the net.  The SE’s notice this and it is partly how they end up ranking your site and what it has to do with.  So using a variety of sample links that sites can put on their site is important.  Even minor word changing is fine.  Move a sentence around, change the alt text for the link, get as many variations as you can.

Next is how do you find links? Well you can do it the old fashioned way and go to a site similar to yours and start looking at the sites that they have in their links of interest area or use a SE.  Follow the rules of are they relevant, are they a link farm, and if they like your site, they will probably link with you.  Many sites have forms you can fill in or an email address specifically for links.  I like to always tell them that I have added them and if they reply with where my link is located at I will make it permanent link.  The formation of a good links letter can mean the difference between getting links and not getting them.

There are other alternatives to hunting up sites yourself. There are companies, such as mine that for a fee will find you links and keep finding them.  One of the important things about links is it is an always going activity. The more links you get coming to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The more links on other sites the more important your site is to the WEB.

Customers going to one website DO look at links and follow them. While no endorsement is implied and even expressly denied, it means something to a browser that if they are good enough to be on this site they must be ok factor is in the mind of the consumers mind when they come to yours.  My coffee site lives off of links with other sites. I track where clicks are coming from and most of them are through links with other sites.

The other way to get links is get a program that will search the web for you. A number of them are out there one that I happen to like is called Zeus .  It can be programed with keywords that are relevant to your site, and even negative or exclusion words to look for.  Basically you tell it what to look for, what to avoid, where to start and it goes out and follows links and ranks sites.  If a site ranks well enough it puts it in a look at file.  The speed it scours the net depends on your connection and a variety of factors but in no time at all you can have lots of incominge and out going links.  Then you just need to look at the sites it finds and if they fit, it will send them your prepared email and even upload the links.  Some will even do a pretty good job of tracking to make sure your links are still out there.

Sparky

Outgoing links take people away from your site. Which is not a bad thing but you do want people and the SE’s to come to your site.

Incoming links are links that are coming into your site from another site. These serve several purposes.  The first is that it brings in customers to your site.  Second is it brings the SE’s to your site.

SE’s have what are called spiders. You know World Wide Web, has World Wide Spiders.  These are programs that follow links around the internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… are always looking for new content on the net.  One way they find it is when you submit your site to them.  The other is they find your site through a link on another site.  The more they come to your site the better as each time they come they look for changes from the last time they indexed your site and may add your information to their data center.

There are a number of ways to get incoming links to your site. One is to use the directories that are out there.  Known to lots of people there are other places to find directories of websites that are used like the major SE’s.  Lots of people use these directories to look for things of interest.  They are usually smaller than the Big Three out there, but have a loyal fan base that is growing.  Many of these directories will allow you to suggest your site for free.  This is a perfect way to get more incoming links to your site.

The other method to get inbound links is to do article submission. If you happen to be good at writing and have some information that will be valuable to others you can submit articles to websites in hopes that they publish them and along with the article you have a link to your site.  These are not as easy to obtain as other types of links as you have to be able to write good content for it to be included in a website and you have to submit it to websites that may or may not include it.  I will discuss article writing in another part of this section as it deserves more attention than I can give it here.

There are a number of reasons to get incoming links to your site. First of course is the potential for new customers finding you.  Second is that as the SE’s spider the net they come across these directories and index them and follow their links, which means you have the SE’s coming and spidering your site more often.  It is also counted by the SE’s as another link to your site.  If your up against another site and all things being equal, the one with more inbound links vs outbound links is going to be one that is more likely to be listed above the other.

You will notice a link on the right that says Free Dirctories. That is a listing of nearly 1000 directories that will take your site.  Here again like link trading you want to have a variety of Title’s, and descriptions so that your site is indexed in different ways by the SE spiders.  This can be a long and tedious process, and again a service that I offer is to submit your site to as many of the directories as I can.  I use a piece of software that allows me to put in your information and then use it to submit a variety of worded links to your site from these directories.  The sooner you get yourself listed in these directories the better.  Many of them have a long waiting list so get yourself included as soon as you can.

Sparky

According to Google they consider themselves as “an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.”

But how do they do this? Google says that this is accomplished with three things.  Crawling, Indexing and Serving.

Crawling is what their spider does. It “is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.“  They use large banks of computers around the world to constantly monitor the web.  If the stats from some of the sites I monitor are any indication, google bots are very active little creatures.  I have sites that google visits on average of 40-50 times per day with peaks of 300 visits per day.

As the google bot goes from one site to another it indexes changes, dead links, and new links, the links it follows around and sees where it takes them. It looks at information submitted for google to search by webmasters, like myself, such as sitemaps and other files placed in websites to direct its bot around to better index the site.

Google says that they do not use the influence of it’s ad generating side of the business to affect search results. There is no evidence of that this is true or not so we kind of have to take them for their word for it.  However search results on Google if you haven’t noticed are surrounded by ads so you can pay to get on the first page, if you have enough money.  I will talk about paying for advertising on the net in another article.

Next is the indexing of the pages. Google bots read the pages and catalogs the words it reads on pages and where they are located at in the page.  Quoting from Google 101 “In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”

Next is serving up the information when someone does a search. According to Google they look at what the “querry” is and through the use of over 200 things they determine what it is that they are looking for and offer up search results.  One of the things they do note right away is they look at links coming into your site. “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.”  adding “each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank“.  Thus the importance of links from other sites.

Sparky

What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks indicates the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a particular keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When there is a banklink to your site come from other sites, and those sites have information that is related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The relevant the inbound link, the greater their quality.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher. Thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques such as automatically generated pages whose purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In a link exchange, one website places a link on their website that points to another website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted.  This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. You could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We should begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being as careful as we can with which websites we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are relevant to others, sometimes they are not.  Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way. Too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your link exchange or backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks. There are tools to help you keep track of your backlinks and make links with other sites.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link’s anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like “click here” which probably won’t relate in any way to your website, using the words “Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten” is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink.  This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to SEO, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.

Sparky