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Link Development takes a major role in having your web site rank well in the search engines. Many web masters as well as SEO companies overlook how important it is to have a good link development campaign going for their web site. This article consists of 3 major topics; What is Link Development, Finding Link Partners and getting the max. potential from each one of your links, and Proving the power of Link Development which are meant to give you the basics of running a good campaign that will boost your rankings in search engines.

What is Link Development?
Link Development, also known as Link Popularity, is a term used to describe getting other web sites to link to your web site. Remember the popular kids in high school? Well lets just say that in most cases popular kids got noticed way more, they usually were social chair or prom queens and kings, top athletes and the list goes on. The point is, the popular kids got noticed while the not so popular kids didn’t. This is the same concept that search engines go on. If you are popular, then you get noticed and how search engines decide whether you are popular or not is by how many web sites link to you and how popular those sites are.

Hopefully that isn’t a painful analogy that brings up memories of your high school days. So now that we know what Link Development is, lets talk about how we start a link development campaign.

Finding Link Partners!
There are two types of link partners to go after, one is a one way link. This is a directory, forum, or web site that links to your web site without you having to link back to their web site. You can buy links now from web sites like: www.textlinkbrokers.com, but I am not to sure how the search engines feel about buying your popularity. The second type of link is a reciprocal link, which means that if you put a link on your web page pointing to them, then they will put a link on your web page pointing to you, the perfect “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.

So now how do we find one way links? Well first off, the easiest way is through the search engines. If you are doing link development for a real estate site, google: real estate directory. There are plenty of directories out there that allow you to add your site for free. Next you will want to look up real estate and find forums, so that you can find posts that relate to you and add a reply giving some useful information while providing a link to your web site. Please do not spam your link on forums, only place a link when it makes sense to. For example if you are a Real Estate agent in Vancouver BC, Canada and you come across a post saying, Where can I find real estate listings in Vancouver. Then add a nice reply and your link at the bottom. Finally, never forget about your friends and family, explain to them that by having a one way link form their web site to yours it will help you boost your search engine rankings.

It seems that reciprocal links do not have as much weight on the search engines as one way links, but are much easier to get. The reason they are easier to get is because you are helping the other web site get better rankings while they do the same for you. So there are a few general rules you should follow while doing reciprocal link development, first, try not to exchange with your competition as you will just make it harder for you to come up before your competition. Second, only exchange links with relevant sites. By relevant we mean that the site you are linking from and to should relate to your web site, an example of this would be if you are a real estate agent, you would want to link to mortgage brokers sites or home renovation sites not children’s video game sites, however if the site is in your locality you can link to them and mention in the link that they are a local business/web site. Finally, always be honest and truthful when sharing links, do not put up a link and then take it down a week later, if you agree to sharing links, stick to your guns.

Finding reciprocal link partners is actually easier than you think. One of the best things to do is find out who is linking to your competition and ask them if they would also like to trade links. To do this, in google type: link:www.competitionswebsite.com. This will bring up a list of all the web sites that have linked to that site, then just find the web masters e-mail and send him/her a polite e-mail asking if they would like to exchange links. Do this for every major competitors web site and you will have links coming at you left and right. Another great resource is a free web site called sitesell. What this site does is lets you enter your information into their database, including your e-mail, web site and what keywords best describe your site, then it finds you people with the same keywords and sends them an e-mail asking if they would like to exchange links. I have received hundreds of links this way. I suggest you sign your self up right away at: http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/.

Now that you know how to find link partners lets look at what your links should look like. Now this is only what I do and it seems to work very well, some may disagree and I can understand not everyone wants to exchange links this way. Personally I think Google has become to smart to just accept links that follow this general concept: Anchor Text - Description of link. How I exchange links is within a paragraph. For example:

Real Estate in Vancouver is a booming industry. With the 2010 winter olympics happening in Vancouver people are very interested in Vancouver Real Estate. Joel Carcone is an experienced realtor ready to help you make the right investment in Vancouver.

By having it in a small paragraph that gives the web site that is linking to you more text that is relevant to your site, it is going to make the link weigh more when the search engines count it as a vote. Lots of software out there will not let you do this and require a strict: link - Description, formation. Do not skip over these, they just won’t count for as much.

Finally, Google ranks sites based on their algorithm and gives them a rank between 0 and 10. The higher the PR the more important Google believes the web site is, thus giving more weight to sites that link to you with a high PR.

The Power Of Link Development!
Link Development should have a Cape and a big “S” on its spandex suit as it has so much power it is unbelievable. The following examples are not intended to offend rather show you that link development can make a huge difference without even having the site optimised for the keyword.

To prove the power of link development we are going to use president Bush as an example. If you look up the following words in google, George Bush’s White house Biography are the first to show up. I urge you to try this, read over the biography and notice that the words “failure”, “worst president”, and “worst president ever” do not show up in the biography at all, but if you look those same words up in google, you will see that his biography comes up first for all 3 of those words. Now this is an extreme case and is known as googlebombing, but this does show the true power of link development.

If Link Development can make a site that is totally unoptimized for those keywords come up first in a search that has about 213,000,000 sites competing for the word failure, imagine what a good link development campaign could do for your site that is optimised and ready to be found on the internet.

If you are thinking of getting SEO done to your web site, look into companies that do Link Development as this is a powerful way to gain rankings for your web site as shown with the example in “The Power of Link Development”. Make sure that when asking about link campaigns that SEO companies follow an ethical approach to Link development, you would not want to wake up one morning to find your site dropped off the rankings because of unethical link development practices.

written by Daniel Cedar
Web Strategist for Elite Beat Enterprises. He is an expert in SEO and Link Development Campaigns that follow strict ethical codes

You must do a keyword analysis in order to make sure you are choosing the right keywords for your website. A lot of companies make the mistake of creating their website using keywords they assume people would use to find their website. There is sometimes a difference in the keywords you would use in searching for your website and what your potential customers would use in searching for your website.

Beginning keyword analysis

You must first write down the obvious keywords. For this article, let’s pretend we are writing for a photographer who does only pets, a pet photographer. The obvious keywords would be pet photography, pet photographer, photographer, Vancouver photographer, Vancouver pet photography. Now let’s look at some of the non obvious ones. Dog photographer, cat photographer etc? There are a few other such as: pet photos, pet pictures, animal photography, animal photos, animal pictures, animal pics, pet pics, pet pix, pet people, petpeople, dog grooming, dog pictures, cat pictures, bird pictures, dog photos, dog images, animal images, pet suites, dog photography, puppy photos, location photography and animal art.

Next step

Now that you have created this great list of possible keywords, I am sure you are asking, now what? We are going to see which keywords are searched for most often and which keywords have less competition. In Google “pet photography” came back with 24,900,000 results. This is a lot of results. The more results, the more competition, the harder you have to work to get a good placement.

Back to the basics.

Since we are a pet photographer and we are located in Vancouver, BC, Canada, we might need a results a little closer to home. I can only assume that people in Vancouver looking for a pet photographer would look for one in Vancouver. Thus, using the term Vancouver Pet Photography. The term Vancouver pet photography in Google, returned 1,870,000 results, which makes Vancouver Pet photography a better keyword with less competition. Now let’s look at: Vancouver pet photographer this keyword yielded 3,360,000 which is 3 x times more that the last keyword we analyzed.

I am sure this gives you an idea of how we make sure we have al list of all the keywords that a potential client might use to find your website.

Now that you have gone through every keyword and got to see how much competition there is for that keyword it gives you a better idea on which keywords to use.

A quick tip.

Optimize each page with only one or two keywords. Do this to your entire website and make sure you have a really good navigation system on your website so, that if your potential client searches for dog photos and ended up entering your website at 5 pages in, he is still able to find what he is looking for because you have a great navigation system or sitemap that will lead him to the right page. Also, for more competitive keywords you would have to create more pages for that one keyword.

written by Alicia Harper
Professional website designer and internet marketing expert. She lives and works in Vancouver BC. Her company, Be Seen Web Design specializes in creating search engine friendly websites.

On the Internet today, there are many people who call themselves web designers and web design companies. Some people do it for fun, as a hobby or part-time. Web designers that design full-time are the way to go.. Someone who does web design in their part-time tends not to take it as seriously as someone who does it for a living. There are also people who do web design, who have no formal training. Make sure your web designer has some formal training from a recognized school. People who are self taught, although I applaud them for doing it, have relied on the Internet for all their information, and as you know information on the Internet can be inaccurate.

Relevant Experience

The web design company you choose for your project should have relevant experience. If you would like them to design a e-commerce website, it is best to choose a web designer who has e-commerce websites in their portfolio. Your web design company should be ready to submit a proposal for your website project along with a contract. Beware of companies who don’t give you a formal contract. The contract should outline exactly what the web designer will do and how long it will take, the price, and what you have agreed to supply. A formal contract is the best way to avoid disagreements between the web designer and you. Make sure your contract outlines every possible problem that can happen.

Different types of websites

There are different types of websites such as: static HTML (brochure type), e-commerce (with a shopping cart), database, Flash and a website with your own content management system. All of these must come into perspective when you are looking for a web design company. For example if you are looking for a fully interactive Flash website you better make sure that the web design company you choose has done many Flash websites. There is a difference between companies who can do Flash headers for a standard HTML site and web designers who can create a full flash website. Your best bet when choosing a web design company is to have a face to face meeting when discussing what it is you would like to have your website look like , also some sketches and some addresses of websites that you like. This gives the web design company the chance to fully understand what you are looking for and a better chance to give you an accurate proposal.

Things to take into consideration

Does the web design company have an update package? You must know that after your website has been created, from time to time you will require updates. Maybe they will be small maybe not. If the web design company you are choosing does not have an update package, you should inquire about the price of updates after the initial design. You should take the price of updates into consideration before you begin the design process. Make sure the web design company or web designer you choose sets realistic goals for the timeline. Usually if it sounds too good to be true then it is.

Many web designers have their own personal style. For example my personal style is clean and bright colors. Some web design companies love Flash and always build Flash websites. This would not be ideal if you are looking for an extremely search engine friendly website.

You would also have to consider guarantees. Does your potential web design company offer a guarantee? Most web design companies do not. So when you find one who does, you can know that they feel very confident in their capabilities. Another thing to consider is: Does the web design company display a phone number that they can be contacted at. Sometimes as a client you would like to speak with someone, not just get a reply to an e-mail the next day.

How to a find a web design company

There are a few ways to find web design companies in your area. One way is to search the web for: “Vancouver web design” or “Sarasota Web design”, obviously depending on the city closest to you. You could also search the Yellow pages for web design companies. Most web design companies who can afford to advertise there have already built a pretty go reputation and have been in business for a while. Another option is search the web and when you see a website you really like, check for a link on the bottom of the page or on a contact page.

written by Alicia Harper
Professional website designer and internet marketing expert. She lives and works in Vancouver BC. Her company, Be Seen Web Design specializes in creating search engine friendly websites