Solid Link Building

Once your new Web site is launched, you can submit it to Web directories and noncompetitive, industry-related Web sites. Once a Web site has some high-quality link development, the commercial search engines should easily discover your site through the natural crawling of the Web. However, submission is not the end of the optimization, design, and marketing processes. Individual Web page effectiveness must be monitored as well.

Understanding Link Development

Objective, third party link development is a key component to effective, long-term search engine optimization. Link development is one of the most overlooked components of a successful optimization campaign. Web site owners can write keyword-focused content and provide search engines with easy access to that content. But without well-planned and carefully implemented link development, search engine visibility is often short lived.

Link popularity vs. click-through popularity

To review, link popularity is the number and quality of objective, third party links pointing to a URL. The quality of a link carries far more weight than the quantity of links. Personally, I have seen many Web sites receive long-term, qualified search engine traffic with less than 50 links pointing to a site’s home page. And I have seen sites with over 1000 low-quality links receive little or no qualified search engine traffic. Therefore, quality is certainly more important than quantity.

Click-through (or click-thru) popularity is the measurement of the number of clicks that a Web page receives from a search engine results page (SERP), and how long the searcher stayed on the Web site after clicking on the link from the SERP. If a searcher clicks on a SERP link and continues to browse the Web site, then it might be assumed that the searcher found the information he desired and did not need to return to the SERP to view other Web pages. However, if a searcher clicks on a SERP link and quickly returns to the SERP, then it might be assumed that the searcher did not find the information he desired on the Web page and/or site.

Unfortunately, some Web developers and programmers have created clickbots to deceive the search engines into calculating more clicks to a Web site, making it seem as if a Web page receives more qualified clicks from human beings. In other words, the clicks do not come from actual searchers; they come from cleverly designed software.

Due to the rise in click fraud in both organic search results and search engine advertising, click-through popularity is a less important or a nonexistent factor in determining a Web page’s relevancy. Search engines do measure click-through popularity; however, it has little or no value for determining positions in the main search results.

Thus, when search engine optimizers refer to link popularity, they are referring to the number and quality of links pointing to a URL, not click-through popularity.

Link development, or the popularity component, is off-the-page criteria because Web site owners do not ultimately control how other people link to their sites’ content. Web site owners can influence how other people link to their sites’ content by using keyword-focused titles, headings, meta-tag descriptions, and page abstracts.

In the end, though, other people will determine how they prefer to link to a site’s content.

True long-term link development is difficult to imitate. Copywriting, information architecture, and site design can be easily imitated. All too often, the imitation constitutes a violation of copyright. Even so, it has not stopped a large number of search engine optimizers from stealing another site’s content and site design. Cloaking, a form of search engine spam, often hides copyright infringement.

Unique link development is equally important as keyword-focused text and an intuitive information architecture for obtaining long-term search engine visibility.

What I like about the entire link development concept is that Web sites will not be able to maintain search engine visibility unless they contain unique content and are easy to use.

If two sites contain similar unique content, the one that is easier to use is more likely to receive more objective, third party links.

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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WP Plugs September 3, 2007

Cimy Navigator provides an easy way to generate page and category lists.

Inline AJAX more displays content that is hidden by WP’s Tag on the same page using AJAX (instead of linking to another page).

Menu Maker lets you create hierarchical menus directly from your category tree.

Most Commented Posts displays a customisable list of your most commented posts anywhere on your widget-enabled WordPress theme.

SphinnIt Button adds a fully customizable and positionable “Sphinn It” button to your posts allowing people to vote for your post at Sphinn.com.

Animated Chinese Emoticons for Comments adds a new set of emoticons for your readers to use in comments.

Jabber Status adds support for showing Your status on the web from Your Jabber account.

Quickmail is a simple e-mail sender which allows WordPress administrator to quickly send e-mail from any address to any address via Admin Panel.

Restrict Authors Access to Edit Comments limits comment editing to site administrators.

Thumbnail Viewer adds libs from DynamicDrive (www.dynamicdrive) to WP for displaying nice image links.

Add to Facebook adds a link to the bottom of each post and page on your blog with the text “Share on Facebook”.

Drop-down Post List allows you to easily display drop-down boxes containing the posts for specified categories.

TwitterPress lets you display your Twitter friends on your blog, shows latest updates, and automatically sends a Tweet when you post a new entry. Current version of this plugin is a preview version.

WordTwit automatically generates a twitter status update for every post published.

Blog Majordomo displays a customizable scrolling message in the sidebar to blog readers.

Dynamic Del.icio.us uses Javascript to display a collapsible list of links from your del.icio.us account. This allows you to share your recent bookmarks without causing search engines to single your site out as a spamlog.

Link Summarizer creates a list at the end of a post of all the link referred to in the post itself. The plugin can be configured in the admin to exclude certain links from the link summary.

Mabber sets up the instant messaging client as a WordPress widget.

Short URL allows you to create shorter URL’s and keep track of how many times a link has been clicked. It’s useful for managing downloads, keeping track of outbound links and for masking affiliate URL’s.

Smiley JS Buttons allows you to display all the smilies in the default WP set as images next to your comment field. When you click on one of them it appends the code needed to produce that smiley to the comment field.

Subscriber Gadget is a simple add-on for the myDashboard gadget library that allows you to display your stats from the WP View Subscriber Info and Subscribe to Comments plugins in your dashboard.

WP Admin Switcher will show you a drop down on top of all pages and let you switch between blogs. When you switch the plugin will attempt to show the same page of the other blogs administration panel. Requires CURL to be installed along with PHP.

Include Me In That (html) includes any file into the body of any WordPress post or page. Care should be taken with files as their content will be transferred directly into the HTML of your WordPress Blog Site.

Include Me In That (website) is a website link generator plugin that provides a thumbnail, description and link to a website of your choice that you can embed into any WordPress post or page.

Mini-Slides is a lightweight image gallery plugin that integrates smoothly with the native WordPress upload feature and with the Lightbox 2 plugin.

Snippet Highlight puts the focus on PHP, CSS, JS code and more.

Those Were the Days is a featured posts plugin that provides configurable links to posts that you want to highlight on your blog. The output from the plugin can be displayed as a widget in the sidebar of your WordPress 2.2+ blog.

Wikisearch is a modest plugin that allows you to quickly link any word to wikipedia without having to look for the page url.

Berri YouTube Gallery gives you the possibility to show a YouTube video gallery with customized appearance on your sidebar

Find Us allows you to display a map on your website and allows your visitors to find your way to your location.

HidePost protects a part of your blog posts (maybe links, images or texts), that only registered and logged in members can see it. Simply put your content to be hidden with [protect] and [/protect] tags.

Bot Tracker tracks bot activity on your blog and displays that data in a graph.

Sticky Image extends the post form, so you can directly upload an image, which then gets resized twice: You can setup a thumbnail size and optionally a new image-size. Requires a minor modification to a wp-admin script in order to work properly.

Tagline Randomizer changes the tagline displayed on your site each time the site is accessed. The values used are added by the blog owner from the Options panel of the Administrative Menu.

Comment Recovery lets paste the email sources of your “new comment” notification emails and save them back to your database in the event that you lose them during the process of database management.

Directory turns any page into a directory.

File Icons adds icons from the famous free icons set at famfamfam to your links via CSS.

Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable widget to list pages and sub-pages in WordPress sidebar.

Highlight highlights anything that is searched for on your blog with different color for each word. It also highlights and search terms that are used to find your blog from any of the major search engines.

Link Modder adds affiliate information to existing links and converts certain keywords like “Yahoo!” to actual links.

AJAX Login means that the login, registration, and password retrieval processes are executed without reloading the entire page.

cron-demo demonstrates how the WordPress Cron feature can be used.

WP-Definitions is an easy way to bring clarity to your blog by adding double square brackets around any word like this: [[word]]. The definition of that word will then be included at the bottom of your post and the word itself will become a named anchor linking to the definition.

DualFeeds allows you to offer your readers both a full post feed (with the more tag stripped) and a summary feed.

Find Us implements Google Maps into your WordPress website.

Flexible Website Thumbnails enables you to display website thumbnails in your posts.

Hide Email disguises email addresses within your posts and pages from spambots.

Mini-Manager is designed to allow you to manage mini blocks of HTML, then include them in posts or pages simply by using their reference name in curly braces, like so: {Reference_Name}.

Page Redirect enables you to create a new page that will redirect to a different page or any url.

WP-Pingpreserver prevents WordPress from discarding pings when a single post links to multiple posts on your site.

Shylock Adsense allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template.

Zooomr RSS allows you to integrate the photos from a zooomr rss feed into your site.

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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