 Building
links with a song in your heart
One of the most important elements of any search
engine optimisation campaign is the building of inbound or referral
links. This month, Frank has taken something of an unorthodox approach
to considering this very important issue – we also have some
useful stuff at the end.
To be sung to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s
“ New York, New York” - this gives you something of
an idea of the approach he has decided to take.
Start spreading the news, I’m looking for
links
I want to be a part of it – Page Rank, Page Rank
These vagabond fingers, are tapping away
Right to the very heart of it – Google’s Page Rank
I wanna wake up to a website, with lots of links
And find I’m king of Google – rank top of the list
These ranking blues, are melting away
I’ll make a brand new start of it – Google’s Page
Rank
If I can rank in Google, I’ll rank in anywhere
It’s up to you – Page Rank, Page Rank
We call this the “e-channel, Frank Sinatra,
New York, New York, Page Rank link building to increase your rankings
in Google and other search engines methodology” ( or “EFSNYNYPRLBIRGOSEM”
for short). This has been an e-channel trade secret for many years
but in a gesture of seasonal goodwill we have decided to share it
with you our valued customers – besides, the acronym is too
long and we need to develop a new method with a shorter acronym.
step 1: start spreading the news
If we had a dollar for every link request we received we would make
an additional $42 per week. If you deduct the cost of properly evaluating
each link request, however, we would make a net loss of around $20,800
per annum.
Each day, we download hundreds of spam-emails. While
our spam filters do a reasonable job of deleting the usual genital
enhancing offers we are still left with the task of filtering out
link requests such as those from shoemakers in Arkansas wanting
to exchange links with us - “I found you in Google and feel
that our site would benefit your readers. Please link to us and
we will link back to you”. While a search engine marketing
company in Australia might be useful to someone in Arkansas who
likes to buy tailor made shoes but we doubt it. We do not recommend
link-spam or untargeted link begging. Never beg for a link –
there is no dignity in it.
“It is better to die on your feet than to
rank on your knees”. In addition to exchanging links you should
also spend some time leveraging your existing business networks;
asking your suppliers and customers to link to you.
The best links of course are earned by putting in
the hard yards. Write valuable and informative content (such as
this fine article) and the word will get out; the news will spread
and you will be inundated with links.
step 2: i wanna wake up with a website, with lots
of links
This won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. An important
part of the link building process is benchmarking. You can’t
score a goal if you don’t know where the posts are. You need
to work out how many links you need and how to evaluate if a website
is seen as credible by a search engine. A rule of thumb is to a)
see how many links your competitors have and aim to achieve as many
as they have or more, and b) look for sites with similar or related
content to your site and make sure that they have good Page Rank.
This is perhaps an oversimplification of the process
but it will give you an idea of where you’re placed in the
link war against your competitors. To view your links type “link:http://www.yourdomain.com.au”
in the Google search box and repeat the process for each of your
competitors. This will tell you how many links you and each of your
competitors have. Now if you are like most people you probably have
a life to live and may not want to spend half of it looking at all
of your competitors links, if so give us a call and we will do it
for you for free because love looking at links and get really excited
about links even if you don’t.
step 3: these ranking blues, are melting away
You got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues and by the
time you get enough links to rank you will have a repertoire big
enough to make John Lee hooker sound like a whining armature. We
have been building links for so long putting up with the pain, suffering
and sacrifice. I now find myself telling tales of link building
pain to my children. Years from now my grand children will be plucking
away at their slide guitar singing:
Gran-daddy’s life wasn’ ezy
He wuz building links for Page Rank
And gran-daddy used to tell me
Rankin in Google wuz the plan
Yes folks, ranking in Google is the plan. And this
will come to you eventually if you are prepared to put in the work
to build links to your website. And by the way, this also works
in Yahoo and MSN.
e-channel news
e-channel wins a national award
We did it, we won, we won!
What? We didn’t win? What do you mean we only came second?
Who came first?
What do you mean “did he?” - what are you talking about?
(muttered conferral)
Ok, so we came second in the National Secrets of
IT Innovation competition, in the commerce category. And we can
now retire to a life of leisure and icecream. What do you mean no
we can’t? I can have the icecream though, can’t I?
Very briefly, and somewhat more seriously, we are
pleased to announce that we did come second in the recent National
IT Secrets of Innovation awards for our pay-per-click advertising
management tool – Dynamic Creative ™. Dynamic Creative
™ is currently in beta-testing with a few select clients and
so we will have more to say on it in another newsletter. For now,
if you have a large, complex database driven website and would like
to make your life a lot easier when it comes to managing your pay-per-click
advertising campaigns, give us a call.
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