Turn Your WordPress Blog Into A WordPress Forum Also!

Here’s a great free WordPress Plug-In that adds
a forum to your WordPress Blog. It’s called
Simple Press Forum..
http://www.stuff.yellowswordfish.com/simplepress-forum/

Supports WordPress version 2.04 to the latest 2.5.1
Fully integrates with WordPress user registrations and logins.
Installs on WordPress MU.
Creates ‘pretty/seo friendly’ permalinks.

I’m installing it on a WordPress MU Blog today.
It’s great.

Linking With Articles

Articles have been a way of life for Internet Marketers since personal computers first started appearing in homes - and that is not likely to change. The fact will always remain that content is king, and people need content for their websites, blogs, and newsletters. This bit of information comes in handy to you, when it comes to building links.

Remember those authority sites that don’t seem to allow you any way of putting your own link on their page? Remember the ones that said no to a link exchange with you? With articles, you might possibly have a way to get your link on that site, regardless.

First, go look at the site. Who is writing all of that content? Look at the top and bottom of several of the pages, to determine whether the articles are coming from the site owner or from contributors. If there are contributor articles on the site, you are home free!

Look at the site again, and get a feel for what the site owner will like in terms of an article. Calculate the number of words per page on the site, and note how often the keywords are used, as well as the writing style. This is important information, and can mean the difference between the editor, or the owner of the site, accepting your article or rejecting it.

Write your article, using keywords that are important to both you and the site that you want your link on, for relevance. Make the article as long as the other pages of content on the page, and make sure that you include your name and website address at the bottom of the article. The site that you are submitting the article to will most likely have guidelines concerning how the author’s name and website address is used on the article for recognition.

You can also write and submit articles to the top article directories. Note that not all article directories in existence get much weight from the search engines as authority sites - in fact, few do. The top article sites are Ezine Articles, at http://www.ezinearticles.com, Go Articles at http://www.goarticles.com, Web Pro News, at http://www.webpronews.com, Search Warp, at http://www.searchwarp.com, and ACS publications, at http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/. These are listed in terms of how the article directory site ranks in Alexa, at http://www.alexa.com.

Submitting your article to the top five article directories will do a lot for your link building, and in reality, you don’t have to submit articles to more sites than this. However, it is important that you do not submit the same article to each of these sites, if building links is important to you. Make sure that the articles are each different, and that they include an author’s resource box, with your URL.

Web 2.0 Concepts And Link Building

Web 2.0 has really set the Internet on fire over the past few years, and it is still going as strong as ever, if not stronger. Furthermore, Web 2.0 concepts can easily be used for link building.

There are two aspects of Web 2.0 concepts that are important to you, in terms of building links. The first is Social Networking, and the second is Social Bookmarking. There is a third concept as well, and that is sharing videos, which will we will cover at the end of this section.

Not all of these sites will aid you in your link building, however, and it is important that you are aware of that. For example, adding your link to a social networking site that is very specialized, and doesn’t have a great deal of traffic - or a very high page rank - won’t do you much good.

However, creating a page on a social networking site such as MySpace, at http://www.myspace.com may help you. MySpace gets millions - if not billions - of hits each and everyday. MySpace has a page rank of eight, which is extremely good.

At the same time, however, since search engines are looking at the relevancy of the content between two sites that are linked to determine how important the link is, as well as how important the linking site is, making MySpace work for you, in terms of link building, is tricky. The idea is to set up a profile page that is extremely related, in content, to the website you will be linking to.

Something else to be aware of is that while the MySpace homepage may be ranked at 8, the profile pages that people set up on the site are unranked - meaning that they have no rank at all, good or bad. Could this mean that the search engines are no longer giving any weight to links on such pages? That is always a possibility.

But this doesn’t mean that setting up a profile on MySpace is a waste of time in terms of other types of promotions. There are many features of MySpace that can be used to garner traffic to your site, even if it doesn’t do much to help your page ranks when linking from the profile to your site.

Another concept of Web 2.0 that you can use in your link building is social bookmarking. There are many social bookmarking sites, and it is free to add your social bookmarks. One of the most popular social bookmarking sites is del.icio.us, at http://www.del.icio.us.com. This site has a page rank of eight as well, however like the MySpace profile pages; the search result pages are unranked. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t aid in link building, however.

Social bookmarking is very fast and easy, once you are set up to do it. The fastest way to get your links on the major social bookmarking sites is to use a service such as Only Wire, at http://www.onlywire.com.

Signing up with Only Wire is free, and only takes a few minutes. However, once you are signed up, you will need to use their setup page, and visit each of the social bookmarking sites that they send your links to. At each of these sites, you must register, and obtain a username and password, which is then put into the boxes on the setup page at Only Wire. This takes approximately an hour of your time.

Once that is done, follow the directions on the Only Wire website to move the Only Wire icon to the toolbar of your web browser. This is vital, because this is what makes social bookmarking so fast and easy.

Now, once everything is done, open up a web browser window, go to Only Wire, and log in. Open up a new browser window or tab, and go to your website. You will need to go through your entire site. On each page, click the icon in your toolbar. You will be taken to a page that allows you to add keywords for that page. Fill in the boxes really fast, and hit the submit key, and you are taken back to the page you were on, on your website.

Repeat this process for each page of your site, and each time you add a new page of content, make sure that you bookmark it.

Videos are the third Web 2.0 concept that is useful to your link building. Sites like YouTube.com, at http://www.youtube.com, which has a page rank of eight, and Google Video, at http://video.google.com, which has a page rank of nine, are considered authority sites. Doesn’t it stand to reason that Google would rate the sites that it owns as authority sites? Of course it does!

On each of these sites, you can set up a profile page, which includes a link to your website. When you submit videos to these sites, make sure you use your keywords in the title of the video, as well as in the file name, and submit it to the social bookmarking sites as well.

Note that as with MySpace and social bookmarking sites, the profile pages are unranked. Opinions vary, and nobody really knows for sure whether or not these unranked pages are playing a role in link popularity. However, one thing is known. It doesn’t hurt you to do it, and there are numerous other marketing benefits to be gained by using Web 2.0 concepts - so it is not a waste of time. Web 2.0 concepts are definitely something that you should participate in, whether you are building links or not.

Do You Prefer Plain Or Text Links?

There are links, and then there are text links. If possible, you should always get a text link, but in some of the link building methods to follow, the best you can do is a plain link.

Text links are important for SEO because it allows you to include your keywords in the link, essentially. A plain link looks like this:

http://www.plainlink.com

A text link, on the other hand, will look something like this:

You’re Keyword or Keyword Phrase

You can also use your marketing message in your text link, but it is essential that the marketing message also contain your keyword or keyword phrase - otherwise, the text link is no better than a plain link. As you can see, with text links, the keywords or keyword phrase is what the viewer sees - not the actual link. You are not trying to hide the link from viewers, however. You are simply trying to give your link more weight, by including the keywords or keyword phrase.

Again, in some instances, you won’t be able to acquire a one-way inbound text link, and you must settle for a plain link, but if you have the option, always go for the text link, and learn how to create text links as well, since many of the techniques to follow will allow you to self-serve.

Make sure that your links are clickable - whether they are text links or plain links! Again, this may require knowledge of the very basic hyperlink tags for HTML, but many websites will automatically make the link clickable. If the link cannot be clicked, the search engines won’t recognize it as a link, and it is pointless.

This is often a problem with email signatures in forums. If the signature is not set up through the profile page, and then automatically added to the bottom of the message after you post it, and is instead just added as a part of the message when you are writing it, it often will not be clickable - unless you are allowed to use HTML tags in your message - which means that if your purpose for posting a message was to build a link, you wasted your time.

Clickable text links is what you want when you have that option. The order of preference should be a clickable text link, with the second choice being a clickable plain link. An un-clickable link shouldn’t even be considered.

How Many Links Do You Need?

There was a time when people set goals to get hundreds of links a month to their website. This was typically done with special automated link pages, using the reciprocal linking strategy. People hired SEO specialists to build links for them, they signed up for reciprocal linking services, purchased links, and even started hitting the ‘Free for All Link’ sites again.

This frenzy of link gathering may have helped to boost their rankings for a little while, but it certainly didn’t help them in anyway in the long-term. Search engines caught on, and this is no longer an acceptable practice.

Link popularity was once measured by the number of links that you had. Today, the search engines are still slightly interested in how many links you have, but they place a great deal of importance on the quality of the links you have, and the number of links that you have really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you have quality links.

For example, let’s imagine that there are two sites that target the same keyword, and each has quality original content. Both sites have followed all of the ‘white-hat’ SEO techniques, and the only real difference between the two sites, in terms of SEO techniques, is that Site A has a thousand inbound links from a variety of sites. Some of the sites have nothing to do with the topic that Site A covers. Others are from sites that have page ranks lower than five. Two or three of the links are from authority sites, with page ranks of five or higher.

Site B, on the other hand, only has 20 inbound links. Now, you might think that Site A would easily win that popularity contest, and rank higher in the search results than Site B. But Site B would actually rank higher, because every one of those 20 inbound links is coming from an authority site, with a page rank of five or better. Site B will not only rank higher, but the owner of Site B didn’t have to do nearly as much work as the owner of Site A - for a better result.

Remember, how many people you know doesn’t count nearly as much as whom you know in the world of link building. Don’t worry about the numbers for the most part - worry about the quality.

You will have the numbers - over time - which is what the search engines prefer (slow link building), but when you have those numbers, the majority of the links pointing to your site will be quality links, and they will all be naturally placed, instead of forced. The search engines are going to love you and your site!

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