gwsnetwork.com » links http://www.gwsnetwork.com Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:17:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Make your site linkworthy http://www.gwsnetwork.com/make-your-site-linkworthy-57 http://www.gwsnetwork.com/make-your-site-linkworthy-57#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:00:57 +0000 Jon http://www.gwsnetwork.com/?p=57 Link building is one of those activities which is usually frowned upon by Google, to varying degrees. Typically if you are paying for links, Google doesn’t like it much. If you are building links through active means but without payment, then usually that is OK. Google’s own guidelines follow the “if you build it, they will link it” rule – meaning that you should concentrate on making good content, a usable site and inevitably you will see more links coming your way.

All of this is easier than it sounds, though. Making a site linkworthy is an elusive art, but there are a few tips to help you on your way:

  1. Don’t fill your site with ads. You may want to make money, but users are no more receptive to being bombarded with ads on the internet than they are in the street. If you’re the kind of person who thinks that at least 50% of the visible portion of a page should be used for adverts, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
  2. Post content regularly, or at the least evenly. By this I mean don’t write 10 blog posts and have them all come out over 10 days in sequence. Spread them out for your more busy periods when you won’t be posting content. This will keep people coming back as they will come to expect this regularity from your site. This will help build links, too.
  3. Don’t just copy another article and shift a few words around. Write original content for your site even if it is about a topic being talked about across a huge variety of sites. Take the Apple iPad for instance – there will be thousands of blog posts about it by now but the ones which stand out are the original ones, and standing out will get you links.

I will be talking about this more in the future, but I think it is something important for website owners to pay attention to. The days of gaming the system are now starting to fade, meaning you will have to work hard to get your site to the top.

]]> http://www.gwsnetwork.com/make-your-site-linkworthy-57/feed 0 SEOmoz take Linkscape to the next level http://www.gwsnetwork.com/seomoz-take-linkscape-to-the-next-level-55 http://www.gwsnetwork.com/seomoz-take-linkscape-to-the-next-level-55#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:06:17 +0000 Jon http://www.gwsnetwork.com/?p=55 Linkscape, the SEOmoz link spider, has found a new lease of life it would seem. Already an invaluable tool to SEO specialists and link builders worldwide, the announcement of the Open Site Explorer shows their intent to take this vast data resource to the next level.

Essentially, the tool makes it incredibly simple to deal with the data Linkscape offers. Information relating to the key measures most website owners would be interested in is now even easier to access, along with an amazing set of tools to help you filter through the masses of links that Linkscape has spidered relating to your site.

SEOmoz are showing themselves to be very committed to this project, and with the possible lack of Yahoo’s Site Explorer soon due to the Bing deal, they could well end up at the forefront of the analytics market outside of Google (if they aren’t there already!)

So what are you waiting for? Check it out!

]]> http://www.gwsnetwork.com/seomoz-take-linkscape-to-the-next-level-55/feed 0 The importance of good links http://www.gwsnetwork.com/the-importance-of-good-links-50 http://www.gwsnetwork.com/the-importance-of-good-links-50#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:52:03 +0000 Jon http://www.gwsnetwork.com/?p=50 I think it is time to go over a simple concept which still seems to be one that a lot of site owners haven’t really got an understanding of – link quality.

Quality of links is a hard thing to measure. Generally you want links from a site which is in a similar area of relevance to your own. Links from a site about body building to your online pet store probably won’t help much, but links from a blog about pet ownership would be very useful. Search engines and users are discerning and will only be interested in a link if it is relevant.

In this way, you could say that 100 irrelevant links could be worth 1 relevant one from a good site. In the end the cost might be the same – weigh it up in your head!

However, nothing beats natural links. Paying will get you so far but the real benefit comes from the snowball effect of good content people want to share. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can be especially good for this kind of thing.

I haven’t gone into much detail as there is a hell of a lot of information out there about links and their usefulness, but I just wanted to get the concept of “quality beats quantity” into people’s heads once more.

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