A website’s ranking is based on the analysis of those websites that link back. This link-based analysis is a very good way to measure a website’s value and can help greatly improve the quality of web search. To get a good ranking on Google the quality of links is the most important aspect followed by the quantity.

There are numerous websites one can buy links from to get them to link to your website. Some webmasters and SEO use this method of buying and or selling links regardless of their quality in order to increase popularity on the Internet. However, search engines do not support paid links. Google even has an official form for webmasters to report paid links.Bad quality links and sources can get you in trouble with long-term impact, which is a problem a webmaster recently reported to Google’s webmaster discussion forum:

“Today I found that my entire site has dropped out of sight in search results. I have a site that received over 2,000 search visits per day and today that has stopped.”

The problem was that the website had many affiliate links and linked to advertisers that Google saw as paid links. The links were not marked as paid links and Google penalised the website for having the paid links.

If you don’t want to get in trouble with Google avoid paid links to manipulate the links to your website and do not join automated link systems to increase the number of links to your website. Remember to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute in links to show that the paid links are there only for advertising purposes and that you don’t want to manipulate your website rankings with the link. Make sure that websites linked to your page are relevant to the site, and have keywords related to what you want to get a higher ranking in.

I am here at SMX Stockholm, went to the internetmarketingninjas.com site and fot this: “We are no longer offering the Internet Marketing Ninjas program“. The Ninjas are used by many for Link-building research but they are now closed. I tried to look into it but I could not find out why, so if you know pls. post.

Other tools that are still open for those that used to have Marketing Ninjas as their tool, are SEOmoz, Yahoo! Site Explorer and MAjestic SEO to mention some.

A great way of gaining quality inbound links is through link-baiting, that is get people to link to you through the type of content you have on your site.

Here are couple of ideas:

1. Whitepapers and research
2. Interviews and Reviews
3. Tools or Plugins
4. Tips and Advice

Giving people thins is always good and will gain attention, people that then like what you are giving will link-to your give-aways and recommend them. By getting people to link to you through link-baiting you will grow links naturally and hopefully equally so prominence in organic search results.

When you create a link-building strategyit’s vital that you have this in mind but also that you can compliment these efforts by requesting links directly from site owners or through forms if you are looking for links at directories such as Dmoz, JoeAnt, Randburg and so on. Through the years I have been creating multilingual link-building campaigns mixing together link-baiting, link-requesting, online PR, social media bookmarking and link exchange to mention few of the techniques out there, with good success for well over one hundred clients over the past 10 years or so.

For a successful Search engine optimization campaign it’s how ever good have on mind that this does not work at its best l in silo, that is even if you get a good link campaign going, with great link acceptance, the likelihood of that working alone is slim except if you optimize your site also, do the link-building based on landing pages optimized for the keywords based in the Anchor tag of the links you are getting. This will help push you up in the organic results pushing to you the traffic needed to justify the link-building campaign.

For me the best way of explaining link-building is searching at Google for “Click here” – You will find Acrobat reader number one, it’s not because they are writing “click here” all over their site, it’s because there are millions of pages around the world saying “… if you need Acrobat Reader Click here” with click here as the Anchor Tag, Useless, but makes a great sample.

Despite trends in former recessions of decreased marketing, there are signs that many companies might keep their marketing efforts unchanged or even increased this time around.

For the airline industry which is traditionally very recession sensitive, this might be particularly true. The flight industry magazine, Airline Business, in its latest issue publishes the results of a survey conducted among 22 top level airline executives. The surveyed focuses on the airlines marketing directions and size of their marketing budgets for 2009. Interestingly, as much as 60 percent of the participating airlines claim that it is important to invest more in marketing during a recession, to stimulate demand.

Compared to last year, only 15 percent of the contributing airlines plan to decrease their marketing budget. 45 percent plan to keep the size of their marketing budgets unchanged while 30 percent of the airlines plan to spend more and 10 percent plans to spend “significantly” more. Birkir Holm Gudnason of Icelandair says in the article that his company intends to spend 10 to 20 percent more on marketing this year, compared to last, adding that Icelandair conducted a similar marketing effort as a direct response to the markets reaction of the 9/11 incidents.

In terms of marketing strategy, 81 percent of the responding airlines viewed the Internet as being very important to their marketing strategies. 57 percent responded that they would spend more money on Internet marketing this year compared to last and a further 29 percent said that they would spend “significantly” more. 75 percent of the airlines recognized optimization of their websites as a “very” important cornerstone of Internet marketing while the remaining 25 percent graded it as “important”. Search engine optimization and focus on achieving high organic search results was graded “important” or “very” important by 75 percent of the airlines.

Among the vast majority of respondents that valued Internet marketing, many mentioned social networking forums such as Facebook as interesting opportunities to look into. Some of the responding airlines are further ahead than others in exploring Internet marketing strategies. One of the Internet marketing front runners among airlines is Icelandair. Its CEO Birkir Holm Gudnason interestingly enough says that they have tried social network marketing in recent years but are going back to focus on visibility through search engine optimization as it has generated the best ROI for them so far.

Although we at Nordic eMarketing are very pleased that more and more companies are realizing the impact and strength of search engine optimization in the long term perspective we are devoted to all types of Internet marketing methods, not the least social networking. We are even happier that we keep hearing about companies and industries which will keep the size of their marketing efforts unchanged and maintain or even strengthen their brand communication during the coming years of recession. We are convinced that the players who spend their money wisely and a large part of it on Internet marketing will come out as the strongest on the other side of the recession.

By far the best way to get indexed to day by the search engines is to gain link-popularity. But any link is not necessary a good link so be carefulwho you choose as your link partner. While gaining link popularity canbe an extremely time consuming process itis still very necessary to the success of your web site. Try setting aside two or three hours week to work on this. You could even hire someone to do it. 

If you want to get indexed at the search engines thefirst places you want to go are MSN, Yahoo! and Google and submit the homepage to these sites, bare in mind that once they have indexed your site you do not have to submit again and you will most definetly not have to submit every page of your website.

http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

But is that enough? What about AOL, Altavista, AlltheWeb, HotBot, Ask, Teome and all the others? That is where link popularity kicks in. Since there is currently no way thatwe know of to get indexed at Ask Jevees for examble it’s only a question of getting few good links to your site and get the spiders and robots to visit you through a third channel.

Also if you want to get indexed at for examble Googleit willhappen sooner than later with few good links to your site. Getting listed at Google alsohelps you at sites like AOL, A9 and HotBot to mention few. They use the Google DB as their source or as stated “Enhanced By Google”. To them Google is more of a Search engine Result provider.

For more information on Search Engine relationships try the interactive map at BruceClay.com.

Well if they have a no-follow on them then they are no good for SEO/SEM. But should you be getting links only becuase of your SEO efforts? The short answer is no, you should be getting you links because of you content from sites that alsi have content related to yours, those links are worth their weight in gold (how much does a link weigh?).  Good content is also great when it comes to link baiting, that is getting sites to link to you because you have great information on your site.

This is how ever a catch 22, meaning that you need links to exist at Google, it’s a little like getting a new phone number and nobody calls becuase nobody knows your new number, but as soon as the word spreds your phone won’t stop.

So who is the ideal link partner? First stop would be the same web sites linking to your competitor, next stop would be searching for link pages related to your sector, you might want to search for “travel links” or “post travel links” if you are a travel site, then you might want to narrow it down if you are a hotel to hotel links and so on.

But all of this does not answer the question, how important are inbound links? They are important and from where we stand they are about 40% (even more) of the total organic result factor of your favorite search engine. Of the three catagories of links you can have for your self they are around 70%, with the two other internal and outbound links sharing the remining 30%.

For those not sure Internal links refers to the number of links coming from within your site. There has been some debate on how important those links are, but we have found that they can play a major role when trying to get your site seen.

If you want to make internal links work for you, firt make sure that you cross link your important related pages and have a good sitemap for the crawlers to see and better yet crawl. Do NOT use the No-Follow on you internal links, exept if it is a part of some thought out strategy.

Don’t use such text links as “read more” or “click here” use meaningful phrases that reflect the content you are pointing to, don’t over do it.

Internal links do nly boost link popularity and increase the visibility of your whole website. Have this in mind when you design you site.

Other type of links would be, incoming links and outgoing links and we will write about them later.