Cyber Imprints

In the first part of this post, we talked about some “slow way” of getting links to your blog. Today, we will talk about some “easier ways” to plant inbound links on other websites.

As I had said in the first part of this post, our goal is to place our links on websites in a way that our links will not be ignored by the robots of the search engines. There are many websites out there that you could use to place your links on, however, there are only few of them that could be planted with links that are not ignored by Google.

Many people said that Friendster is dead, especially now that majority of its users are migrating to Facebook. However, I still view Friendster as an important tool for my blogs. My first reason is that Friendster is still a popular website and has high rank in Google. My second reason is that public profiles in Friendster can be crawled on by robots. Because of this, Friendster is a valuable site to plant your link on.

For starters, I placed the link of my blogs on my Friendster account. I made sure that my Facebook profile is open to public so as not to restrict Google’s robots from crawling. Next is to place a comment or testimonial on the profile of your Friendster contacts. Just make sure that your links are included in the comment. Imagine if you commented on 100 Friendster users then you have 100 links to your blog.

Guestbooks are usually placed by website administrators as a way to get feedbacks from their visitors. The problem with guest books is that they are usually not open to the robots. However, there are some of them that are open publicly and could be crawled on by robots. Most of these “open” guest books are found on government websites. You will know if the guestbook is open if the comments in the guestbook are shown in search engine results.

There are many blog directories out there and they could be found with just a click from Google. However, you must search for blog directories that do not demand payment from you or ask you to place widget or link on your blog. Their widget will serve as an outgoing link on your blog and will negatively affect your page rank. Look for free blog directories that have pages that could be crawled on by search engine robots.

I was wondering why many people are offering free blog templates. Are they so generous to exert time and effort to give us free templates? The answer is no. Creators of free blog templates place the links of their sites on their templates. Thus, if hundreds of people used their free blog templates, then they are guaranteed with 100 free inbound links to their site.

These are just few of the methods available to plant inbound links on other blogs or websites. There are other methods out there that you could use. If you know other techniques, please share it with us by leaving a comment.

Inbound link is a blogger’s treasure because it helps the blog get a good page rank and a chance to land to the front page of search results in search engines like Google and Yahoo. Thus, many bloggers are working very hard to get inbound links from other blogs or websites to their blogs.

There are many ways to get inbound links but before we get into the meat of this topic, let us understand how links and linking works. Links serves as a doorway from one page in the Internet to another page in the Internet. People who are surfing the net clicks the link to get to another page. Therefore, links is an important tool to bring in readers to your blog. This is the reason why Google is putting heavy weight on inbound links in calculating the page rank.

However, not all links are treated as equal and some of the inbound links are totally ignored by search engines. Links on the comments page of blogs are ignored by Google, thus inbound links from there do not matter. Google made this policy to prevent bloggers to spam the comment pages with links to their blog. Another thing is that inbound links on popular website or blogs have much weight in page rank calculations than inbound links on obscure blogs or websites. Google have complex way of calculating the weight of a link to your blog but the simple principle is that the more links you have the better and the links on popular website are the most valuable.

Google indexes all the websites in the Internet using what they call as robots. Robots crawl the web pages and follow the link located on those pages. The robots were programmed to follow specific types of links. As I had said, there are links that are ignored by Google like the links on comment page of blogs. Links with “no follow” attribute are also ignored by robots.

Therefore, in your quest to put inbound link to your blogs on other webpages, be sure that those links are not ignored by Google.

There are many ways to get inbound links for your blogs. For my blogs, I used varied websites to plant my inbound links on. Here are some of the methods that I observed as a good way to get inbound links.

1. Exchange Links

Exchange link is done by asking other bloggers to place your link on their blog in exchange for placing their link on their blog. This is good especially if the other blogs have higher page ranks than your blog. However, Google disapproved of this racket and put a little weight on links placed on the sidebar.

Other bloggers may also ask you for exchange link. Be careful when accepting this kind of offer. I have experienced that those asking for exchange links usually delete your link on their blog after a month or so. So if you do not check their blog, you will never know that they just tricked you so they could get one-way link to their blog. I suggest that you don’t accept invitations for exchange links from bloggers who just recently visited your site.

2. Befriend and be a Friend

One of the best ways to get inbound link is when your blog is linked by other people on their blogs. However, getting inbound links through this way is not easy because it entails you to engage in continuous communication with other bloggers. For more than three years of blogging, I have been linked by my blogger friends for so many times. However, conversing with other bloggers through their blogs is quite engaging to the point that I just consider inbound links from them as bonuses. Currently, I have scores of blogger friends through my travel and personal blog. There are times that some of them link to me through their posts. Links on the blog of your blogger friends is not only for your Google page rank but also help introduce you to their readers, which will help you add more readers to your blog.

3. Be an Authoritative Blogger

Blogging is all about sharing information to other people in the Internet. Thus, when you a start a blog, make it your goal to be an authority to the niche that your blog covers. If other people and blogger see you as an authority within that niche then many people will cite your blog and place your link on their sites.

4. Link from Your Other Blogs

If you have other blogs or websites, make sure that you will include the link of your blog to those other blogs of yours. If you are talking about a topic on one of your blog that has a related post on your other blog, then link your blog to the related post on your other blog. This is not just helpful in putting inbound links for your blog but it also help in increasing the exposure of your other blogs.

Other bloggers use this technique, especially if they own a blog that is paid-hosted. They create blogs on free hosting sites like Blogger. Their free-hosted blogs will serve as their platform to place inbound links to their paid-hosted blogs.

 I just outlined here the “slow way” of getting inbound links to your blog. In the next post, we will talk about some “faster ways” that I used to have inbound links to my blogs.
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One of the characteristic of a blogs is that it is like a diary. Its pages are sorted by the time and day that the blog post was posted, with the latest blog post placed in the first page of the blog and the older blog posts are placed on the next pages. Consequently, the older blog posts are not seen by the readers and authors of blogs that have too many posts forgets some of his/her old blog posts.

Old blog posts are important, especially if you have a new blog post that is related to that old blog post. There is important information that visitors to your blog could read and make his/her visit to your blog post more informal. It is also good that new readers will read your blog posts from the past.

The best way to re-connect to your older blog post is by linking to that blog post. One of the way to this is by using Linkwithin.

Linkwithin is a free application or widget that you could place to your blog. This widget automatically pulls related older blog posts and places them on the page of the new blog post. The application decides on what blog posts to feature by looking at the tags, relevance, and currency of the featured blog posts.

As of now, the application only generate up to five links. However, unlike its competitors, Linkwithin features a link with a thumbnail that have a picture from the featured blog post. This set-up of Linkwithin boosts the promotion of your old blog posts and is more attractive compared to its competitors.
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Setting-Up Linkwithin

Installing the Linkwithin widget is easy. The widget could be downloaded for free from the LinkWithin website. You just have to provide your e-mail address, the link to your blog, the platform of your blog, and the number of link that you want for each blog post.

Linkwithin supports Blogger, self-hosted site in Wordpress, and Typepad. A new window that contains instruction for installing the widget will appear. The instructions are easy to follow.

You have to wait for a while before the links will appear on your blog posts. The more blog posts that you have, the longer time you have to wait for the links to appear.

Internal linking, or linking to your blog posts in your blog is a good way to promote your blog posts and increase its rankings on search engines. This will also enable you to keep your old blog post from falling to obscurity. Linkwithin is a good way to do internal linking as it is automatic and has more attractive to look at.
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Links are important elements or factors that are being considered by search engines like Google and Yahoo in ranking every website in the World Wide Web. Basically, the greater the number of incoming links that the site has, the higher its ranking will be in the search engines.

Because of this, bloggers do their best in scattering the links to their blogs in the internet by trying to place their links in other blogs or websites. Linking your blogs to other websites or blogs is called as external linking. There are many ways to do external linking like asking other bloggers to place your blogs link on their blogs, which is called as exchange link. Leaving comments is also helpful in leaving links on other people blogs or websites. 

There is another type of linking that many bloggers ignore. This is internal linking.

Internal linking is done by placing a link or links in a page of blog or website that is referred to another page or pages that are also within your blog or website. For a blog, this is done when links were placed on a new blog post that are referred to the older blog posts that are related to the topic of the new blog post.

For example, you are writing a blog post about Siamese cats and you remembered that you posted a blog post about Persian cats in the past. It will be a good idea if you will place a link on your Siamese cats blog post that refers to your blog post about Persian cats. Doing that is what we call as internal linking.

Search engines do not only rate blogs as a whole but it also ranks each page of a blog. This means that one of your blog posts may rank higher than your other blog posts. Just like in ranking websites, search engines rank pages by looking on the different factors like the number of visitors that the page receives, the number of incoming links that the page has, and many more. Doing internal linking will help individual pages or blog posts to garner higher pageranks.

Links are doorways to other pages and it will be good if that doorway will lead the visitors of your blogs to your other blog posts, thus making them stay longer in your blog. Placing links of your other related blog posts will also show the readers that you have more to say about the topic that they interested in, thus making you more credible in the eyes of your visitors.

Because of the diary-like set-up of blogs, old blog posts are being buried under new blog posts and many of them are forgotten. This should not happen to any blog posts and bloggers must ensure that old blog posts will still be visited by readers. Internal linking is great way of resurrecting old blog posts.

There are many ways to automate the placing of internal links on your blog posts. Many widgets are available and are free to use and download. One of them is the LinkWithin, which on my travel and personal blog and my tips and review blog.

You should also know what is the best color of links to make it work better for your blogs.

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The creation of the Internet also entailed the creation of the hyperlink. The hyperlink is a character, word, or phrase on a webpage that takes the reader from the current webpage to another webpage. In HTML coding, the hyperlink is created by using the anchor tag that is referred to the Internet address of the webpage.

The hyperlink is an important blogging tool. It is used by bloggers to link to their favorite websites and websites of their advertisers on their blogs. It also serves as the venue for new readers to reach your blog after they clicked on the hyperlink (referred to your blog) from other blogs. This is the reason why many bloggers are asking for link exchange from other bloggers.

According to a study made by Chitika, Internet users usually associate characters, words, and phrase in blue font or color with hyperlink. The study explains that since the inception of the Internet, the color of the hyperlink had been blue. Because of this, Internet users had been “trained” to think all blue colored words on a webpage as hyperlinks. Because of this, the blue-colored hyperlink has a higher probability of being clicked than other hyperlinks of other color.

Thus, it best to keep you hyperlinks colored as blue on blog, especially the links of the ads on your site. Blue-colored hyperlink will generate more income than green-colored hyperlink, or any hyperlink with other color.
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