The trouble with the internet is the old information is out there floating around with the new information and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. I’ve noticed a lot of people putting up lovely websites for their businesses and then going out searching for massive link trades. Belly dance sites in particular seem filled with lots and lots of links to other dancers’ sites. My question is why?
Why are you out there trading links with anyone you can like it’s a race or something?
If your site is designed to be a massive resource site like Shira’s, great! That’s a fabulous resource for people and the links are an integral part of it. They serve the goal. But most people are collecting links because they think it’s going to bring them Google Love. In other words, they want a higher page rank on the search engines–Google, mostly, but also Yahoo and MSN.
A few years ago, collecting huge numbers of backlinks was a good strategy. Just as a decade ago, using massive keyword density worked really well. Neither one of these strategies works anymore. They were weaknesses in the Google system exploited by shady businesses. Google got wise and changed their algorithms. They do that. A lot. Yet the information is still floating around out there, and people believe it.
I just got back from a big internet marketing seminar in Chicago. Google was there. They explained the deal.
Here’s the deal…content. Getting a strong search engine ranking is all about regularly updated, relevant content. And a FEW backlinks from authority sites.
Let’s start with content. Your biggest keywords will probably be “belly dance” and “your town”. When you write the copy on your site, those keywords will appear naturally within the text. That’s what the Big G is looking for. Naturally occurring keywords. How do they know the difference between a bunch of gobbledy-gook and real content? Google Books. They scanned in millions of books, journals, texts, anything they could find to teach their spiders what natural text “sounds” like. And they learned. And now keyword density doesn’t work. So just write your content and don’t worry about the keywords. They’ll be there on their own. The only exception is to use the keyword in your title tag, your page description and a headline (if you have one.) That’s it.
Next, you want to have regularly updated content so the spiders will index your pages more often. The more recent your content, the better your page ranks. This is one of the primary reasons I suggest using a blogging platform like Wordpress as your website. It’s easy to post often.
Backlinks–you want a few, like 10 or 12, from authoritative websites. What’s an authority site? One with a lot of educational content. One that Google likes. Anything with a .gov or .edu is helpful, but not easy to get for us. Shira’s site would be considered an authority site because it ranks really well (because of its content) and because its been around a long long time. Google thinks, hey, this is a great site and it’s linking to this other site. So the other site is probably really good, too. Social bookmarking is another topic that deals with backlinks, but we can discuss that later.
Why linking on your site is a bad idea: If you have a “links” page, what is your visitor going to do? Click the links, of course. Clicking is fun. It makes a cool sound. People like to click links. So, what are the chances they’ll click away and then never come back? Pretty good! The vast majority of lost traffic NEVER comes back. That’s sad. You had someone to sell to, and now you don’t. All because you were being nice and helpful and informative. Bummer.
There are ways to get around this problem. Afterall, we do want to show people all the cool sites we know about. And we do want to promote our friends. I’ll post about that next time. Until then, think about your link strategy. Do you need them? Do they serve your site’s goal? Or are you just showing your visitors the quickest way out of your site?
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