Someone Wants To Buy A Link On My Website. Should I Sell?
This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.
Eric Cummings asks:
I received the following email today. Is this a good idea, or is this person trying to game Google? If so, I don’t want my search rankings to go down. I’m curious if you’ve seen anything like this before.
First of all let me quote the email that Eric received. Here it is:
Hello,
I was reading http://www.onviolence.com/?e=174 and had a comment from the piece. I really enjoyed reading your take on Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” I agree that World War I really was meaningless in the end, there was no real reward or good that came out of it.
Also, I’m interested in purchasing a text link on this post, that would go to an education site offering history degrees. The site is http://www.example.com.
I can pay 0 for the link via PayPal and give you a call or email back details if you are interested.
Thanks
If you have a blog or website, you probably received something similar in the past, right? I get around one of those emails per day….
When your site is relatively new or small, the idea of earning 0 to insert a link on an article, which will take literally one minute of your time, is tempting. But should you do it? In my opinion, no.
Purchasing and selling links that pass juice (i.e., that don’t have the nofollow tag) violate Google’s policy, and as a result your site can get penalized if you do it.
The penalty itself will vary from case to case. I have seen websites that were selling links and only lost their nominal PageRank as a penalty, meaning that the search rankings and traffic from Google stayed the same. On other cases the search rankings were affected as well, drastically reducing the organic traffic from Google to the website.
Overall I don’t think the risk is worth the reward. If you decide to sell the link you’ll earn 0 today, but the result might be the loss of tens of thousands of visitors from Google in the future.
Over to the readers: Have you sold links in the past? Did you ever get penalized? What do you about the issue?
Original Post: Someone Wants To Buy A Link On My Website. Should I Sell?
Increase Traffic to Your Website With a Simple Button From RemindThis
The concept of RemindThis is simple: Install a button on your website that, when clicked, will set up an email reminder for visitors to return to your site. This is a great way to encourage repeat visits and increase traffic to your website.
Button Customization & Setup
Signing up for your button is free and simple. Once you sign up, the control panel gives you access to account settings, button setup, button management and statistics. When creating your button, you get to choose the position and style of the button. It would be nice to be able to change the wording on the button. Of course, if you’re pretty handy with Photoshop you could create your own button image to use in place of the RemindThis default ones.
Add Button To Your Website
Once done you’ll get a code to paste into your blog or website. Keep in mind that the button does contain JavaScript, so it may not work on some sites (depending on what type of site you’re trying to use it on). With the button now on your site, just a mouse scroll over it will bring up the RemindThis window. This is where users can setup an email notification that will remind them to visit your site the next day, in a week, in a month or on a certain date.
The Downside
I setup a test email reminder and I did notice that you do not receive a confirmation email or even a confirmation in the RemindThis window. After clicking on the submit button it goes back to what you see above instead of letting you know that your reminder was successfully created. This could be a deal-breaker since it may confuse your readers and may even lead to repeat submissions.
View Your Statistics
It’s great that RemindThis does offer statistics because this way you can see if visitors are actually using your button. You’ll be able to see the total number of email notifications sent for each button that you setup. You can also filter your results for a specific range of dates.
While RemindThis is a great blog tool, it does seem to be a little lacking in some areas. Let’s hope to see some improvements that will not only benefit blog and website owners, but also the visitors who opt to use the RemindThis button on your site.
Copyright © 2011 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.
POSTLINK
A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger.
Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/
30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready
Revised 30 SEO Tips in 30 Days - Explained in Google Knol (Won best knol of the Month March 2009 & Top Pick Knol Award)
Having less time to do SEO by your own 
do not worry, now you have a chance to turn your website SEO ready in just 30 days by applying one SEO tip a day? Here are those 30 SEO tips
Tip [1] Add Titles related to targeted keywords, place only important keywords, do not exceed more than 25 characters
Tip [2] Meta description should be unique for each pages with targeted keywords. Do not stuff keywords into Meta description.
Tip [3] Layout pages with CSS, avoid tables
Tip [4] Add Keywords towards H1 tag as page headlines.
Tip [5] Implement Bread crumbs for increasing web site navigation structure example Home >> Service >> SEO
Tip [6] Create Static Header and footer navigation links, Links should be text not as images
Tip [7] Analyze your targeted keywords using Google suggest
Tip [8] Keywords in navigational links play a vital role and have its own importance to search engine eyes
Tip [9] Use most important keyword in file name or URL
Tip [10] Minimize table especially nested tables
Tip [11] Say yes to Quality links and No to Quantity links
Tip [12] Never try to place hundreds of link for a new site on the very first day
Tip [13] Your targeted keywords need to vary a lot in anchors
Tip [14] Always have a good combination of links from new and old sites
Tip [15] Try writing articles having links and have them in the resource page of your site
Tip [16] Images are important, make sure your site logo contains your keyword
Tip [17] Put CSS and JavaScript into external file / folder
Tip [18] Pay special attention to your content
Tip [19] Make sure to have sitemap as text links
Tip [20] Place robots.txt in root on your server
Tip [21] Create Google site map to your web site
Tip [23] Start a blog and participate with other related blogs
Tip [22] Submit site to open directories
Tip [24] Create feed xml and ror xml for xml search engines and directories
Tip [25] Try to avoid automatic directory submission and build manual links
Tip [26] Monitor your hits and traffic by using free Google analytics
Tip [27] Know how to analyze the reports and to optimize the results
Tip [28] Know about redirection methods and theory - 301, 302, and 200 response codes
Tip [29] Implement, understand and react to website analytics reports
Tip [30] Make your body copy sufficiently long and keyword rich
If you want these SEO tips in your site or blog as Gadget, feel free to use my SEO Tips of the Day Google Gadget that displays one SEO tip a day in your web page which can even help your site visitors to learn SEO tips and to get SEO and other Internet marketing Tweets follow me @jagadeeshmp , thanks for your time
30 SEO Tips in 30 Days post useful?, you may also like SEO related articles below,
Share with your friends:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Articles, Tips, Tricks, Help PodCast Blog | Jagadeesh M
Sell Without a Website
I recently advised Justin Levy of Red Pin Marketing ( recently announced) to start selling. He mentioned that there wasn’t a website built, that he was just getting social presence put together. I listened and appreciated where he was. That’s where I was when I launched New Marketing Labs a few years ago. Justin knows. He was there, too.
We sold without a website.
You can sell without business cards. You can sell without fliers. You can sell without a website. Your job, such as it is, is to sell the product or service, and to get your customers the success they deserve. You don’t need a site to do this. You don’t need anything to do it but persistence, a good value proposition, and the sense that you’ll deliver success to that client.
And Then
When you have a quiet moment, get the site going. When you have a quiet moment, get some cards ordered. If you want a shiny logo, make one (or buy one).
But that is all in the “and then” column when it comes to doing business.
I’m proud as hell of Justin for doing exactly what I asked him to do, and I laugh every time someone tweets that he doesn’t have a website built yet. Know why he doesn’t? Because he’s booking so many clients that he hasn’t put that on a priority list yet.
Yes, it’s great to have a site as your silent seller. Yes, it’s important to have a web presence, especially if what you’re selling is web presence. But if you ever let that get in the way of sales and business, you’re looking at the wrong end of the equation.
Check If A Website Is Blacklisted
As you probably know the web is full of threats these days. They range from common email spam to malicious software spread by infected websites. As a result there are many blacklists around, with the goal of helping Internet service providers and companies identify the problematic websites and domains.
If you want to make sure your website is not listed on any of these blacklists you can use a tool called BlacklistAlert.org. Simply input your domain and the tool will check on more than 30 spam and malware blacklists.
This tool can also be useful in other situations, including:
- If you are considering to buy a registered domain name and want to make sure it’s clean.
- If you just moved to a new hosting company or to a new server and want to make sure your IP address is clean.
- If you are considering to exchange links or create a partnership with another website and want to make sure it’s clean.
So check it out.
Original Post: Check If A Website Is Blacklisted
Test How Your Website Looks On The iPhone
A couple of weeks ago I came across an interesting tool that aims to help website owners and developers to see how their websites look on the iPhone, called iPhoney.
The problem with that tool is that it’s a desktop application, and that it only runs on OSX. I am a Linux user, so that was a bummer. I figured there would be something similar available online, though, and after some research I found it.
It’s called TestiPhone.com, and it pretty much allows you to load any web page and see how it will look on the iPhone. The only thing missing is the touch screen (but you can use the scroll bars to move horizontally and vertically).
If anyone decides to test the iPhoney tool as well let us know how they compare.
Original Post: Test How Your Website Looks On The iPhone
100 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Website
Last week I told you guys I was working on a really long post that I hoped would become popular, remember? Well, I just published it on one of my other websites. The post is called 100 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic.
I had seen a couple of similar lists around the web, but most of them contained only a single sentence per item, and most items were not directly related to generating traffic at all.
That is why I decided to write my own list. I made sure only to include points that are really going to increase your traffic (even if just slightly), and I also explained each point and included links to relevant resources where suitable.
The result is a monster post with almost 6,000 words. Here is a quote:
30. Launch a review contest. If you want to increase your search rankings you could launch a contest where people need to write about the content in order to get an entry. The links you’ll get will send you both Google juice and new visitors. Keep in mind that you need a good prize to motivate people to write about your contest though.
31. Launch a voting contest. You basically need to create a contest where the winner will be picked with a voting session. Suppose you have a fitness website. You could invite your readers to submit their best fitness tip, and then a voting session would decide which tip gets the prize. This would motivate participants to link to the voting session and to encourage their friends to visit your website and vote.
32. Launch a traffic contest. If traffic is what you want, why not be direct about it? You can launch a contest where people need to send traffic to one particular page inside your website. It could be the contest page (for a viral effect) or a resource page (e.g., a page where you give away an ebook). After the established time frame (e.g., 2 weeks, 1 month or anything else), you’ll simply need to check your web analytics to see which websites sent you more visitors, and then award the prizes.
Check it out. And if you like it, please help me spread the word with a stumble or a retweet!
Original Post: 100 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Website
Google Now Displays Complete Backlink Data For Your Website
There is a big change in the Google Webmaster Tools. Historically Google only showed a sample of your backlinks (i.e., 10% or less), so webmasters had no way to know how many backlinks their websites had according to Google.
People argued that this was a measure to prevent people from trying to reverse engineer Google’s search algorithm.
I was reading Search Engine Journal yesterday, however, and I discovered that Google just changed this feature. If you log into your Webmaster Tools account now, under the “Site Analysis” and “Links to your site” section you’ll find the complete backlink data for your website.
I remember that before this change Google was reporting around 500,000 backlinks for DailyBlogTips.com, and now it reports over 5 million (as you can see in the screenshot above). You can also see which pages are getting more links, and even export the whole thing as a spreadsheet.
I think this is an important change for two reasons. First of all it will help webmasters understand where their backlinks are coming from, and how they affect the search rankings of each page. Secondly, this change also signs that Google is becoming more transparent regarding how it indexes and crawls the web.
Original Post: Google Now Displays Complete Backlink Data For Your Website
Want To Make Your First Website?
Most of my offline friends and relatives know I work full time on the Internet, and as such many of them come to me asking how they can make their own websites. Instead of explaining the basics to each one, I tried to find a simple online tutorial for that. After some research I couldn’t find anything I liked, so I decided to create one. That is the story behind my latest project: HowToMakeAWebsite.net.
On the homepage of that site you’ll find a complete tutorial explaining how anyone can get a website up and running in a matter of hours. I cover how to choose the domain, how to get a hosting plan, how to install WordPress, how to choose a nice template and how to customize the website design. Over time I’ll polish and add more sections to that tutorial (suggestions are welcomed).
Starting next week I’ll publish other articles there too, covering aspects like website promotion, basic search engine optimization, web usability and so on.
If you subscribe to the newsletter of that site you’ll get the latest eBook I wrote, titled “50 Mistakes to Avoid When Making Your Website.” Subscribers of the Daily Blog Tips newsletter don’t need to subscribe again, as I’ll send them the direct download link later today.
Finally, any help spreading the word is appreciated (e.g., retweets, stumbles, bookmarks on Delicious and so on).
Original Post: Want To Make Your First Website?