Website Promotion

Getting Links And Becoming Known

To a new website publisher, the acquisition of links looks like yet another example of the rich getting richer. The number one mistake authors of new websites make is going chasing after links before they finish even a skeletal website. I understand the logic that drives it, after all, without links, nobody is going to come to your site. But you need to save your energy and not blow all of your potential sources for links before you have something online that's worth linking. A pretty website with a couple hundred words about you and your cat isn't going to cut it. You need to have a genuine resource in place, and if it takes you a couple months of working part-time before you get to that stage, so be it. Nobody worth getting a link from will provide it until your site is worthy of the attention. Unless, of course, your mother has a website. Barring mom, I'm going to list the honest ways of getting established in reverse order, from the worst to the best.

I'm always getting questions from authors about how to get links. They want to know if they should pay, or how much they should pay, or who they should pay. Get paying for links out of your head, it's bad practice. What's more, the people who sell links are often dangerous Internet associates to have, and you may wake up one morning to find your site banned from all the search engines for having participated in a link buying or swapping scheme. The exception to the link buying rule is when you purchase online advertising: in a newsletter, through a search engine or through one of the known press release services. In those cases, you are paying for more than a link, you are paying for an advertisement that will run for some fixed amount of time. The search engine advertisements go away when you stop paying, and are rarely cost effective for authors of trade priced books. The newsletters and press release stories and links may be permanently archived and broadly distributed. To find out if that's the case, use Google to search on a specific phrase from somebody else's press release from that company or from an earlier newsletter and see if static web pages turn up. If that's the case, your advertisement will result in one or more permanent links, but they will usually be low quality because there won't be any incoming links to those advertisements. Use the Google Toolbar to get an estimate of PageRank when you visit the archives of a press release or newsletter you're considering paying.

Next is to write original content for somebody else with an authoritative website, unpaid, in order to link your site from the article or from your byline. I'm not crazy about this because as a professional writer, I don't want to work for free, and I especially don't want to repeat myself so closely that the search engines could see it as duplicate content. As the publisher of a new website, you have to be particularly careful about the appearance of duplicate content, because the search engines will like consider your version the "junior" version (ie, the copy) since your website has no authority or trust rank yet. This means writing something completely original for free and handing over the first publication rights to somebody who is earning money from your work. Not much of a business model, but you might do it a few times while you are starting out.

An easy way to get links that was badly abused until blogging software began adding NOFOLLOW tags was commenting on blogs and newsites that invite comments, with a link back to your site. While it's perfectly legitimate, as long as you have something meaningful to add to the discussion, it can easily decend to the level of running around posting your link on people's guest books. If you don't know what a guest book is, that's because the fell out of fashion when they turned into repositories of spam from strangers - "Hi, love your site, visit mine." Many blogs ask for your website URL when you comment and link it to your name, others automatically add the NOFOLLOW tag to every link given in coments, which means the search engines ignore it. However, some blogs and newsites do allow html tags, including links, so if you find yourself commenting on one of these and want to include a link to your site, or any other site for that matter, you'll need to know the basic HTML for it. Type exactly as below (or cut and paste)

<A HREF="http://www.yoursite.com">the phrase you want to appear as linked</A>

So, if I was adding a link to this page in a comment, I would type,

Blah, blah, blah,

<A HREF="http://www.fonerbooks.com/promote.htm">the page where I explain it all</A>

blah, blah, blah.

And it would appear in the comment as

Blah, blah, blah, the page where I explain it all blah, blah, blah.

There are directories with a broad range of subjects, manned by human volunteers, from which links have some value. The main drawback with these is that they are slow, one way transactions, where they never get back to you to say whether you will be listed or why. The largest of these is the Open Directory, DMOZ, Don't rush over and hit the "suggest URL" button. Use their search function to find the right category for your website, and check out the other websites in the category and related categories as people who may want to know about your site and may be willing to link you..An interesting category within DMOZ is their listing of directories, which includes over a thousand (with links to more) in all the popular languages. You could spend days and days just submitting to directories, but I wouldn't recommend it. Just pick a couple free ones, like DMOZ, where there's a good match for your site or the new topic on your site, and skip all the paid ones and those demanding link exchanges. The reason I don't get excited about directories is that relatively few people use them for search, the categories are generally so large that whatever search engine authority they have is spread very thin. Getting listed in DMOZ and a couple others is a reasonable bona fide, but it's not going to make or break your site. No matter who the directory is, it's not as trusted as a link in context from a page with authority on your subject.

The next stop, because it's easy, is getting a couple links from friends with high quality websites, whatever the subject. These will help your overall page rank, making your site look more attractive to people considering linking you, and you'll never get easier links, provided you have friends with established websites. Which brings us to the subject of becoming known. If you're an active participant in the web ecosystem and you have something of value to say when you give advice in forums or offer your own experiences, you should be known in those circles already. If you haven't been an active participant anywhere, get cracking. It doesn't mean committing hours a day of your time, you can join a discussion group and not read all the e-mails or only check the forum site when you have time once a week. The idea is not to waste your breath and waste other people's time. If you save your energy for when you have something genuine to contribute, and I don't mean an opinion, you'll earn standing.

These online social groupings, whether you join for professional reasons, for a hobby or for entertainment, function much like social groupings in the flesh and blood world. They form into cabals and clumps, there are people who sit in the corner and never say a word and there are loudmouths who won't shut up. The active participants tend to form into small groups of people with similar approaches, attitudes or backgrounds, and much of your correspondence with like people will end up being "off-list". In other words, you'll start e-mail each other directly when you have something to discuss that you either feel isn't an appropriate topic for the larger group, or ideas and problems that you don't want to share with a whole group of anonymous strangers. These individuals, who you will probably never meet in person, become trusted professional friends. If I had a new site that needed incoming links, I wouldn't hesitate to ask these friends for links, even to the point of suggesting how they might best do it. Most group participants include their website address in their signature line, or "sig." If the groups is open to search engine indexing, those sig lines will result in some links to your site. But don't waste time looking fro groups with open archives and high page rank to spam with your sig. If they aren't closely related to your subject, it won't help much, and you'll earn the repuation of being a jerk.

Establishing trusted relationships with individuals you'll never meet over the web is a bit similar to the problem search engines face in establishing trust in websites. Trust is largely based on what you're willing to give, you show trust by making yourself vulnerable in some way. I routinely share business information with a circle of professional Internet friends that includes sales dollars and other confidential information. It's especially important for authors and sole entrepreneurs to share information if they want to get a better picture of the business environment than they can get walled off from the world. Authors on discussion lists routinely discuss contract terms, advances, issues they are having with particular agents, editors and publishers. It's information you can't get anywhere else. Unfortunately, authors don't represent some unique class of humanity with high ethics and low avarice. If you spend enough time on these lists and are open enough, you will find that some authors (whether participants or lurkers in the shadows) will enter into competition with you based on the information that you share. After a couple incidents, I pretty much dropped out of the list scene and stick with private correspondence, but it's an experience every author should at least try.