How to convince webmasters that they should link to your site

Suppose that you have a great website with great content. Your web pages are perfectly optimized for visitors and search engines and you have found many related websites that could link to your site.

How do you convince these websites that they should link to your website? Here are five tips that will help you to convince other webmasters.

1. Offer something in return

The easiest thing that you could offer is a link in return. However, not all webmasters want to exchange links.

There are many things that you could offer in exchange for a link. This could be a discount for your products, an ad on your website or even a simple hint.

If you find a broken link on a website, inform the webmaster about the link. Tell him that your own website might be a good replacement for the broken link (if it is).

2. Ask your current link partners

If another website already links to you then they might add another link to a different page on your website.

Getting a second link from existing link partners is much easier than getting new links because you don’t have to explain yourself anymore. The other webmaster already knows you and your site.

3. Make friends with people from your industry

Networking can help you to get links to your website. This works best with blogs that are related to your website.

Contact the blog owners and compliment on their sites. Do not ask for a link in your first contact. When you’ve a good relationship with the blog owner, you might inform him about a new product or a new article that you’ve written.

Chances are that you’ll get a link from the blog then. These links from related blogs have a great impact on the position of your website in Google’s search results.

4. Show that other webmasters already linked to your website

It’s easier for people to do something if they see that other people have done the same thing before. If many other websites link to your website, you could mention this in your link request.

If a well known website mentioned your site, that’s even better: “As you might have seen on NYTimes.com, we’ve published a new product. This might be interesting to the visitors of your website.”

5. Offer something that other people don’t have

This is the easiest way to get links. If you have a report with ground-breaking new information or something other that’s very interesting and only available on your website then it will be very easy to get links to the page that contains that information.

Increase your sales with less traffic

Search engine optimization is not about getting as much traffic as possible. It’s about getting the right kind of website traffic. Sometimes, less traffic can be better.

Many website visitors aren’t necessarily a good thing

Many webmasters try to get as many visitors as possible. They join traffic exchange programs and they optimize their web pages for keywords that have very many searches.

Unfortunately, getting as much traffic as possible is not the right strategy for a successful website. Traffic that doesn’t convert is useless traffic. If your website has thousands of visitors but only a few sales then you have done something wrong.

Why less traffic can be better

If you want to succeed with your website, you have to focus on the conversion rate of your web pages. A website with a good conversion rate will do much better than a website with many visitors. Here’s an example:

• Tom’s website gets 10,000 unique visitors because it has a #1 ranking for the keyword “buy inexpensive brown shoes”. The conversion rate is 2%.
• Peter’s website gets 1,000,000 unique visitors because it has a #1 ranking for the much more popular keyword “shoes”. The conversion rate is .02%

Both websites will get 200 conversions. But why does Peter’s website get the same number of conversions as Tom’s although it has 100 times the number of visitors?

There can be several reasons for this. For example, Peter’s keyword “shoes” is very general. People looking for one-word keywords usually aren’t interested in purchasing. They are looking for general information about a general topic.

Peter’s landing page also might have a poor design. His website might not offer what the searcher is looking for. That is very likely if the visitor found the website through a one-word keyword.

Tom’s keyword “buy inexpensive brown shoes” is very targeted. Web surfers who use that keyword know what they’re looking for and they are ready to buy. That means that Tom needs fewer visitors to get a sale.

Multiply your revenue without working more

Four word keywords such as “buy inexpensive brown shoes” have much less competition than one-word keywords such as “shoes”. That means that it is much easier to get top rankings for these longer keywords.

Suppose it takes Tom five hours of optimization per month to maintain the #1 ranking. Each working hour costs $100. That means that Tom spends $500 per month.

To maintain the #1 ranking for the one-word keyword “shoes”, Peter has to invest 30 hours per month because it is much more work to get and maintain high rankings for such a competitive keyword. Peter’s working hour also costs $100, that means that the spends $3000 per month.

As explained above, both websites get 200 conversions. If each conversion is worth $15 then Tom has a ROI (return-on-investment) of 600% for every dollar spent on search engine optimization. Peter has a ROI of 100%.

If Peter had not invested his 30 hours in a single keyword but in optimizing 6 good converting four-word keywords that each needs 5 hours then he would have multiplied his revenue by 6 without working more.

What can you do to increase your conversion rate?

You can do the following to improve your conversion rate:

• Do not waste your time for getting vanity rankings. It makes no sense to get high rankings for one-word keywords.
• Optimize your web pages for multiple-word keywords that attract visitors that are ready to buy.
• Make sure that your landing pages contain a clear call to action and that the content of your landing pages is related to the optimized keyword.
• Make sure that your website has a professional look so that potential buyers aren’t turned off.

Search engine optimization is not about getting visitors. It is about getting conversions. Search engine optimization is about creating conversion paths for the traffic that comes from search engines. If you optimize your web pages for the right keywords then you’ll save a lot of time and you’ll get more conversions.

Five mistakes that keep search engine robots away from your website

Many webmasters don’t get high rankings on Google and other search engines just because Google’s indexing robot has difficulty to index their web pages.

Search engine robots are very simple software programs. If an indexing robot cannot find the content of your website immediately, it will skip your site and go to the next link in the list. For that reason, it is very important to make sure that search engine robots can index your web pages without problems.

Here are the top 5 elements that drive search engine robots away:

Reason 1: Your robots.txt file is damaged or it contains a typo

If search engine robots misinterpret your robots.txt file, they might completely ignore your web pages.

Double check your robots.txt file and make sure that you use the disallow parameter only for web pages that you really don’t want to have indexed.

Reason 2: Your URLs contain too many variables

URLs with many variables can cause problems with search engine robots. If your URLs contain too many variables, search engine robots might ignore your pages.

Here’s Google’s official statement about web pages with many variables:

“Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored.”

Reason 3: You use session IDs in your URLs

Many search engines don’t index URLs that contain session IDs because they can lead to duplicate content problems. If possible, avoid session IDs in your URLs. Better use cookies to store session IDs.

Reason 4: Your web pages contain too much code

Of course, your web pages can contain JavaScript code, CSS code and other script code that is not directly related to your content. Visit your website with a web browser and select “View source” or “View HTML source”.

If it is difficult for you to spot the actual content of your website then search engines might also have difficulty to parse your pages.

Reason 5: Your website navigation causes problems

Fancy JavaScript or DHTML menus cannot be parsed by most search engine robots. Flash or AJAX menus are even worse when it comes to website navigation.

As mentioned above, search engine robots are very simple programs. They can follow HTML links, all other links can cause problems.

Optimized web page content and good inbound links are crucial for high search engine rankings. However, the best content and the best links won’t help you much if search engines cannot index your pages.

Make sure that search engine spiders can index your web pages without problems so that your web pages can get the rankings they deserve.

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