PowerSite System Tutorial Lesson Six - Links

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Welcome to The Power Site System Tutorial. This Tutorial is a multi part document that is broken up into chapters. You will receive these chapters o­n a regular basis as E mail messages. They are also available at http://powersitesystem.com/

Links

Without a steady stream of visitors, no o­ne will see all of the fine content that you have added to your site, and you will never make a sale. By exchanging links with other sites your site will gain visitors from those sites, and gradually move up in the search engines. Previous lessons stressed the importance of adding content to your site. This lesson will discuss the equally important task of exchanging links with other sites. You will learn how to set up your links page, how to post a link, and how to add a requested link. o­nce you have links to and from quality sites, your traffic will increase dramatically, and your search engine ranking will steadily improve.

Page Rank as it relates to linking

Remember, that your aim is to get your site to the top of the search engines. If you are not listed o­n the first few pages of Google, for instance, you might as well not be listed at all. This is because most folks who do a search, never scan past the first few pages that are displayed by Google for the terms entered.

Search engine rankings and results are based o­n many things.One of the most important is the number and relevancy of the websites who are linked to yours. Not o­nly is it vital that you exchange links with as many sites as possible, but you must also link to sites that are relevant to yours. for example, it doesn't do much good for an automotive repair site to link to a site about hamburgers or crochet materials. However, if the repair site exchanged links with an auto parts site both sites would benefit.

The more good links exchanged, the better the page rank, and the closer you will get to the front page o­n the search engine. If you have not already done so, install the Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com. This will let you to see the page rank of any page that you visit. See the article o­n Google and Alexa toolbars at http://biz-whiz.com/article137.html

Setting up your link page

With the PowerSite System, you can add links yourself, or visitors to your site may submit their links after adding your link to their site.

1. From your Admin Menu, go to "Web Links"

2. Add categories and subcategories inside which you will be adding links. Add any categories you wish, like "general information," "Finance Related," "Health," etc. The categories should be related to your chosen keywords. It is okay to have o­ne or two off topic categories like "Other" or "Miscellaneous" for links that do not fit anywhere else.

3. Click o­n Web Links Configuration. This is where you will make your Link Exchange Settings.

4. Enter the HTML to be used for your link o­n other sites. Other webmasters can use this to create a link to your site. It will look something like this:

Your keyword phrase goes here
Your site description goes here.

If you don't know HTML, you can copy and paste the above lines of text into the text box o­n your site. Then paste your information in the appropriate places.

Note: It is important to use your key words in your link text.

5. The Customized Promotion Text Box is where you can add additional instructions that will be displayed o­n your add links page when anyone goes to submit a link to your site. You can leave this blank if you wish.

6. The link Approved Email Text will be inserted into a message and automatically sent, when you approve a submitted link. This message will contain the exact URL to the newly added link, so the webmaster who submitted that link can verify it. In addition the text that you type in this box will be appended to that email.

7. There are various other settings like the number of links o­n a page and if non members should be allowed to submit links. When your site is still new, you should select yes because you want as many links as possible. Other settings related to voting and top links can be left as they are. You can change them later to suit your needs.

8. Return to your Web Links Administration page by selecting Administration o­n your main menu and clicking Web_Links.

9. You can now add new links as the administrator. You can either type the link information directly into the appropriate text windows, or paste the HTML code that the linked site webmaster provides for that purpose. Simply paste the code into the Description text box, select a category and click 'Add URL.'

Handling Link Requests

Link requests will be displayed o­n your front page in the incoming block.

1. Click o­n the link in the incoming Block

2. Review the link request. Check to see if your link is properly displayed at the linking site.

You will find that many sites ask for a URL where their link can be found.  Here is how to find this URL.

 
When you are submitting your link to other directories that require a reciprocal url, first add it from your Web_Links administration, then go to the category where you add the link from http://yoursite.com/Web_Links.html - you will find the link that you just added o­n this page, the url showing in the address bar of your browser is what you should enter as the reciprocal link o­n the site where you are submitting your link.

3. Categorize and approve the link.

Deleting and Modifying Links

Enter the link id in the modify link section in your weblinks administration.  Each link in your directory has a link id. This starts from 1 for your first link and is incremented by 1 for each subsequent link.  To find the link id for any link, just go to the correct category in your links directory from http://yoursite.com/Web_Links.html (as any visitor to your website would go) where you added the link. Then move your mouse over any of the 3 links (Rate this site | Report broken link | Details) under the description for the link whose id you want to determine. The status bar in your browser will show a url like for example over the Report broken link - it will show http://yoursite.com/Web_Links-req-brokenlink-lid-17.html - here the link id is 17.

Finding Link Partners

When your site is still new, you will have to add links to your directory by searching for your target words and contacting other webmasters after you have added their links. A good way to find link partners is to view you competitor's back links. The back links o­n Google can be viewed by typing in link:http://sitename.com in the Google search box. Google lists o­nly important back links. You should then contact the webmasters of each of the sites that is linking to your competitors site and get links from them. You should try to get as many links as you can.

http://linkpartners.com is a free service that you can use to find link partners. You should also register your website with them to attract people looking for related links exchanges.

The value of a link you get is determined by the Page Rank of the page that is linking to you and the number of links o­n that page. This means that generally if you get a link from a PR4 page it is better than a link from a PR3 page, but a link from a PR3 page with o­nly 10 other links in the page is better than a link from a PR4 page with 100 other links or a PR5 page with 1000 other links. For more details see http://biz-whiz.com/article308.html

Many webmasters will not link to a new site with zero page rank (PR0) this is where the PowerSite system comes to your help, our clients page is a PR5 page, o­ne link from this page should make your site PR4 or PR3. When your site reaches a PR3 or a PR4, other webmasters will be happy to exchange internal page links with you.

You should start main page links exchanges after your site reaches a PR4 or PR5 and you should exchange main page links o­nly with sites that are PR4 or higher. Internal page links are good for everyone, and are encouraged, as long as the content of the linking page is relevant to yours.

In this lesson, you learned how to set up your web links administration page and how to post a link. You also learned how to approve a requested link. You learned to begin looking for links by searching for your keywords and the importance of page rank and how linking is related to page rank.

With this information, you can now begin improving your page rank and search engine position by swapping links with other sites. By doing so, the amount of traffic to your site and the number of sales made will improve considerably.

This Lesson was developed by Robert Thompson. He owns and operates http://www.stayathomejobs.net
. Stay at Home Jobs was built using the Power Site System.