|
|
|
|
|
Most Popular Sites - Web Directory |
|
|
|
Increasing Your In-Bound Links (IBL) and Traffic - Part I |
Increasing your In-Bound Links (IBL) and Traffic - Part I
by Glenn Ford
Part One of a Three Part Series.
With the ever increasing competition to get your site ranked and increase traffic I thought I'd share with you my experiences on how Increasing your In-Bound Links (IBL) can help you. The good, the bad and the ugly. Which is exactly how I will rate the various systems I have looked at. I will include an overall score as well for those who don't like the Clint Eastwood pun. A score of 0 will be the site/tool/service is god awful. A 10 means I found it to be invaluable. You will notice I do include links to these various resources.
All the items discussed/reviewed in this part I article are completely free.
Link-Vault ( sign up for link vault ) - Good - Score 9
So I found link-vault quite by accident some time ago. Signed up and simply forgot about it. Then I ran into it again recently and knew I wanted to try a bunch of systems for this article and decided to give it a review.Sign-up ProcessThis was really quite painless. Registering a new account requires your usual username, email account, password. In addition they also ask for your sites url, keywords, category, language and scripting language (asp or php). Once signed up your taken to your link vault where you can manage your sites. One problem I did have was I couldn't figure out how to change my keywords for sites I already added. Other then that the process is very painless. Their setup intstructions (I only did PHP) worked the first time and I had no problems whatsoever. Organize Links Then you wait for approval on your site and while waiting you can work on organizing your links. For each site you add to the link-vault you can have 30 links. Each link can have a different url and 3 optional anchor text items with custom percentage use. I really loved this as I can add many links to my site(s) with many different anchor texts. Search Engines love anchor texts and this lets you completely control how links will appear coming in-bound to your site!Conclusion I found this site to be an up and coming heavy used resource. They are a bit new at this right now, but their interface is great. Whats even better is all IBL's will remain static for the life of your site (and theirs)! The new Google Patent discusses how long term IBL's are becoming increasing important and this is the perfect system for that. This is definitely a high priority free service to use and is a must recommend.Digital Point Co-op Advertising Network - ( sign up for DP Co-op ) - Good - Score 8
I found this network about the same time I found Link-Vault and it is a wonderful free service. The main difference between the Co-op and Link-Vault is Link-Vault provides static links and Co-op doesn't. However, co-op has a lot more sites in the system and you will gain tremendous exposure and increased traffic with their setup. Digital Point also only allows you to run their co-op and no other advertisement "system". Google adsense is ok, but a banner exchange network wouldn't be for example. You need to read their Terms of Service for more information.
Sign-up Process
It is very easy, just follow the URL I provided above. In the middle of the screen you will see a standard URL link to create a new account. Normal information such as username, email account, site url is required. DP has a nice page to copy/paste code to get your site showing ads and their forum provides excellent support. Once your up and running you can add text and banner links with fully anchored text for both. Very nice! Your points for this setup is based upon a logarithmic "weight". The higher the weight the more ads you will see and they have stats that show daily impressions, another very nice feature.
Organize Links
This isn't very difficult to do and as said before you can have text and banner ads to any site you want that meets their TOS. Good for promoting your new site just as in link-vault. Their statistics are very nice and they also provide some other nifty tools I will discuss in part II or III of this series. For each of your links you can assign an individual weight which will increase or decrease how many of your total impressions it receives.
Conclusion
Digital Points Co-op program won't build a huge set of reliable In-Bound Links, but its very large network of 5,000+ (at the time of writing this article) sites will get your sites advertisement on thousands of pages. It is a very nice balance between advertising your site and providing some boost to your SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position). I am all for this sytem and highly recommend it.
TrafficSwarm - ( signup here ) - Ugly - Score 4
TrafficSwarm is another free service that will definitely drive traffic to your site. It is certainly not in the same class of service as DP or LV previously mentioned but it still has it's place. The basic idea behind traffic swarm is the more sites you visit through their site the more credits you get. With your credits they will show your text ad to other users in the trafficswarm and affiliate systems (like exactseek.com search and other places).
Signup Process
Very confusing at first. The trick is you must build up 50 credits before your account is "activiated" and then you get a bonus 100 credits also. At this point you can add your text links (again multiple links OK). This is what others will see.
Organize Links
The links you add are URL, Credit Cap / day (0=unlimited), and category your site is in so its semi-targetted.
Conclusions
This site will increase your traffic considerably if you play the field right (or sign up for their premium membership which is 30$/month). However - your conversion rate IMO will be considerably below normal. The upside is you can show to potential advertisers higher traffic and you do indeed get conversion. It just is below normal in my experience. But for a free service, what the heck? I have seen no negative reason to not join as it doesn't really require much effort. No effort if your willing to spend 30$/month. Which I don't do. So on the recommend scale I say yes if your trying to increase traffic with luke-warm conversion rates.
|
|
|
News & Articles 
