Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Online links and politics – Are there similarities?

There was an earlier article that was developed which likened online websites with real-life communities. That article went so far to try and establish the similarity between real-life neighbors and online reciprocal linking neighbors. Now this article will talk about one way linking and how it is very similar to real-life politicking.

Every person in the planet has his or her own personal views, agendas, and political leanings. Some people may not support a particular politician without getting something from them in return, while some are just avid fanatics of a particular candidate just because they like what that politician represents.

Very similar to one-way links online – most of the well-informed websites would not think of directly linking or supporting another website without getting something (a reciprocating link) in return; while others directly link with a ‘popular’ site just because they like or love the content or what it has to say.

These “politicians” or what can be referred to as Future-High-PR sites often resolve to a lot of politicking or online strategies just to be able to get plenty of support from the masses. One of the more famous online strategies to getting one way links is through email marketing. Telling webmasters that the site or page has something great to offer their online visitors can sometimes prove very tempting and can merit an inbound link. Sending out HTML-based newsletters can also be very useful, especially if the outbound emails can be tracked and can be reconciled with the inbound traffic and generated links.

Another excellent strategy is through social communities. Posting messages on social networks about tempting offers or supporting a group cause do have its merits. Link baits on the social networks will also give the site the opportunity to expose their content more, and thus generate inbound traffic.

Those who will heed the “politicking” of these Future-High-PR sites would want to be closely associated with them, and thus inbound links will be formed. Posting link baits are very common on social networks. Utilizing link baits to get better traffic from a particular social class and age group which may be interested in what you have to say or to the content of your site can be categorized as potential inbound links.

Blog comment posting is also an excellent strategy to gain widespread exposure on blogging networks. Finding categorically related blogs and posting some “useful” message on their comment sections can be very beneficial. And one of the best ways to gain inbound links is by writing articles and submitting them to various article directories, while adding an inbound link to your site on the resource section of the article. That way, people will be able to trace where the article came from.

There are plenty of ways to get one way links. Using white-hat strategies is always encouraged. Black hat strategies can get you penalized or banned. It’s better to read and follow the guidelines set forth by the different search engines to have an idea on how they rank and track different websites online.

Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

There are plenty of things you can do and should do to optimise your feeds aside from just clicking on a couple of Feedburner “activate” buttons. Some of the things you can do are actually the same things you do to optimise any normal web page including:

* Using keywords - Use keywords in your channel and feed item titles, anchor text for both internal and external links (be considerate of other people’s SEO efforts!), channel description, and blog posts.
* Make sure links are working properly - Use full path when linking to ensure that the links are rendered properly.
* Use H1 and H2 tags - The use of heading tags for channel and feed titles are important in order to emphasise the importance of the titles. However, if you do not insert key terms in the title then you’ll simply be emphasising words you are not optimising for.

Other things you can do to SEO for your feeds that are “feed specific” include:

* submitting your feeds to appropriate directories
* offering feeds for different categories - This is especially important if you cover a wide variety of topics. If your site/blog is very specialised you might not need to do this. Note that this is useful not only to subscribers who do not wish to be deluged by blog entries they are not interested in but also to syndicators who are only interested in specific topics.
* subscribe to your feed - This isn’t a tip to boost the number of subscribers but is important in order for you to always see exactly what your subscribers see when they view your feeds.
* use MyYahoo and MyMSN - To get your feeds indexed faster and crawled more frequently by the two search engines add your RSS feed on your MyYahoo and MyMSN pages. According to Yahoo if you do this your feed will be indexed approximately within 48 hours! You might as well try this on iGoogle although I don’t know how fast this tactic will get your feed indexed by Google. To add your feed to iGoogle click on Add Stuff, click on Add feed or gadget (at the bottom left sidebar), then paste your feed URL on the box.