Link Exchanges & Why They Don’t Work

Too often other website owners ask me to exchange links with them.   They hope that multiple reciprocal exchanges with many website owners will improve their natural search engine rankings.  Despite their best intentions, this strategy does not work.

Obtaining relevant links to your website is the single best way to improve your natural search engine ranks.  The boost from an inbound link is called “link juice”.  However, when you place a link on your website (i.e., outbound link), you actually are giving away link juice.

So who wins?  The website with the lower Google ranking wins.  That is, if your website has a 3 Google ranking and the other website has a 5 Google ranking, then you gain link juice from the exchange.  Of course, the owner of the 5-ranked site should know this information and, as a result, should not enter into an exchange arrangement.  If the websites have equal ranking, then there is a zero-sum gain from the exchange.

Further, a website owner can include a link but add in its code NF for “no follow”.  If this code is added, then the inbound link is rendered worthless for search engine optimization.

There is a criminal attorney directory called Criminal Defense Lawyers Nationwide.   It is a pretty nice site and it has allowed me to add Weiss & Associates, PC, my law firm, to their directory for a small price.  The cost?  That’s right, you guessed it, a link back to their site.  Criminal Defense Lawyers Nationwide has a Google rank of 1 while my WordPress blog has a ranking of 4.   So they did get better in the transaction.  Can you guess why I don’t mind?

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New Social Media Book Helps Me Upgrade My Blog

It seems like I’ve been working weeks on making my blog better with minimal improvement. I have been researching extras, installing (or at least trying to install) widgets, and otherwise making writing and using my blog a better experience.

Fortunately, I recently purchased a new book which helps clarify a lot of the clutter and makes sound recommendations to upgrade my blog. I haven’t finished it yet but the book contains all types of social media recommendations including how to improve your Facebook page, how to Twitter effectively, etc.

The book is called “Everything You Want To Know About Social Media” by Hilary Topper. Hilary is a marketing and social media expert and her blog (which garners 15,000 hits a month) was even nominated for a Stevie last year. This is a great read for anyone interested in social media (beginner or experienced).

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Social Media

I will discuss here some great blogging things that I learned (but the book contains much more).

The first tip I want to discuss is a program called Zemanta. This application makes it easier to locate and include images, links and related article links to your post. It also supposedly enhances your search-engine friendliness for Google, Yahoo, etc. Once installed (it works with most blog sites), you just click on various suggestions that Zemanta provides.

Hilary uses and now I do too. I honestly didn’t like the images which were suggested (and therefore added my own). There give you 32 suggestions but, in my view, it is “hit or miss” regarding whether they capture the essence of what your blog is about.

I was impressed by the tagging and related article suggestion features. Zemanta suggests tags and related articles to include and you can add each one with just one click. What do you think?

I also followed Hilary’s recommendation and added a stat counter to receive more metrics about my blog than WordPress currently provides. Other than a stat counter tag, I made these metrics only viewable on the administrative side.

Finally, the easiest and potentially most impactful addition I made was using Pingomatic which updates various search engines that your blog has been updated. By “pinging”, you get greater exposure for your blog.

Thanks Hilary for all the great tips.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta – Great Blogging Tool (thetechscoop.net)
• improve the way you blog (transitionweb.blogspot.com)

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