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If you’ve been having trouble building incoming links to your website, a few questions come to mind, such as:

Some Questions To Ask Yourself If You’re Having Problems Getting Links

1) Is your content unique and worthy?
2) Does your website do something noteworthy?
3) Is your website the only one of its’ kind?

Most people can’t honestly answer “Yes” to all of these questions, and you might not be able to either, but the 3 questions are worth keeping in mind. If you’ve had a lot of trouble getting links, it might mean your website is giving off “red flags” that indicate the site is just “no damn good”.

Improving Your Website’s Signals Of Quality

1) Improve design and usability
2) Use a clear and consistent navigation
3) Add a sitemap that links to lower level pages
4) Re-write any content that is unclear
5) Remove as much “fluff” as you can and stick to the essentials.

The more linkable the website, the easier it is to get links.

Internet marketing is a tough job, unless you do one thing right from the beginning: find a need, and then fill it with a vengeance. If you make a website that people actually need to use, then your life gets much easier than if you enter a crowded field and don’t bring anything new.

There are lots of needs to be filled on the internet

The internet is expanding so rapidly that plenty of needs are created every day. Sure, it takes creativity to think of these ideas, but the reward is much greater than with other types of websites. If you find a “hot niche” it will generate traffic rapidly.

Before you launch a website, confirm there really is a need

If not, don’t bother. Why try and compete with better established websites? What can you offer? If you don’t have something innovative to offer you’ll stand a much better chance.

Get out there and see what needs to be done, and be the first to do it! There’s your free recipe for success today.

Okay, proxy servers can be very useful, especially if you find yourself blocked in because your sysadmin has chosen to block one of your favorite websites. It happens all the time and it happens especially in the cases of MySpace, Bebo, and FaceBook. The solution is to use proxy servers. This will “unblock” access for you.

Here are the newest MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook proxies:

1) Unblock MySpace Now – a proxy server that will help you unblock MySpace.

2) Unblock Bebo Now – a proxy server that will help you unblock Bebo.

3) Unblock Facebook Now – a proxy server that will help you unblock Facebook.

All of these proxy servers are free to use and run fast.

It seems that Google has pushed many forum pages into their Supplemental Index. There are some reasons for this move that make sense.

Forum content:

1) Tends to be low quality
2) Tends to be repetitive
3) Doesn’t tend to have many deep links direct to it

The trend has been going on for some time. I’ve observed that many Vbulletins, in particular, have seen many pages erode. I guess it’s inevitable in a way, and it’s giving rise to an idea I have to keep the “sludge” to a minimum.

If Google is ignoring new pages on a basis of “quality”, it will be harder and harder to get many pages indexed without the help of many incoming links.

I’ve been working on tidying up any all websites under my care. The task is pretty straight-forward, yet it’s oh-so-important. You might be surprised at how much dust builds up if you don’t vacuum out the cobwebs every now and again. I always look for any broken HTML, because that’s one of those errors that can keep on multiplying, if left unchecked.

I’m also looking for obvious errors in design and/or usability and attempting to banish them once and for all. Less is more is my basic philosophy, especially when it comes to bugs!

I’m even breaking out the Xenu to make sure all links are in tact. Let’s hope they are!

It’s always easy to think in terms of getting more traffic to your website, but it’s not always as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, getting more traffic to your website is a ton of work. If the traffic’s not productive, you run the risk of using up a lot of energy to accomplish very little. If you decide that you’re having troubles getting people to your website, than you have to be more productive with the traffic you already have.

If you increase your conversion rate, you get paid more. It’s not a complicated idea to digest, and the truth is, more money in your pocket is the ultimate goal, regardless of how you plan on accomplishing the goal.

How can you improve your conversion rate? It will depend on many factors, and the single most important factor will be your acumen concerning your business and your sector. You may have to redesign your website. Perhaps you’ll have to offer a discount, but there must be something you can do to increase the productivity of your current traffic. If you focus on the customer and your actual product, you’ll end up improving revenues without spending more money for more traffic.

DMOZ may finally be dead, according to an early founder. It comes as no suprise to anyone who has had to deal with the behemoth. Now the old dinosaur is down, and nearly out. Let’s face fact, it’s a different web than it used to be, and the only thing AOL is commited to doing is losing.

So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage. Add in the massive AOL layoffs last week, and it’s not clear if there’s even any left over there who cares. Even if some form of the ODP editing system is brought back, the likelihood of continued existence within AOL seems extremely doubtful.

Wow, they pretty much lost all of the data. All of that incredible work done over the years by their band of corrupt editors may come for naught in the final analysis. But what of all the DMOZ clones, where will they get data from now? Nowhere, it appears. Bye Dmoz.

One thing about comment spammers. They are a polite group, after all. Who else would take the time to compliment you before dumping 100 urls into a comment? Only a super-polite comment spammer. “Nice site.”

I know I love it. I figure, hell, at least he enjoyed the website! I don’t approve his spam, of course, but I think better of the link-bomber as a person. At least he thought enough to compliment me.

If only everyone in the world was so damn polite. We’d all be better off

Many people mention the idea of diversification online. Their idea is that you can spread the risk among a number of websites in a portfolio. This is true, but it offers a few disadvantages over building and concentrating on one website. I know I’ve tried both ways, and lately I’ve come up with some conclusions as to why concentrating one one website might be the better of the two methods.

With focus, you’re less likely to make mistakes. And mistakes on a website are almost as bad as mistakes made by football players during games. I say almost because at least you won’t end up “knocked out” by a webmaster mistake Or at least let’s hope your boss isn’t that mean. But the key to football and webmastering is keen attention to details. The less mistakes you make, the easier it is to get by.

With focus you are more likely to put a ton of creativity into your one main website.

If you work on one primary property, you will devote most of your time to the marketing, design, and business model of that one site. It’s almost bound to do better than 10 or 20 websites you might make. With focus, you can sharpen your one website to a finely honey tip.

Concentrating your marketing and link building efforts to one website will likely ensure success.

If you try to spread your marketing budget around, and attempt to link buiild for too many websites, you might find your efforts stalling out quick. Link building, in particular, can be fatiguing enough with one website, but to multipy the efforts across many has a tendency to leave you burned out and frustrated.

There are a lot of huge examples of companies who’ve done quite well with one domain.

It’s safe to say that Yahoo and Google have done very well marketing under one primary domain. They’ve all managed to brand themselves, and grow rich. If they had attempted to diversify, history might be very different indeed.

There are still tons of good reasons to attempt diversification, and we’ll look at them in a seperate, future post.