The LinkingNews
Issue 3 May 2007

The LinkingNews is a free newsletter & updater provided by Linking101.com, "your link to link building resources."

Linking101 was created to assist webmasters in using and understanding link exchanges as an inexpensive means of promoting their site, product, or service.

This newsletter is published monthly to provide timely information and updates on the techniques of link
building and web site promotion.

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Greetings!

Yes I am still alive and kicking! Boy things are happing quickly around here so I finally taking a breath to let you know about them.

Linking is getting more difficult these days. I get emails daily from those saying they now do link building. When Linking101 started years ago, that was not the case. Well link building is still important but you need to be a bit more careful how and where you get links.

If you keep up with the search engines, you will know they are changing also. Local search, Social Search, Mobile Search and so on. It is very exciting. To this end,
I have set up a new local search marketing component to my business. You can find it at http://local.lrsxpress.com

Also I have a blog set up called Local Biz Bits at http://www.localbizbits.com.

The blog is geared to small business owners to help them understand how to promote their website locally.

So What is local search?

Local search is searching for products, services online but using a geographical component to focus the search.

This is and will be a very powerful online marketing tool for small business, since most folks will search for information online but will then purchase things offline
locally.

I have written a couple of articles on local search and how it relates to link building. You can find the articles at: http://local.lrsxpress.com

The basic component is that the search engines are trying to make their search results more relevent and local search is one way they are doing it.

If you have a "brick and mortar" business,and/or a website, and looking to get more traffic then think about building local links. You are looking for related links but to websites that are locally close to your business. This will help with your local search rankings, general search rankings. A win-win.

Go take a look at those articles and let me know what you think!

If you have questions about local search, please let me know. I do provide local search marketing and I will give all LinkingNews readers a discount. If interested, please email me.

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Guest Article:

FLinks, Laying down some SEO Roots...

Everyday I receive a ton of emails offering to teach me about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Everybody is claiming to be a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert and for their fee, or the price of their product, they will gladly help you get your Internet Business ranked at the top of the major search engines. Sounds too good to be true? The fact is that most of these self-titled Search
Engine Optimization experts are a waste of your time and money.

One thing that's an advantage for these so called experts is that the feedback loop for any changes you make to show up in the search results (or not show up in the search results!) of a search query is measured in weeks, not minutes or hours. This makes it easy for you to forget to follow up, or monitor how your site's doing. It also makes it easy to keep letting it slide by saying it hasn't been
crawled yet, or just a few more days and we'll start seeing some results.

So what exactly works? How do I know Whose Advice to Take? And what about all that free advice that's available in forums? This goes back to some advice I give in one of my courses: Be Careful Who You Choose to Follow! SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advice given in forums is rarely correct... people that really know what they're talking about on a given topic are not usually hanging out on forums calling themselves experts... they're usually too busy.

What about all those advertisements that show up in my inbox? I'd pass on most of those too. You don't need to pay someone to submit your site to search engines... You can do it yourself - it only needs to be done once.

What Works:No BlackHat: Don't try to fool the search engines or trick them by stuffing your pages full of hidden text with your key words, or Alt/Title tags that are 400 characters long filled with key words, redirects, hidden code, etc, or whatever the current "trick" that will give you a boost in ranking may be... it's only going to be temporary. It's easier to do it the right way.

Quality Content: Put something worthwhile on your web site or blog. Write it for humans to read and then tweak some of the words or phrases to reflect the key words you would like to have indexed by the search engines. Conservatively use these same key words in your title and Meta tag description. It's important for your content to read naturally.

Writing Articles: Write quality articles and do it often. You don't need to pay someone to distribute your articles, nor put them on the big article sites.

Exchanging Links: Search engines place just as much value on the number of inbound links to your site as they do on the content of your site. Spend time exchanging links with other sites. Writing articles and submitting them will help with this. Don't be concerned by people that tell you to only exchange links with sites in the same genre as your site... just don't exchange links with adult, crime, hate sites.

Leaving Trackbacks/Comments: Post comments (using valid comments or feedback) on your favorite blogs, include a link back to your site if they give you that option. Some bloggers turned off comments so your only choice there is to leave a trackback to a post on your own blog. Trackbacks are really good so I'd consider using them even if you can leave a comment.

Creative Ideas like Blog Memes are a great way to get some traffic and inbound links too.

What About Real Optimization? Yes, there are valid ways to optimize your pages and there are people who have that knowledge and the data to back it up. I'll share more about that and them in future articles and posts. Your first steps should be to do the above items, and do them well!

Fred Black is an experienced programmer, web site developer, Internet business operator, systems integrator, father, husband, musician, and songwriter. Visit his Internet Business web site,
http://www.pqInternet.com for Information and Tools to help build a successful Internet Business.

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As always have a great month and until next month...

Larry

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