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In This Issue:
We've Expanded: Hans Joins
Full Time
We're
pleased to announce Hans Huether has joined us full time. Along with
Anna Ledbetter and Ronda Etzel, Hans has been working part time for
HUEY Productions for the last two years. Hans' primary focus is going
to be day-to-day maintenance of sites and Flash animation.
Review Your Inbound Links
How is that all-important inbound link campaign coming along?
Chances are, once you managed to get a couple of dozen
sites to link to your site, you took your
foot off the gas. Don't get complacent, especially if you want your
site to be at the top of the search engine results come Christmas.
Techniques for linking have been discussed exhaustively, so we won't
go into much detail here. However, make sure you regularly go back and
review the sites that are pointing to your company. "Are they still
linking to you?" is the biggest question.
Phishing with PayPal
Don't know about you, but in the past few days I've received several
messages purporting to be from PayPal sending
me a copy of a "PayPal Member ID Confirmation" message.
Very professional-looking, and if you're a
PayPal member, you'd be tempted to click immediately through to
confirm. Only one problem: clicking on the link doesn't take you to
paypal.com, as the text in the message says. It takes you to
cgi37-paypal.com. A quick check with WHOIS shows that cgi37-paypal.com
is registered to Eric Groce in Rockford, Illinois, and that the site
itself is administered by Yahoo. It all has
to do with phishing - attempting to get you to divulge personal
information by making you think you're dealing with a bonafide
business.
Who Should Link To You? (Incoming Links)
When
you are looking for sites to link to you there are five questions that
you must ask yourself:
1) Do
they compete with you? While you can try to request a link from a site
that provides the same or similar products and services that you do,
this is generally a waste of time that could be spent finding
legitimate links.
2)
Does their site relate to your content? If you have a site promoting
carpet cleaning products, a link from a hair salon will not be of much
benefit. Google and the other major search engines look for content
relationship when determining the value of a link. If the content of
the two sites is totally unrelated the link is given very little
weight if any.
3) How
does Google rate the site? Google has come out with a fantastic tool
called the Google Toolbar. The advanced version of the toolbar
includes the PageRank of the site you are currently visiting. Without
getting into a long description of PageRank (see Google's definition),
the higher the number the better (it is a ranking out of 10 where
traditionally anything above 4 is good and anything above 6 is
excellent. If Google rates the site well then the link will be more
valued than from a site that Google rates poorly. When looking for
links give more time and attention to those with PageRanks of 4 or
higher. The Google Toolbar is a
free download available from Google.
4)
Will they require a reciprocal link? Whether the site will require a
reciprocal link or not is a serious consideration. The more links to
your site that you have that are not reciprocated the better. These
links are given added weight.
5) How
many links on the page? How many links are on the page that will link
to you, and where your link will be placed is another serious
consideration. If your link from their site will be on a page with 100
other links then the value of the link itself is greatly reduced.
Also, whether your link will be on the top of the page or the bottom
will also determine the value of the link itself.
This
may be a lot to consider, however it can save you enormous amounts of
time and frustration. People will often work for hours to attain a
link from a site they like when in reality the site has a low PageRank
and the link won't even carry much weight as far as search engine
placement is concerned.
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