The Value In Links

Make Link Building a Priority

Most people think that creating a website is the most important part of any internet marketing venture.  It’s not.  It’s all about the links.

If you have been busting over a website and admiring just how good it looks; and went as far as launching it, only to find out that it’s nice but nobody is visiting it.  It may have more to do with the SEO and links to the site than the site itself.  That is, of course, unless you are a heavy user of Flash.  If you have lots of Flash on your site, it is likely that the search engines don’t even know you exist!  That is because search engine crawlers look for text above all else, to determine what your website is all about.  Flash and images are nice, but they fall way short.

Make Links A Part of Your Website Strategy

So, when you design your site make sure to make linking a priority. And no, this does not mean putting a bunch of links on the site to your favorite websites.  It means, going out and having relevant websites link to YOUR site.  Yes, you have to email, call or even blog about another website on your site if you want them to link to you.  Why? Because if they are a PR5 or PR4 or something and you are a PR0 or PR1 you will need them linking to your site if you ever wish to climb on the search engine results!

So a great optimal linking strategy to maintain is:

• Have more inbound links to your site than outbound links
• Link to and request links to your website from relevant content websites
• Do not participate in link farms or anything that promises 1,000s of links
• When requesting links, always go for anchor text links above all others

There is more information on this topic throughout Laberinto Social so look for the Articles on SEO and Linking for more information.

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SiteMap and Robots File

Sitemap and Robots

One of the best things you can do to get the search engines to notice you, is to install a sitemap and robots file on your blog or website.  Now I know that may sound a bit trivial for some and all, but it is really really simple.

First of all, you can get a sitemap very easily from XML-Sitemaps.com.  You simply follow four simple steps on their site and in no time at all, you will have the file you need for your site.  Very simply put: upload that file to your root directory (the place that is the bottom most tier of your website – example: c:/ would be the root of a PC, and so the same would apply to a website or blog, only the root is where the website is being hosted).

Once you have done so, it is a great idea to sign up with Google Webmaster Tools so you can tell Google exactly what you want crawled on your site.  You will be able to designate what to crawl and what not to.  Although some crawling robots out there, ignore the request and crawl everything anyway (usually these are spam search robots). 

SiteMap XML

A sitemap basically tells Google and other search engine crawling robots, what your site looks like in terms of a map.  It says to the crawling spiders what is okay to index and what is not.  It is important to have a sitemap on your site, because even though the internet looks for content all the time, they won’t always know you are there, unless you make an effort to tell them.

Along with a sitemap, it is a good idea to install a robots.txt file so that it can work in conjunction with the sitemap in that it will tell any other crawling search "spider", what to search and what to leave alone.  And although a sitemap and robots file sound the same, they are not.  The sitemap tells the search engines what the landscape looks, like and the robots file tells them what to index and crawl, and what to leave alone.

Robots.txt

You can easily get a robots.txt file the same way you got a sitemap from XML-Sitemaps.  Just simply upload this .txt file to your root directory also and you are set to go.  If you want to find a sample robots.txt file to upload to you site, just search robots.txt on the net and you will see a sample come up.  Save it as a txt file and upload it to the root directory.

The internet is so much friendlier to your site or blog when you have these things in place.  You can visit Google Webmaster Tools for more information or XML-Sitemaps too. 

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Hot Spots Feature on YouTube

Some Hot Spots To Look Out For

Here is a quick little inside note that everyone should be aware on their YouTube accounts, especially if you do any kind of video marketing.  When you load your videos, make sure to use the Annotations tool inside YouTube.  Annotations allows you to add comment "bubbles" to your videos that can link to another video on YouTube or bring special attention to a specific part on your video.  These hot spots features bring a visitor’s eyes directly to your page link.

For example, if you have learned how to put your http://sitename.com into the description area, you can have an annotation pointing directly at it at the end of your video so that viewers know exactly where to click when the video ends.  You will notice that when annotation is used in combination with the placement of your URL in the description area, your visitor traffic increases dramatically. 

Hot Spots and Metrics

Now although that is a good way to bring more visitors to their site, we have to look at the performance of those visitors as it pertains to the value of our efforts in the videos we upload.  So to ensure that you are measuring the metrics on that, make regular use of the Insight button on YouTube so that you can see how many views you are getting.  These additional hot spots feature gives you a lot of valuable information.

The Insight tool (button) will tell you specifically what is the popularity of your video, what source (embedded video or YouTube play area) is generating the largest number of viewers, and what demographic is targeting your content the most.  All of this data is available to you just by clicking the insight button in the video edit area.

 

So as you will notice, individually, each of these hot spot features and buttons are great in themselves, but when properly combined, they can give you a much better return and perspective on your web traffic and investment.  And don’t forget that YouTube is not the only place to upload videos to.  You’ve got bilingual internet marketing places like Univision and Telemundo that also give you the opportunity to upload videos.

Let me know if there are any additional hot spot features that you’ve come across that help with YouTube or any other video network like Truveo.  You can also read the other post I wrote about video marketing too.

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