Article Links
Continuation of Lesson 9 from You Can Make Money
Writing
We continue this look at resource boxes with some guidelines
for article links. There are several important questions here.
First is the matter of how many links to include. After that
we will look at which pages you should link to. Finally, we will
look at what the link should say and how to actually format it.
Why Only One Link?
Since you want webmasters across the world to put your article
on their sites, you have to think like they do. They are "paying"
for your article with a link to your site. They may not want
to pay the "price" of several links. After all, every
time a reader on their site clicks through to your site, that
website owner may have lost a click on something that generates
revenue.
Besides, they may already have a minimum of two non-paying-links
going out when they use your article. Why? Because in addition
to the link they have to your site, the article directory where
they found your article may require a link to them in order for
the article to be used (this is common).
You see, they want their visitors to click on their paying
advertisements, the links to affiliate products, or to buy their
own products. They're happy to use your article to get more visitors
and to make a better website, but only if it doesn't come with
too many non-paying ways for the visitors to leave.
I use other peoples articles on my sites and in my newsletters.
I can tell you that I have passed up many good articles because
they have too many links. There are usually enough articles to
choose from out there with just one link in them.
I have had two links in some of the resource boxes of my own
articles, and some of these articles were used on other websites.
Obviously, none of these rules is absolute. I never put two links
in a resource box any longer, though, and I strongly suggest
you follow the same rule.
One more point: Because of the way the resource box is often
formatted, with a linking keyword, and the name of the site,
there may be two links anyhow (I'll have more on this kind of
linking in a moment). This is because some directories automatically
make a link out of any URL (anything starting with "http://").
If I had included yet another, there would be three in these
cases (because of the required link to the article directory.
That's definitely too many in my opinion.
Where Should the Link Go?
Linking to the home page of your site seems like the obvious
answer, but there are other options. If I write an article on
wilderness survival for my backpacking site, I figure that the
reader is probably more interested in survival than in lightweight
backpacking gear, so I make the link go directly to the page
that introduces the wilderness survival section of the site.
If you have a page devoted to getting visitors to subscribe
to a newsletter or e-course, you might get more value out of
those clicks by sending them there. If the article is about the
best digital cameras, you might want to send the readers straight
to a page that sells those cameras. Make the link to the most
appropriate page for the readers of that article. This may be
your home page most of the time, but not always.
Also, for general search engine optimization purposes, it
is better to have incoming links to more than just your home
page. So it is a good idea to have at least some of your articles
link to interior pages on the site. In general SEO (search engine
optimization) experts recommend that at least 20% of incoming
links go to interior pages for best results.
Since most links resulting from trading links with other sites
or listing your site in site directories will be to your homepage,
the place where you have the most control over this factor is
with your articles. Try to make about every fifth link go somewhere
other than the home page, but don't worry too much about this.
By the way, if there is a section of your website that targets
a great keyword, using the links in your articles is a powerful
way to boost the visibility of that section. For example, when
I created a course on "mind power" on my site www.IncreaseBrainpower.com,
I didn't want to rely on getting visitors to the homepage and
then enticing them to visit the mind power course page. I wanted
to promote the subscription page more directly, so I wrote a
series of articles on related topics that linked directly to
that page.
I also made the link text "mind power" or "mind
power course." This is why years later, the page shows up
in the first page of Google results if you search "mind
power course" (no such luck yet with "mind power,"
but you can't win them all). That brings us to the next important
question about those links:
What Should the Link Say?
Ideally you want the best keywords to be part of your "anchor
text." The anchor text is the words that are actually linked.
For example, the following two links go to the same page:
1. Learn more at http://www.everywaytomakemoney.com/money-articles.html.
2. Visit the site to read more great Money
Articles.
The first just uses the URL as anchor text, while the second
uses the keyword "money articles" as anchor text. This
is great for optimizing that page for this keyword. In fact,
the anchor text of incoming links is one of the important elements
of how you get found in the search engines. Google and other
search engines use these links to determine what a page is about
and how important it is. (The latter has to do with how important
the site is where the link is located.)
However, there is a problem with the number 2 example above.
When a web master copies your article from a directory to use
it on his site, he may not get the code with the correct URL
for the link. As a result, he may put the article up without
a link, or link to your homepage not knowing that you had originally
linked to another page. I've had it happen many times with my
articles.
This is why the first version is safer. Notice that I try
to have the keyword in the page URL in any case (money-articles.html),
so the search engines can find it. But this isn't ideal.
The best alternative is a compromise, which might look like
this:
To get a free course on how to make money writing, and to
read more great Money
Articles, visit http://www.everywaytomakemoney.com/money-articles.html.
Notice that the URL is not linked, so you don't scare off
potential users with too many links (although this a case when
two links may be okay, since they go to the same place). Meanwhile,
you get the optimization value from the article directories you
submit to, and from those web masters that know how to properly
code a link.
At the same time, if someone uses the article without linking
the words "Money Articles," they should at least see
the URL and make that into a link. This is how you "idiot
proof" a resource box link.
Note: Some directories will automatically convert all
URLs into links, in which case you may end up with two links
using the above format. I am not sure how to get around this
problem, and not sure it really is a problem, but most of the
directories will still post the article with just one active
link.
Continues here... Making Links
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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