Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings with Link Partners.

As you may know, I believe that pay-per-click advertising with companies like Google Adwords or Overture is very quick and effective for getting instant traffic and for testing new products and ideas with minimal investment. I always suggest this as the first form of internet marketing to try.

However, once a product, service or an idea has been proven to sell with pay-per-click ads, I would suggest including a search engine optimization strategy to your marketing plan. Search engine optimization is where you attempt to optimize the web site itself for the web pages to rank well in the search engine search results. I suggest search engine optimization as something to do after pay-per-click, because search engine optimization cost much more time and money to get started so it would be good to be sure that your product, service or idea is proven to sell before investing much more resources upfront.

Now, search engine optimization includes three different components for good search engine rankings. They are the following:

• Age - the age of your web pages is a factor of ranking well, particular on Google. All else being equal the older a web site is the better chance it has to rank better.
  
  
• Content - good content includes quantity and quality of text content on your web site. The more relevant content you have relating to a particular search term, the higher you should rank for the search term, all else being equal.
  
  
• Popularity - link popularity is also very important for increasing your search engine rankings. This is where a web site links to your web site. Search results are affected by how many links you have from quality web sites.
  

Today, I will be focusing on the link partners as a way to improve your web site's popularity. I have been experimenting a lot lately with link partners and have found some very favorable results. I will use our Champlain Coffee web site as an example.

Before we started our link exchange campaign, Champlain Coffee ranked on somewhere on the 3 page of search results of Google for the term "low acid coffee". After about a month of our link partners campaign, it ranked #9 on the first page of search results on Google and as of this date, it still ranks there, occasionally fluctuating between #7 to #9. We have determined that this could be the only cause for the increased ranking as the ranking was stable for several months before and starting going up as soon as we started our link exchange campaign. We did nothing else to increase the ranking.

We have since determined that about 20-25 link partners combined with good content and time should get you to the first page of search results. This does require that the link partners be related to your web site in terms of content and the link partner's web site must be of good quality.

We would be glad to help you form a link partner strategy, search engine optimization strategy, pay-per-click strategy or full internet marketing plan. Just click here to send me a message or call us at 802-865-0111.

Podcasting

One of the fastest growing trends online is podcasting. Podcasting is creating audio files (usually in MP3 format), posting them to a web site and allowing users to subscribe to a feed for downloading them. Podcasting is a great way for people to record their thoughts on a variety of subjects from health to politics to movies and share them with the world fairly easily. A web site called PodcastAlley.com is very comprehensive and popular directory of most known podcasts. Some of the most popular podcasts to date are Free Talk Live, The Dawn and Drew Show,
The MacCast, and this Week in Tech. It was Free Talk Live that inspired me to investigate podcasting as a medium and get involved.

My wife Heavenly and I started a podcast over the last month called Ethan Allen Radio, which is a podcast covering local issues and events that Heavenly and I are involved in or have opinions about. It has been fairly successful since the first day we introduced the podcast as I have promoted regular on forums where the reader would have interest in the content of our podcast. I will now run down how we create our podcast.

Starting a podcast isn't very difficult. All you need to get started are the following:

• podcast content
• a computer/ internet access
• podcasting audio recording software
• podcast web space/ bandwidth
• podcast promotion

Podcasting Content:
You need to start with thinking of content that people might actually what to hear about. Heavenly and I participate in local events city council meetings, city events as well as following the news and state-wide issues, so it made sence for us to create a podcast about this providing viewpoints that the traditional media doesn't cover.

Computer/ Internet Access:
You will need a fairly decent computer to create the podcasts as the files as creating them does take a lot of computing power. We use a computer with a 1.1 GHz processor and 240 RAM which works well. We use DSL high-speed internet access. DSL or Cable is definately preferred for uploading the files.

Audio Recording Software:
There are many different free programs you can use to create your files. We use and highly recommend WavePad, which has many great features for recording and modifing the audio files. It is a shareware program where some features are disabled after a certain amount of time, but the features that most people would use stay active after the trial period.

Podcast Web Space/ bandwidth:
This is probably the biggest problem for most people trying to start a podcast. Podcasting can quickly take up a lot of space and a whole lot of bandwidth and this can get very expensive when just starting a podcast. I would suggest using your existing site to include information about your podcast and actually store the physical files at OurMedia, which is a new non-profit organization that is now offering free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text, or software. Forever with no catches. After you create a free account, upload your podcast there and then link to the podcast from your existing web site.

Podcast Promotion:
Now that you have created your podcast and uploaded it and have it listed on your web site you must promote it. You can do this a variety of ways. You can do the following:

• Tell your friends, family, customers, clients, suppliers, everyone you know
  about it that might be interested.
• Issue press releases and send them to the media.
• Participate in chats and forums and mention your podcast.
• Register your podcast with podcast directories such as podcastalley.com and itunes.com or any other directory that relates to the topic of your podcast.
• Optimize your web pages for the search engines and the submit your pages to the search engines for indexing. Don't forget to include a Google Sitemap.

I will be continuing to experiment with it. I will probably be starting a podcast to compliment these blogs so that way readers such as yourself will have the choice to hear or read these blog entries.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding podcasting or would like us to help
you create your own.