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To manage your link campaign with an osCommerce CRE Loaded site, the Link Manager will let you add links as well as allow you to manage links that people post on your site. You can create categories where you want to allow links to be added to your site. You can add them yourself, or you have other users submit them on your site. After someone submits a link to your site. You control if you want the link to appear with the status option (Green Dot= On Red Dot= Off). There is a rating system so that users can add reviews or rate links to show what links add value to them. The Reciprocal Page allows a user submitting a link to use the URL to add a link to their site and you can follow the Reciprocal Page to add you link to their link page. You can also you use this reference to make sure that reciprical links remain active back to your site.
Some of the fields to know in your link menu are:
Site Title: A descriptive title for your website.
URL: The absolute web address of your website, including the 'http://'.
Category: Most appropriate category under which your website falls.
Description: A brief description of your website.
Image URL: The absolute URL of the image you wish to submit, including the 'http://'. This image will be displayed along with your website link.
Eg: http://your-domain.com/path/to/your/image.gif
Full Name: Your full name.
Email: Your email address. Please enter a valid email, as you will be notified via email.
Reciprocal Page: The absolute URL of your links page, where a link to our website will be listed/displayed.
Eg: http://your-domain.com/path/to/your/links_page.php With any new website you MUST begin to design a marketing strategy. A URL, logo, and a few products do not do much to create real traffic to your site....no matter what the late night infomercials and dropship turnkey sites will tell you (often after a large set-up fee). While your end goal should be to sell enough products for you to find ecommerce success, your first step needs to be to attract as many visitors as you can. One simple way to generate traffic is through a "Linking Campaign".
There are two types of links for your Link Campaign: reciprocal and non-reciprocal links. A reciprocal link is when two websites link to each other. Both sites generate traffic for each other simultaneously. Some sites will only link to you if there is a reciprocal link offered to their site. A non-reciprocal link is a link to a website that links one-way. A good linking strategy is to create as many inbound non-reciprocal links as possible, with some strategically chosen reciprocal links as well.
Search engines, or at least the people that create search engines, are incredibly smart. The positioning of your site in the ranking results depends a great deal upon how many people link to or reference your site. Non-reciprocal inbound links communicates to the search engines that your site contains valuable information. After all, who's going to recommend your site without reciprocation unless they believe it will benefit their readers? Your website's popularity is just like high school. If two students tell each other that they are popular, it might not mean much when it comes to a class elections or home coming court nominations. However, if everyone else points at that student down the hall saying they are popular, it is much easier to believe.
However, non-reciprocal links might not be enough to ensure high traffic flow and search ranking. A website with a bunch of reciprocal links could indicate that the site solicits links. With websites and SEO efforts, you cannot simply buy relevance and ranking when it comes to the major search engines. The same is true if your site is connected by a large number of reciprocal links. The point of a search engine is to find sites that give the searcher what they are looking for, not provide the searcher with the sites who are best at getting links or just pay for them. Search engines try to verify the integrity of the link quality by reviewing key word connections between reciprocal links to determine if the sites are in fact benefiting each other.
Some points for a good Link Campaign:
1) Choose your reciprocal links wisely. Connect only to
websites that contain related information that your readers will enjoy.
2) Spend your time cultivating valuable information on your site, and then tell everyone you can. If you end up having more non-reciprocal links than reciprocal links, search engines will rate your site much higher than those that do not.
You can learn more details about how to manage a free link campaign by looking through our Guides and Tutorials in the Ecommerce and General Business Strategy Guides on this site. |
