Webmasters and bloggers are always after more links. The more links the better your ranking should be in the search engines and hopefully the more people will visit your website or blog and take what ever action you want then to take. Whether you want them to buy something, read your wonderfully witty posts on your blog, or take part in your latest social networking website. We all need links. Bloggers that have been at it a little while often follow Technorati and they know that their blog ranking is determined by how many blogs link back to them. You want to get your blog into the top 100, get hundreds and thousands of links.

Want to know a secret of getting tons of links back to your website or blog? Are you ready for it? Give something away that people want. Not really a secret right? Businesses have been doing this forever. McDonald’s is famous for giving something away for free to get people to come back. They started selling kids happy meals with toys for a reason. My son does not like to go to McDonalds for the food, at least he never eats it when we are there. He wants to go there to get the latest toy that comes with his lunch. We continue to go to McDonald’s because they give away something for free that my son wants.

A good example of this are website themes. There are hundreds if not thousands of people out there designing website themes for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and even plain HTML/CSS themes. Why do people take time out of their busy lives to design a website theme and then just give it away? Simple, they want that link back to their own website every time the theme is used.

Here is an example for you. Michael Martine runs a blog called Better Blogging with Michael Martine. I don’t read his blog very often, but there is something to learn by looking at the blog reactions for Better Blogging with Michael Martine. Notice anything about the links back to his blog? They are almost all links back from a theme he designed. All of those links place his blog in the top 100 according to Technorati, although you don’t see him listed on the top 100 list. He has designed a WordPress theme(s) that people like and use and in return he gets links back to his blog from every single blog that uses the theme. Not bad for giving something away. I am sure there are many examples of people or businesses gaining huge amounts of backlinks by giving away something.

How does this help you? Not everyone can create a popular WordPress theme, but I am sure if you think about it for a little while you will be able to come up with something that you can give away that people will want that can help you get those links.

I would love to know what you come up with. It would be great to make another post of all the possible things people could give away to help create more links back to their website or blog.

A great video on how to use del.icio.us. del.icio.us is one of my favourite social bookmarking sites. A common problem with del.icio.us and other sites that rely on tags is the lack of any kind of controlled vocabulary for tags. I don’t have a degree in library science but I have that problem just on my own account. Sites that are actually similar or related have different tags assigned to them and make the bookmarks hard to find later on. Multiply that by millions of people using different tags for the same website, along with misspellings and the number of tags and websites can in some ways become chaos. Makes me appreciate librarians a lot more.

A popular thing for blogs to do these days is to run a review for backlinks program. Usually the programs run something like this: review the blog running the program and get a backlink from that blog to your review. The selling point for these reviews is that the blog doing the review will get a link back from a more popular blog, either a higher PageRank, and/or high traffic blog. The question is, are these backlinks valuable for the blogs doing the review?

One of the more popular review my blog for backlinks programs is John Chow’s “Review My Blog & Get A Free Linkback“. He has been running the program since December 2006 and is currently up to batch 76. His site is currently ranked as a PageRank six and reviews are posted in increments of 10 at a time. At John’s current rate of posting the review post might be on the home page for seven days and then it will only be found in the blog archive. This gives you seven days on the front page of a fairly high traffic blog. Being on the front page of a PageRank six website for only seven days will be useless as far as flowing PageRank, it simply is not long enough. The value will only be the traffic that one can expect from being on the front page of a busy blog.
I am sure there would be a pretty good traffic spike from being on the front page of a busy blog like John Chow’s, but that traffic might be even better if the links to the blogs contained small reviews of the blog that did the review to help peak interest in each review.

The very first post of “review my blog posts” on John Chow is a PageRank three, and the PageRank of the review pages varies from unranked to five. If you are lucky enough to be on one of the review pages with high PageRank you will be sharing PageRank with the other ten links, not to mention all of the other links on the sidebar. I checked the PageRank of the reviews from some of the higher PageRank review posts and the average PageRank of the reviews was one! Most of the reviews were often unranked, and these were reviews that have been on the interent long enough that they should have received PageRank. That tells me that whatever PageRank value that is flowing to the review is fairly small. Do review posts on blogs get much traffic after they are off the front page? I have no way of knowing but I suspect that the number of visitors from the reviewed blog is fairly small after leaving the home page. There is simply no reason for people to read those posts and follow through to your blog, unless you are doing what I did today.

Review me for a backlink programs work for the blog offering the program, since they get links to their blog using the anchor text they want, but for the blog doing the review there appears to be little value, except the traffic spike from being on the home page of a popular blog for a short time. Long term you would be better off being active leaving comments and participating in other blogs than doing a one time review. Review my blog for a backlink programs could be made better for the reviewers by implementing some of these ideas:

• Limit the number of review backlinks from a review post to five or less.
• Provide a short preview of the review/blog along with the link. This will give the post linking to the review more content and provide some value to readers and reviewers. This might actually make the review link back post worth visiting.
• Offer a link back for a longer period of time from the home page or site wide to the reviews. Best would probably be three months, but at least one month would be better. Reviews might have to be done less to provide the greater value to reviewers.

These are just ideas I had off the top of my head. Of course this goes against the whole point of most review my blog for a backlink programs. Since if you actually did this you would be putting your readers and reviewers first and yourself second. Perhaps I will have to think about starting a program and doing these things.

Building links is part of every webmaster’s daily work. Thanks to Jennifer over at Search Engine Guide for a great how to on how to use blog search engines to build links. She walks you through how to use Technorati to find blogs that are talking about topics relevant to your blog.

The list does not get any bigger than this one.

The Enormous list of Linkbuilding tips, articles and resources

Some fantastic resources on the list, some that I might avoid, but overall a great list. There is hours of reading for you to do on link building. I know I will have to work my way through the list later tonight.

I was doing some surfing last night and dropped in on the “Succesful Blog” by Liz Strauss. She had a great post about a smart banner that takes your rss feed and creates an animated gif that you can use on top blog sites and in other places where you need a banner. Liz links to Blogosquare where you can get the complete instructions to make one for yourself.

Here is one I did up late last night quickly for my Video Rambler blog.

What a great idea for a banner! It presents the latest headlines from your blog, and is sure to catch peoples attention to bring in even more visitors.

In the rush to embrace new technology and new ways of communicating we often abandon the well established communication methods that people are used too. For example, people know how to use email. Everyone from grandparents to little children use email. It is still one of the most used services on the Internet and probably will be for a very long time, even with the problems of spam.

With that in mind it can be a very useful promotion device to still provide people with an easy method to forward your website information to their friends, family and coworkers by email. This blog for example has an email this icon and link on every post so people can quickly send the link to others. On other blogs I help with or publish the email this link is used quite often, and from the statistics email referrers account for just over 1% of the incoming traffic.

Another email option that you can provide, if you have an rss feed, is the ability for people to subscribe to your rss feed be email. This weblog uses Feedburner for that feature, but there are other services out there that provide that service as well. People that subscribe by email are sent an email archive of the latest posts from your blog once a day. This allows them to read the latest posts from your weblog with very little effort.

Website promotion by email is still a very useful tool to provide your visitors. It gives them an easy way to spread the word about your website to others, and is a great method to stay in touch with your regular visitors.

I was taking a break from coding today and took a quick peek at TechCrunch. TechCrunch had a nice writeup on AddThis, a new widget that I was starting to see on blogs around the web.

The AddThis widget is a way for your readers to bookmark your website on pretty much any social bookmarking service in existence, as well as being able to save it to the browsers local bookmarks. The widget setup page is easy to use and you can quickly generate code for websites, blogs, MySpace page, and even an ezine or newsletter.

The AddThis widget code generator.

Adding an AddThis widget to a website or blog can help to reduce the clutter on a site, so you don’t see a huge list of social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every page. Your readers can easily bookmark the page using the social bookmarking service of their choice. You can gain some insight into what readers save with the statistics that AddThis gathers, and probably the nicest feature, it is free.

There are some possible draw backs to using an AddThis social bookmarking widget on a site. Not that the drawbacks are huge, but they are something to consider. It does add an extra step for people to save your site in the service they want. The widget relies on javascript, so in the off chance that someone has their javascript turned off, the bookmarking does not work. I was able to get the popup window to open but could not bookmark anything. I also occasionally got a request to download a php file when I clicked on a social bookmarking icon instead of it saving the page to the service. Hopefully that is an error they will correct quickly.

Overall the AddThis social bookmarking widget can save some valuable screen real estate on your website while still giving your readers the benefits of saving the pages they like to the service of their choice. I am sure they will work out any errors that they have soon. They also have an RSS version of the widget as well that could be just as useful.

Trailfire is one of those Web 2.0 applications that makes it possible for people to create custom web tours or trails.

To be able to create a web trail you need to be using Firefox and install a toolbar. The toolbar itself adds a new menu item to Firefox and two new icons on the navigation toolbar.

Trailfire menu and navigation toolbar icons.

Once the toolbar is installed you will be able to create your own web trails for others to follow, discover other peoples trails as you browse around the web and add comments, like post it notes, to any web page. You do not need the Trailfire toolbar installed to be able to follow a web trail that others have made, but it is required to make your own trails, add comments and discover other peoples trails.

Click follow the trail to follow other peoples trails without the toolbar installed.

Once you create a web trail you can make it publicly available on the Trailfire website on your profile page. For an example you can view my profile page and see that I have created one trail titled “Google Adsense Essential Reading”. To follow the trail of web sites I added to the “Google Adsense Essential Reading” trail simply click the “follow the trail” link and you can go through the sites I added one by one. When you are on the trail you will see a little icon on the page () that you can roll over and see where you are on the trail, read comments about the page, and if you have the toolbar installed make comments yourself.

There are a lot of interesting trails available for people to browse on the Trailfire website and a great opportunity for you to create trails that are unique to you and your interests. I plan to create a portfolio trail showing off the websites that I have created or worked on with details. This is also a possibility for increased traffic as people surf trails. While you might not get tens of thousands of new visitors, it does offer another interesting and unique way of promoting your own website.

I was helping a client establish a new blog a little while ago and one of the questions they had in the process was what are those little icons at the bottom of posts? I was not sure what they were talking about at the time, but after a little of back and forth I figured out that they were talking about the social bookmarking icons that are on the bottom of so many posts. They simply did not understand what was the point of having them. I tried to explain that social bookmarking can be a great service to your readers since it allows them to bookmark your post and share it with others.

Social bookmarking sites also have the potential of sending users to your website or blog. I have mentioned StumbleUpon a few times here, that is perhaps my favorite social bookmarking service, but there is also Digg, and lately I have come across a blog focused site called Blogg-Buzz. These services can be a great help in getting your website noticed. They are the digital form of word of mouth advertising.

When adding social bookmarking links the tendency is to add all of the social bookmarking sites. While I can understand peoples desire to do that, I usually recommend that people add no more than 10. Why 10? It is a nice round number, plus by choosing 10 you should be able to get the services that has the majority of users. Almost always Digg is on the list as well, and while Digg has the potential to send you a lot of visitors, I recommend people don’t bother with it since Digg is a very specific niche and they tend to look down on blogs.

It only takes a few extra minutes to add some social bookmarking links to a site to provide users with a quick way of being able to find your website again, and the word of mouth advertising never hurts.

What are your favorite social bookmarking sites to use? What services do you add to your blogs?