Web Dev Notes

The more links you have to your website, the more visitors you get! That’s a pretty simple concept to understand. Every link to your site on the web is another chance that someone will find your website. Even more important is the fact that the number of links to your website also helps your site gain a higher ranking in search engine results. Since most people use search engines to find anything online, the better you rank, the more traffic you will get! Search engines are an excellent form of free advertising for your website so it is crucial that you do not upset them if you wish to give yourself a competitive advantage over websites similar to your own.

There are many ways to build links. If you’re blogging, the best way is simply to interact with other websites by posting comments on theirs.

Another excellent way to build links to your website is through article submission. If you have a good website, you will already have tons of articles sitting around in your archives. Every now and then, submit one of these articles to an article directory like Writer Database.The reason for doing this is because at the bottom of your article, you can place a resource box which will link to your website as the source of the article. Therefore, if your article is approved, you will suddenly have generated a new link to your site. You can read more about the Writer Database website here.

Don’t just submit to a single directory. If you have time, try submitting to multiple directories to further increase the amount of links to your web site. The more you have, the better!

What about the Google penalty for duplicate content? If you submit an article identical to the one on your website, will the penalty outweigh the benefits? I’ve seen many discussions on the matter and the fact remains that nobody really knows the algorithms Google uses to rank pages. Many people believe that the duplicate content penalty will only affect duplicate content on the same domain. I have in fact seen this happen on my BattleCity Classic website which uses the Joomla Content management system. Due to the way the system is set-up, several different links could allow me to reach the exact same page. For this reason, my main landing page had a low page-rank of 1 for a long-time, until I fixed this problem. A few months later, after the next page rank update, my landing page jumped to a page rank of 4. During this time, I’ve seen the page rank of most article directories remain stable or even increase and so it would seem that the duplicate content penalty is meant to protect against a single website spamming Google’s index.

If you are however worried about duplicate content penalties, then take the time to write new articles ONLY for article directories. Do not place this content on your website, but instead use it in as many article directories as you can in order to advertise your site via the quality of the writing and of course through the generation of incoming links!