SEO Consultant Ireland

An interesting question posted in the LinkedIN Answers by Tim Van Der Stek:

Is there money to be made by posting links of other websites on your own website? Do you need a middle man to accomplish something like this? How can you find out the going rates?

And my LinkedIn Answer:

Google will not like you really much if they find out that you are selling or renting links from your web site. So do not display the advertisement for such a service on your front page, since Google will not send you much traffic, and we all know that the vast majority of the web sites have the majority of their traffic directly from Google.

How to find the rates?

Rates depend on the traffic volume, traffic quality, geographical market, industry, or niche and if your traffic is from Google – what keywords is your web site found for.

The easiest way to find out what is the going rate is to ask a large number of similar sites to yours – in the same market, industry, and with the similar number of the Google PR and Alexa ranking – what would they charge to link to your site (or a fictitious site). Or even better, send them an email and say, I offer €XXX for the link to our site on your front page. From their responses you will quickly establish what would they agree to sell it for – and that is what the going price is.

The majority of this link trading is done by the third party companies, that try to do it all ‘under the radar’ for Google not to notice. Google on the other hand encourages the webmasters to report paid links. Unfortunately they do not offer any of their cash as a reward.

Other third parties like Google AdSense and Text Ads,… offer a far smaller revenue then the direct link sales.

For more of my LinkedIN Answers in the Internet Marketing visit: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanstojanovic.

In the article: Good Google Web Traffic – Bad Google Web Traffic I defined some web traffic as ‘Bad’. The fact is that in most online businesses there is the traffic that the business will profit from and there is that ‘other’ web traffic.

The relevancy plays the crucial role. If the visitors are brought to the web site that does not provide them with what they come to find on the web site, they will leave. If they leave from the same page they have landed on – there is no benefit to the business from such a visitors. The only way such visitors could contribute to the business is to click on the advertisement on your web site. But that’s a whole different story…

The point is that having thousands of visitors on the web site is worthless if those visitors ended up on the web site ‘by mistake’. It is extremely important when purchasing the advertisement on a web site to analyze the traffic, and see where and how is this traffic ending up on a web site that is being evaluated. It is not only important to check if it is ranked high for the relevant terms, but to check the figures from the competition, and try to find out if it is ranked high for unrelated search terms – and gaining a huge traffic from such unrelated search terms. It seems like an impossible task, but a number of search engine ranking tools can help to achieve the task fairly quickly.

What is WordPress
WordPress is an free open source blogging platform. There are a quite a few free open source blogging platforms, but WordPress seems like the most popular and the most used. Everyone can contribute to the WordPress code. If there is a new ‘Look & Feel’ developed it is called a WordPress Theme. There are literally thousands of them available on the web today. If there is a functional update to the WordPress code it can be distributed as a WordPress Plugin. Anyone can download WordPress and any theme or plugin freely and use it for both personal and commercial use.

WordPress is easy
WordPress is designed so that no technical knowledge is required to install it and use it. It doesn’t even ask you to many stupid question during the install but what do you want to call your web site and what your email is. And most of us can answer that. The amount of the customization that is available is as well quite impressive, and the interface is intuitive. So really, anyone can use it.

WordPress is constantly upgraded
The last WordPress update made available is about two weeks ago only. It gets better and better every few weeks. The amount of plugins growing exponentially as well, so it is unlikely you will find a web site functionality that is not ‘developed’ before.

WordPress is a SEO Killer!
And here we get to the interesting part now. The applications of WordPress are really numerous even in the business use, not only as a blogging tool. Imagine the following scenario:

You are the used car salesman. You have a garage with 50 to 100 cars in it. 20 to 40 cars are sold each month and the same number of new ones come in. It is 21 century and you know you need to advertise on the Internet. Those lazy white collar people will not just walk in trough the front door. They will use the web to find their new car. What will they search for? What is the keyword they will type?

Car –to many results – all irrelevant.
Used cars – better but I am looking for a Saab!
Used cars Saab – good results, but it is the Automatic I am looking for
Used cars Saab automatic – ah, here we are… but let me try….
Used car Saab Automatic Black Leather 2l low mileage – Got it!

If you are a car salesman the only thing you need to sell that Saab is to place a link to the YOUR advertisement on the web that will display on top of the search for the exact phrase that describes that car. That is the buyer you want, you do not need his wife who has an idea about the Estate version!

Here is where WordPress comes into play. WordPress is a tool that can if set up properly and used properly place your advertisement on top of the exact search your buyers are looking for. You will get more relevant phone enquiries as well. There will be less:

Do you sell good Volvos?

And will be more like:

That Saab that you have advertised, the automatic 2 litre Petrol one. Do you still have it?

WordPress is a SEO springboard for almost any business.