Affordable Web Site Design

Google has been on a mission lately to devalue any paid links it can find. What does this mean? Well, all those website directories that were once a great place to buy a PageRank 5 link for $10 to help get your site ranked higher are no longer effective, and they’ll become less effective as time goes on. In fact, over the past year or so Google has literally been penalizing websites that it thinks are selling links or exchanging links just for the sake of getting higher rankings. Case in point, JohnChow.Com, a popular online marketing blog was penalized last year by Google, the PageRank on his site was dropped from a 6, which is very good, to a 3, which is something most sites can build in less than a year…all because he was selling (or rather renting) links.

It’s incredibly difficult to build links these days without just giving up and purchasing them. With all the penalties going on, that’s not a viable strategy if you’re looking to build a website that’s going to have any staying power.

What About Link Exchanges?

If you have a website, you’ve probably heard of a link exchange at some point. To make it short, Joe Website Owner posts a page of links on his website, hopefully that page has a high PageRank so it can pass some link weight onto those sites listed. You email Joe Website Owner or submit his contact form and asked to be placed on his links page. He says, “Sure, just put my link on one of your pages and we’ll both benefit.” So, in the past, you would do this…it worked. But, in an effort to prevent what they see as “Gaming the search engines,” Google has devalued reciprocal links; in other words, if you have a link to Joe Website Owner and he has a link to you, that link to you is worth far less in Google’s eyes than if Joe Website Owner had linked to you because you had high quality content that he liked and you didn’t have to link back. We call these one-way links, and they are vital to your search engine position.

Linking to “Bad Neigborhoods” or Excessive Linking

To add to this, Google is also penalizing websites for linking to, what it calls, “Bad Neighborhoods” as well as Excessive Linking.

Bad Neighborhoods are any website Google considers to be engaging in what Google considers to be “gaming” of the search engines. That means that your sweet old grandmother who has her own blog talking about knitting could be deemed a “Bad Neighborhood” by Google if she has one of these link exchanges setup or any number of other seemingly innocent things like that.

Excessive linking means that those link exchanges are worthless because of the way PageRank is passed. If you don’t know what pagerank is, it’s a measure of a website’s value according to Google and, in large part, is determined by the number of other websites linking to your website. Hence all the attempts to rent and exchange links in the past. For each additional link on a given page, the PageRank that is passed onto the linked sites is diluted. If you have a page with 100 links on it, the PageRank of that page is being split among 100 other sites before it’s passed on. That means a link on a PageRank 1 (very low) site, could be better, if yours is the only link on that site, than a link from the “Links Page” on a PageRank 5 site that is also linking to 200 other websites.

So How Can You Get Higher Search Rankings Nowadays?

Well, you still need to build links to get high rankings, but how can you do that now that Google’s seemed to devalue every method that used to work?

By creating high quality content AND promoting it correctly and to the right people. Notice that you not only have to create very high quality content, but you also have to promote it correctly and to the right people. Succeeding online is similar to other businesses in that who you know can sometimes help you more than what you know.

That’s where we come in

Much of what we do all day is figure out really interesting and insightful things to add to the web, and then we promote those things, as if they were their own product launches, in extremely powerful and effective ways. We can do this for your website, building many extremely high quality links to your site that will never be penalized by Google. Why?

Because people will link to you by choice…not in exchange for anything else…

While devaluing many of the old tactics in an effort to improve search rankings, we had to figure out ways to market websites while still playing by Google’s new rules. The problem is, it’s tough to build links to a website the natural way, and there are so many millions of sites out there it can take years before most people even find your website to link to it in the first place.

When people find extremely high quality information and/or tools on the internet, they will link to them…the problem for most sites is two fold…

1)What are people going to find extremely high quality enough to link to?
And 2)How are you going to get that information/tool/resource in front of enough people and the right people so that they even have the opportunity to link to you in the first place?

That’s what we specialize in. Building high quality, one-way links that will never be devalued by Google because they are exactly what Google has always wanted to see. The smarter Google gets, and the more they improve their search engines, the more value will be placed on the types of links we’re building everyday.

Only Pay for Results

Quality Internet marketing is a relatively new discipline even for website owners, so I don’t expect anyone to pay me $1,000 a month for some service that they may never see a return from.

Instead, we charge by the link. We have a pricing structure that is dramatically lower than you could even buy links for, but these links aren’t bought…I mean, sure you pay for them, but they’re built naturally and because of that, are incredibly powerful. Quality, not quantity is the name of the game for building links these days.

So, now that I’ve practically written a book here, shoot me an email and we can discuss some options that are within your budget either via email, over the phone, or in person. I’m happy to provide references upon request, but realistically, you only pay for results, so there’s nothing to lose.

Thanks for your time.
John Crenshaw
john {at} johncrenshaw [dot] net

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