A Strong Web Community Refused to Die

A virtual community can crash and die, but the people behind the data live on. On June 27th, CouchSurfing.com, the most active hospitality exchange website, where members offer their couch (or other free accommodation) to traveling members in 205 countries worldwide, experienced a major crash which resulted in the loss of most of its user database. However, with the support of its membership community and a renewed passion from its core volunteers, CouchSurfing version 2.0 returned on July 6th with a refocused mission to include more robust user participation in the maintenance and growth of the site and community.

Two days after the crash, Casey Fenton, the founder of CouchSurfing, issued a statement that the site would not be able to be rebuilt–-meaning the demise of CouchSurfing and a loss of the global network of friends. Hours after the statement was posted, Casey and “The CouchSurfing Collective,” a team of international volunteers who had already assembled in Montreal for the summer to improve the project, received thousands of emails from members worldwide pleading for the site to rebuild, and offering to participate in the reconstruction. “I was overwhelmed by all the support coming in,” says Casey. “I was reminded that the CS community is not about the data, or about just surfing couches. It’s about the network and friendships that have been created. The data was dead, but the community was still very much alive.”

Casey and a dozen volunteers quickly got to work. Support poured in from the community and in a matter of 4 days, the site was rebuilt from the ground up. CouchSurfing had 90,000 profiles in the database before the crash. Casey was able to painstakingly stitch together data from various earlier back-up sources, and recreate an older version of the database. Approximately 11,000 profiles were lost, many of them empty.

“CouchSurfing is the first website of its kind to be owned and operated by the community itself,” says Casey. “It’s a revolutionary concept. What seemed like a tragedy has turned into a blessing for CouchSurfing.” Weekly sign-ups of new members have more than doubled and traffic to the site has increased by 500-1000%.

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Five Free Link Building Methods To Push People To Your Website

link building methods
Fran Jeanes asked:


Getting people to visit your website doesn’t have to be an expensive undertaking. By using a few simple, free, link building internet marketing techniques, you can get traffic to your website. While these methods are free, they are time-intensive – but they work.

Even if you don’t have access to employees, or the budget for hiring freelancers, you can still get amazing traffic results without spending a dime. Not everyone is patient enough to take the time needed to succeed in link building, but if you have the drive and perseverance to do some hard work and research you will generate more traffic for your site.

Use the five following free traffic-getting methods for link building success:

1. Take advantage of social networks.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for yourself and/or company. It’s easy to showcase your depth of knowledge about topics so that over time you can build a reputation and earn the trust of others in your area of expertise. Using social networking sites also makes it easy to target your desired demographic when internet marketing.

2. Use newsletters to spread your message.

By offering good quality information in a newsletter about your products, or line of business, you can bring visitors to your site on a regular basis. An email newsletter can easily be forwarded, thus expanding your message’s reach and expanding your link building potential.

3. Exchange links with other topic-related sites.

Email the webmasters of other sites in a similar line of business/interest as yours and ask to exchange links. It’s so simple – you place a link to another site on your website and they return the favor. This means that every visitor that goes to their site could potentially click on the link to your site and visit yours as well.

4. Write articles.

Write interesting articles that grab the reader’s attention. Provide interesting tips and techniques, guides or reviews in your field and link to your site in the author’s resource box. By submitting your original articles to article directories you will make your work available for others to use on their sites – with your copyrighted link building information attached. Links for your site will be spread to many other websites and interested readers may convert to new visitors.

5. Write good content for your site.

Write about what people are searching for. By using relevant search keywords in your web content will mean that you will improve your web page’s ranking in search engine result pages. The higher your web page appears in a search result means more visitors to your site.

All of these internet marketing link building methods used alone will drive more traffic to your site for free. Use all five and watch your web stats skyrocket!



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Some Common Link Building Methods for SEO

link building methods
IC asked:


e primary activities in SEO that will arguably have the most impact on your sites position in the search engine rankings is link building. A web pages position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) is largely dependent on the number and quality of other pages linking to the page. Here we present some of the more common link building techniques to increase your inbound links.

1. Directory submission: Link directories contain pages of categorized links. One method to obtain back links involves submitting your site to these link directories. Directories can be either paid, free or requiring a reciprocal link. The most well known directories include the Yahoo directory and dmoz.

2. Article Submission: Submission of articles to article directories is another common link building technique. At the bottom of an article you submit to an article directory is an author’s bio where you can include links to your site, as can be seen at the bottom of this article. One of the positive traits of this form of link building is that you can word your author bio as you want and therefore, have choice over the anchor text of the link.

3. Social Bookmark Submission: Social bookmark sites allow you to bookmark web pages online, and when you do a link is created to the page you bookmark. Submitting pages to social bookmark sites is another common method of link building.

4. Blog Posting.: Similar to article submission, you may be able to contact owners of blogs relating to your niche and provide them with quality content for them to post on their blog. In this content you may put a link back to your site. The key here is to provide quality content so that it is worthwhile for the owner of the blog to post your content.

5. Link Exchange: Some sites participate in link exchanges, where you link to a site in exchange for a link from their site. It is important in link exchange to exchange quality links in limited numbers. There is not a lot of value in much of the mass link exchange some sites engage in that have many pages of links devoted to their link exchanges.

6. Link Bait: This involves the writing of content, of posting of pictures or other interesting posts that other webmaster will find interesting and worth linking too. If the content is of high enough quality if may be featured on sites such as digg, potentially attracting a large number of organic links.

So here we have presented a number of the more common link building techniques. There are many others and a good way to keep up with current link building trends is to become active on one of the many popular web master forums. The key is to try different methods and attempt to get a feel for which methods are more effective through monitoring your sites position in the SERPS. You may want to establish several sites and explore different link building techniques with each site, thus allowing you to observe which technique provides better performance.

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Traffic Assistants – Link Building

link building methods
Jockmark asked:


 

What is link building?

Link building is the process of increasing link popularity and search engine exposure through many channels including, Link Exchanges, Directory Submission and many more.There are three types of link building.

1. Link Exchanges

2. One Way Link Building

3. Three Way Link Building

The most popular and cost effective link building technique is exchanging links with different and theme related websites. One way link building is very costly which is usually obtained through paid inclusions. Three ways link building involves lots of work and is time consuming process in which there will be three domain names which will participate to get one way link to each other.Search Engine Rankings usually improves with one way links and it’s more effective than link exchanges as there won’t be links going out from the website and hence the credibility of website does not decrease. Link exchanges are not much effective when compared to one way but plays a vital role and usually they are permanent links, and cost effective because of that it’s more popular than any other link building techniques.

Why link building?

Link building is one of the hardest things to do when creating a successful website, on little or no budget. Link building is one of the most and crucial part of any search engine optimisation campaign. The basic concept of link building is to get as much links of your sites sprinkled all over the Worldwide Web. Link building is an important off-page optimization factor that helps boost natural search engine rankings. Link building is a process wherein there is a creation of inbound links to your own site. Link building is difficult, frustrating and time intensive. Link building is simple emailing sites and asking for links. Link building is a very specific field that comes under the term SEO.

Links to your site are not the most important factor in determining your ranking and you will have to have a well-optimized site to rank well, however, when all else is equal (i. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo. Links are what make the World Wide Web go round. Links are the most objective and unbiased evaluation of a website’s worth…. Links are crucial in almost every SEO strategy to help improve your sites ability to rank high in the search indexes, draw traffic and ultimately generate revenue.

Link building is a tedious process, but one of the best for getting free (sometimes not), targeted hits from other websites. Link building is really “link buying” in whatever format it winds up being. Link building is an indispensable part of any effective search engine optimising strategy and is specially designed to establish and improve your website’s link popularity. The act of executing a link building campaign builds invaluable market knowledge Link building is self-fulfilling. In conclusion, link building is not only for increasing link partners and search engine rankings, its also used to create partnerships and establish profitable relationships with other webmasters.

Link Building Methods:

there are many link building techniques.

the most effective are…..

1)Social book marking

2)Directory Submission

3)Article submission

4)block Commenting

5)forum posting and many more..

Top Reasons To Hire A Link Building Company linke Traffic Assistants:

Link building has never been on the website owner’s list of favorite things to do. It is time-consuming, but then again, a website never gets to the top of search engine results without any links to it.What does a website owner do if he is not fond of doing it himself? Hire a link building company to do the link building. Outsourcing your link building may cost a lot of dollars, but there are reasons that tip the balance in favor of outsourcing.

Link Building Takes Time.

If you don’t have the time for link building, chances are, you’ll never have other websites linking to you, unless if other website owners find you first.

Don’t think that it only takes an email to get other website owners to link to you. The reason why link building takes time is because most website owners or web masters do not respond on the first try, or even on the second.Keep in mind, there are so many other websites trying to get as many links as they can. This floods the webmaster’s inbox. It definitely takes a strategy and a bit of creative thinking to get webmasters to notice you and make it impossible for them to refuse your request for a link.Link-building companies make your life easier because they’ve been at it long enough how to get the intended results right away.



It Can Be Frustrating


When you try link building, you are trying to sell your site to other website owners, which is not an easy thing to do if you are a new website.

Expect website owners to reject your sales pitch on the first attempt (sales is a field of rejection). This makes it very worth it to outsource link building; link building companies are used to the cycle of contacting webmasters or website owners, making a follow-up, and facing rejection.



Important In Search Engines


The triumvirates of Google, Yahoo! and MSN have factored in link popularity and link quality in their search engine algorithms. Thus, your website will not rank if you don’t have any links to your site.Link popularity is measured according to the number of inbound links to your website. Link quality, on the other hand, evaluates the quality of the links. Link building companies can get you those quality links since, in all likelihood, they already have a database of the websites related to your own.In choosing a website, check out their link building strategies, whether they really take the time to find the best sites that are related to your website or just generally harvest and link. There’s a very good reason for this.Google once penalized websites that scooped 200 to 300 sites in one month. Some websites even disappeared from Google’s index altogether due to a dampening filter. The overdone link building efforts were though to be the link-building version of spamming. Other content rich websites take one year to build 100 relevant links.

 



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Various Link Building Method

link building methods
andy tao asked:


Once you have made your website it’s time to get it successful and making money. The only way to make money is to get people visiting it, the more people you can get – the more potential it has. There are many ways that you can boost your search engine ranking increasing your traffic. You have to build as many quality back links as possible which in turn raise your rank in the major search engines.

There are various ways of doing this, each having advantages over the other. One way is to submit your website to directories, this is where you pick a top level category and include your website and description in there. This can be very useful as a popular directory can provide you with targeted traffic. Directories often come in three forms, free non reciprocal (you can submit it for free with out needing to link back to them), free reciprocal (you can submit your link for free but you will have to have a link from your site to the directory in order to get accepted) or paid directory (self explanatory, you have to pay either per month/year/permanent in order to get your site listed).

Another way is to contact similar sites in your niche asking for a link exchange which can also provide you with targeted traffic from time to time. For example if you have a site selling baby cots, contact sites that sell baby clothes, toys etc and ask to trade links as you can also provide them with traffic. Make sure you trade with the right sites that will actually give you a benefit as too many outgoing links can have a negative effect on your site.

You can write articles based on your niche that people will find interesting and submit them to article directories, make sure you embed a link back to your site so that if people use them it will provide a back link unless they go to the trouble of taking it out.

A new method that is becoming popular is to sponsor wordpress themes, once someone has made a theme and got sponsors they will submit it to various theme sites where people can download them for free and use with their blog. If they do that they will have a link pointing to your site. Only pick ones that you think will be downloaded multiple times in order to get the best results.



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Directory Submissions, Web 1.0 Link Building

link building methods
Justin Briggs asked:


In the world of Web 2.0, link building has shifted to social bookmarking and social media sites. People produce high quality content in hopes of baiting social media site users to link to them. Webmasters are also using social bookmarking sites to generate easy one-way back-links. Many people quickly forget the benefits of Web 1.0 link building. Although Web 2.0 spurred the creation of many new forms of sites, Web 1.0 did not die. Website link directories, although not what they once were, are still all over the net.

Link directories organize links to hundreds or thousands of sites. The most popular of these are the DMOZ, Best of the Web, and Yahoo directories. For a long time, webmaster used this as a method of link building. Over time though, webmasters used this site format to spam links. The result is that many directories have been discounted. Many internet marketers now ignore them as a link building method.

Directory submissions should be used as one method in your overall link building plan. These links are low quality, but they are one-way keyword anchored back links. These links do not provide massive authority to dominate competitive niches, but they can provide a significant amount of juice to niche sites focusing on long tail keywords.

An important part of link building is to create a diverse link profile. Directory links allow you to increase the size of your link profile by generating links from a variety of new sites. Do not discount this age old method of promotion, because many skilled internet marketers won’t.

The most important part of directory submissions is to generate good back links. You will not be receiving any quality direct traffic from these directories. Their purpose is to generate links to improve your rankings. With this in mind, you need to evaluate the quality of the directory. Many spam directories link out and promote gambling, porn, and Viagra sites. You want to avoid these directories, since they may create a negative association with your site. Look at a directory’s pagerank, the pagerank of internal pages, the number of pages indexed, and the sites that directory supports.

There are two important tips to remember when doing submissions. First, this is for anchored links. Try your hardest to get an anchor that includes your main keyword. Second, you need to vary your anchor text. Having too many links with the same text does not look natural. You should make effort to mix up your anchor text when submitting to web directories.

Simply put though, directories are a solid option for those building links to long tail niche sites. When combined with other link building methods, they can be very effective.



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Using Link Building to Increase Your Website Popularity

link building methods
Aidan Doran asked:


Do you want to improve your search engine rankings through search engine optimization methods?

Then link building can be used as an effective strategy that can help in providing high quality links from popular websites.

Advantages of link building methods

The success of your website is measured through high quality links that point towards your website. In other words, it is one of the most important factors while judging link popularity for different websites. Many popular search engines use this factor to determine the website ranking and quality of websites. You need to incorporate various link building methods that can help in improving the link popularity of your websites.

The following are the advantages that you can get through link building for your business:

-Link building methods assist in improving the quality of your websites and attract higher number of visitors to your site.

-They can help in establishing new business contacts, getting acquaintances and acquiring new customers by directing traffic to your website through inbound links.

-In using link building strategies, you can create a brand name and identity for your products.

-It is one of the effective ways for website promotion for achieving high search engine rankings.

Using link building strategies for your business

Link building plays a vital role in offering your websites a higher search engine ranking for which you need to have relevant and quality links directed towards your website.

These are the following factors that you can consider as part of your website link building efforts:

-Writing articles and submitting to directories

You can create good links pointing towards your website by using articles on specific subjects that is relevant to your website and submit them to top article directories.

This is one way of generating good links to your website which can get you a lot of good quality traffic from visitors searching for different topics.

- Provide relevant and quality information

You are likely to attract more visitors if your website is well designed and has high quality content that provides useful information to the visitors. Besides, it gives a chance for many popular websites to get associated with your website if they find it to be useful and interesting.

-Submitting for Press release

One of the best ways of link building is to submit press release about your website or product. This gives more exposure for your site or for your products or services among the media sites and your website gains more popularity. With the publicity that it created, press releases help in creating goodwill and bring good quality links to your site.

-Blogging and online forums

Blogging is the most popular form of social communication these days which can assist you in providing more relevant information to the visitors. You can even start your own blog or an online forum where you can advertise your product by posting information about your products and services.

You can get into conversations and discussions with different people and use your links for giving your site reference. Thus, link building can be a very profitable to your business if used in a productive manner.



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Keywords: Increase Link Popularity, Get Traffic, Link Building

link building methods
Cliff Posey Jr asked:


To increase link popularity, you need solid link building techniques. Link building allows you to establish relevant inbound links to your website, which in turn increases search engine rankings and helps you get traffic.

If you aren’t familiar with the different methods people use to increase link popularity and get traffic, the first thing you need to know is that not every link building method is considered acceptable. In fact, some of the methods used to increase link popularity are considered so unethical that they can actually get you in trouble with the various search engines.

To help you differentiate between what is ethical and what is not, here is a list of the most common link building methods used to get traffic:

Social Bookmarking

There has been a lot of discussion lately in regards to using social bookmarking as a way to get traffic and increase link popularity. Some people think that this link building technique borders on unethical.

The truth is that it depends on how you utilize social bookmarking sites. If you are an active member of a social bookmarking community who posts links to a personal website and other relevant sites to increase link popularity for everyone, you are doing nothing wrong. If, on the other hand, you create an account and repeatedly submit your own links and nothing else to get traffic, you are participating in spam-like behavior.

Spamming

Spamming can sometimes get traffic to your website, but it is not the best way to increase link popularity. Most of the search engines frown upon spamming and have the ability to catch inexperienced spammers within a month or two.

The following link building techniques are considered unethical spamming by the major search engines: participation in unrelated and centralized link farms, automatically generated doorway pages, and false redirects.

Article Submission

Manual and automated article submission is another link building technique that has garnered proven results over the years. Article submission is widely thought to be an ethical way to increase link popularity and get traffic. Nevertheless, there are exceptions to the rule.

For example, article submission that is fully automated but not targeted is usually considered spam. It is also a huge waste of time when compared to other link building strategies. If you want to get traffic and increase link popularity, you must submit articles to the right directories.

CBuying Links

Search engines often advise against buying backlinks as a way to increase link popularity and get traffic. The reason is because it cheats their ranking system and is therefore considered unethical. Even so, there are plenty of website owners who employ this link building technique and reap great rewards.

If you want to give this link building strategy a try, the key is to start slowly by buying only a few backlinks. Buying 1,000 links in one day looks suspicious. You will also want to be careful as to where you buy your links from. Ten quality backlinks will help you increase link popularity and get traffic; 100 poorly regarded backlinks will not. Keep in mind you backlinks need to come from what search engines will consider good neighborhoods.



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