Now that the search engines know you exist, you have to
work at getting more noticed. A good guide to how well you are noticed is
your Page Rank. This is a scale from 0 to 10. If you have a Google toolbar
installed on your computer, the Page Rank indicator is the little green
horizontal line in the white bar. Page Rank is a complex mathematical
construct, named after someone called Page who did a PhD on how to calculate
linking popularity and then went on to found a company based on the
research. He called the company Google.
When the spider programs visit internet sites, they
crawl through the links following them out of and hopefully back to the
original site. Page Rank is really a measure of how frequently the spiders
crawl back to the same sites. In other words it’s like a measure of how
popular sites are. More popular sites get higher Page Ranks and these sites
tend to appear more frequently towards the top of search results. So what
your site needs is links to other sites and links back from them. This is
called a linking strategy and the process of establishing and maintaining
links is endless, time consuming, very boring and utterly essential.
A links page
The first thing you need is a links page on your
website, if you don’t already have one. It’s just a page devoted to a list
of links to other websites. Internet etiquette requires you to offer a link
from your own site to any other site that offers to list your own .
Sometimes you will be asked to provide a link to your own site. Below is an
example of a link back to my own site.
<p><a
href="http://www.philipspires.co.uk"><u>Mission - an African novel set in
Kenya
by Philip Spires</u></a></p>
It looks a bit strange but
it’s really quite simple. The p and /p tags just open and close a paragraph.
The u and /u tags open and close underlining. The a href links to a url and
the text Mission - an African novel set in Kenya by Philip
Spires is where the hyperlink is inserted. You can copy the link
above, replace the url with your own site and the text with whatever you
want. Save the text in a file and then you can copy it whenever you are
asked to supply a link to your site. So where do you link?
Free directories
These are the easiest place to start. Type “Free
directory” or “internet directory” or “book directory” or anything else
involving “directory” and you will find thousands of them. They are
organised in categories like search engines used to be. Find categories
relevant to your book. Literature and books are obvious, but also check out
art, arts, artists, writing, writers, specific genres and relevant place
names. When you get to the right place, look for the “Submit a link” or
similar text and follow the instructions. Never pay for a link! Always take
the free option, which always means that you have to link back from your own
site. Here’s my advice on how to go about this.
a)Have your own website open in your web publishing software. Have the
links page open.
b)Have the word processor file “Mysitemetatags” open as well.
c)Open your internet browser in another window and navigate to the
directory sites.
d)Find the relevant category.
e)Click the Submit a site button and select the free option.
f)Copy the directory’s suggested linking code and immediately paste
into the html view of your links page. (Note: if some of the characters
don’t paste correctly, paste them into Wordpad or Notepad first and then
copy them again. I don’t know why these errors sometimes happen!)
g)Go back to the page view of the links page to check that the link
appears correctly.
h)Publish the web site.
i)Return to the directory page and enter the details for your own
website from the standard text in your “Mysitemetatags” file and submit the
link. (Sometimes you might be asked for a ready-made link. In that case use
the href tag above.
j)Repeat steps c to i as many times as you wish.
The process is literally endless. Once you have a
hundred or so links on the links page, create another!
Classified ads
Type “free classified” or “free ad” or something
similar into a search engine. Listed will be thousands of sites categorised
by type of advertisement offered. Create a standard short advertisement for
yourself and your book. Make two copies of this text, one containing the url
of your website and one without it. Some of the sites will not allow a url
in the text of an advert. In the second copy of your test, therefore,
include the site name, but without the
http://www at the beginning. In my case, I include philipspires.co.uk
and generally I get away with it. At least you now that anyone finding the
ad can enter your own special keyword to a search and find your site.
Classified ad sites often get indexed, so they enhance your internet
linking. Some of them will demand a link back to them. Never refuse.
Free site, submit and link back
Some sites are dedicated to linking. Type “Linking
site” or “Free link” or something similar into an engine. There are
thousands. Use as many of them as you wish.
It’s also a good idea to register your site for a free
banner exchange. The provider will give you some code to place on your site
and in return your details will occasionally be displayed on other people’s
sites. The banners can be a bit dominating, but if included low down on your
home page they will do the job you want without distracting visitors to the
site.
Blogs – create and link back
Create blogs which link back to your site. Type “Free
blog” or something similar into a search engine. Create the blog and link to
your own site. Link back from your site to the blog. See below under Press
releases for a tip on standard text.
Register with favourites sites
Blogs have their own rules, their own search engines
and their own favourites sites. Technorati and del.icio.us are the best
known. Personally, I have only just started using these as a linking method
and would be grateful if someone could tell me how to use them more
effectively for linking.
