e 3 a s h i g R E F L E C T I O N S

I Am Linked Therefore I Am

Linking has become such a big deal on the internet. Since Google was born, it has become the norm that the more links a website generates, the more powerful, credible and authenticated its contents is. While this may not be entirely accurate; it is the best model to mass process the gazillions of pages currently online.

Obviously, the best way to get other people to link you is to produce authoritive quality content. Once you’ve done that, there is no harm getting a boost by helping people link to you. So how do you go about doing that?

• Provide an RSS feed to your site. Your website is invisible to many new blog search engines without RSS. Also, once your provide RSS, people have an easy way to include your content with your links into their websites – generating not only a large number of fresh links every day, but also an influx of new visitors you would not have otherwise got. Here is my RSS feed.
• Sign up and encourage your site visitors to sign up for del.icio.us accounts. It is an online bookmark that you can access from home, work or anywhere. Many news and update sites use del.icio.us as the source for their links. It has a built in feature of counting how many people linked to you, the more your site URL appears on del.icio.us, the more likely it will be picked by news aggregators. Once people sign up for del.icio.us , make it easier for them to link to you. I decided to use this guy’s method and provide a “del.icio.us this” link after every post. Will see how this goes and will let you know if it works out.
• Sign up for an account with Technorati, Feedburner and other blog monitoring services. They will make sure that the world knows about your new entries as soon as you publish them. Not few days after. Here is an example that will illustrate the difference if you are checking this post within few days of typing it. I searched google for the title of this entry: “I am linked therefore I am” and there is no mention of my website. However, when I did exactly the same search on technorati, my website is listed at the top of the search results.

Having said that last point, Philipp thinks mighty google is catching up:“In the meantime, I found that Google – the normal web search – is catching up when it comes to fast indexing of content. It sometimes needs only a day or two until Google gives you a good overview of people discussing specific new items.”