One of the new buzzwords in SEO and Internet Marketing these days is the term “Link Wheels”.  Link Wheels are pages that loosely speaking claim to have at least two important kinds of links.  Looking at the first picture (which I grabbed from a random Google image search) you can see that it shows “wheel links” in red, and “money links” in green.  You can see similar things in the other two link wheels examples.

The question that needs to be asked is this: Does this topology of linkages really do anything to boost traffic, or is it wishful thinking based on flawed understanding of how Google and other search engine spiders actually prowl the net and create that “elixir of traffic” known as Page Rank.

One of the explanations of why the wheel works is that the idea is that the spiders rotate around the wheels causing ranking to “flow” from site to site and ultimately to the central site.

Standard Link Wheel

Another Link Wheel

Big Link Wheel

That idea, however is not true.  Spiders are programs that go to a site, evaluate the content, gather all the links, compare those links to a database of links it already knows about, and then makes decisions about which links to traverse next, and what final evaluation to gie the sites and the links between them.

So, what we have here is an idea that in fact is quite meaningless. I’ll tell you why, but it requires a rudimentary understanding of directed graphs, which is what the internet is.

A directed graph is any set of nodes (web pages) and “edges” (links) where the edge has a directionality, which internet links have. There is a rather complex and in-depth mathematical discussion about the internet directed graph and how page rank is computed on it at Wikipedia (here).  In the final analysis there are some important things to understand about which links actually contribute traffic, SEO ranking, and finally page-rank to a site.

The bottom line is that link wheels are really no different than a host of other link topologies and any meaningful ranking you get from any topology is from the direct links to your main site.  Page rank is computed in more simplistic terms in a manner shown int the diagram labeled “link juice”.

Link Juice

Secondary links do not contribute directly to your page-rank, but do so only in a round-about way as they affect that site to which you are linked, and as a pathway for both the spider and the live-human visitor.  The problem with this logic is that the “spokes” are already heavily linked by tens of thousands of other pages, so you little extra link here really adds nothing in the way of getting a spider to rank you higher, and is also meaningless for the human – as they have presumable already read your article so a link to the same article on another site is not really going to be useful to them.

Add to that the sophistication of today’s spiders and their content comparisons, even those show “spin” their articles are going to have very little gain from these “spoke to spoke”linkages.

This spoke-to-spoke linkages in a link-wheel is supposed to be the “discovery” that makes the wheel so powerful.  It is not really is not that useful at all, and is a waste of your time if you are setting them up by hand.

Rank Sources

What really matters are the direct links and some other aspects that rank your site as illustrated with this picture labeled “Rank Sources”.

You might still make the argument that the spoke to spoke links help by distributing the content around and thereby cause the search spider to take that route and see the content – however the spider rates the link importance more due to the importance of the site it comes from.  What that means is that your juice comes from the spokes themselves, not the interconnectedness between those spokes.

The real juice comes from the importance of the site, the freshness and relevance of the content, the keywords in the content and the how often these keywords are searched for, and the number of times the web-site is visited and then clicked on directly from Google search page url.

The algorithm for page rank that is currently published over at Wikipedia has been highly modified in actual practice by Google with many proprietary filters and other formulas and has a host of additional controls that allows Google to penalize or ban certain practices from contributing to page rank – we can also assume therefore that there are formulas that contribute more than “normal” for practices they want to encourage.

With this in mind, I submit that Google is well aware of those who try to game the system by creating these wheels – but even if they are not, if last time their spider crawled the, and  your site was not there, and the next time it crawls the net and your new site is there with thousands of links to it, that is going to be a tip-off on what you are doing.

So a better solution to setting up you marketing pages is to concentrate on the spokes themselves – get linkages from powerful sites to you money site using great content, lots of comments on great blogs and forums, lots of feed aggregators, and add these over time.

That last point is important as to increase of page-rank and and avoidance of Google bans – build the links over time.  This way you do not suddenly appear full-fledged with thousands of links because that is a dead giveaway to Google and others that you are a marketer pushing a product.  This is a perception problem, it does not matter how good your product is, Google is notorious for penalizing this.  So build over time, and build multiple sites for multiple products – or different versions and bonus packages of the same product and eventually cross link them.  This looks more organic and will raise your SEO rankings in a more solid and long lasting manner.

David T. McKee

Have you ever wished that there was a way you could just plant a little seed about your product or service into the minds of targeted customers or people that you meet every day that you just know would benefit from your product or service?

If so, there are ways using a traditional business method that is off of the Internet, but that will help explode your growth on the internet…

Business Cards.

People accept business cards from other people because of the tradition behind them, the tradition of exchanging them and because they are so portable.  While you may be hard pressed to give away a promotional letter or other sales copy, a business card is innocuous and most people have to trouble taking one from you.

What if you could make that business card act as a sales seed – planting the idea in your targeted customers head that they need to go to your website where the real sales copy is?  What would that be worth to you?

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David T.  McKee

How, in this highly competitive Internet Market, with billions of web pages and millions more being added each and every day (it is estimated that 150,000 blogs alone are added each day), with economies around the world reeling from the global credit crisis, how do people like you and me make any money?

Now more than ever, with banks and governments stealing through taxes and inflation the dreams of millions – some who thought that they had achieved the dream seeing it dribble away, we must discover how to make money, and then how to grow it and protect it.

With so many challenges in front of us, when we try to start our Internet business we face one especially monumental one: how do we get our first customers?

I call this particular issue “The Bootstrap Problem“.  Like a computer that must “Boot Up” from the initial switch of the power supply and the initial spin of the primary disk, our online businesses must start up and grab initial customers – customers that, through word of mouth, through testimonials, through blog comments, etc. get our business snowball rolling down the hill.

I believe (from experience) that this initial problem may be one of the main reasons that so many beginning online business starts end up in failure.  You are told that to sell products you need to have a site with testimonials and “a buzz” but if you have not even sold your first unit, how do you do that?  It’s a catch-22! you can’t put up testimonials if you have never sold anything, and buzz requires several people who have a presence of their own talking about you and your product.

So how do you get to that place?

There are some practical steps to do this, here is three of them:

1. Give your product away for free.
2. Do something radical.
3. Use every channel to broadcast yourself.

Give your product away for free: Obviously you want to make money on your product, so what this step is really addressing is giving your product away to a small group of “beta testers” – people who agree to give you a real, honest appraisal of your product.  This helps you do two things:

• - find bugs in your product and fix them.
• - get testimonials from actual users which you can put on your sales pages.

Do something radical: People like to read about new, weird, radical, strange, controversial things, that is why when things are sane, good, comfortable, nice – you never see that in the news!  You want to be searched for you got to be different, and hopefully just a bit over the edge.  There is an Internet marketer out there I just hate, and that is the way he likes it!  You may have heard of the so-called “rich jerk” or seen his sites. The thing is, the debauched person who talks on the site, and the garbage he spouts about being so incredibly wealthy, having several girls in his hot-tub, etc…is mostly just crap.  The actual owner does not show his face on the site, those are actors, playing a part to create a sense of Vegas style playboy-isms.  This has been a brilliant marketing strategy because it is so radical compared to “normal” strategies.  There are many other ways, however, that you can create a sense of “this is different” – just as long as you are attracting the kinds of people who will also want what you have to sell.

Use every channel to broadcast yourself: You need to look into all the possibilities, even those you may not have yet considered.  Today, with Web 2.0 we have tons of social networks (if you look in the upper right hand of this blog you will see “LinkedIn” and various feeds and below each post a “ShareThis” link to social networks).  There are a variety of auction and promotion sites (most people never even consider advertising their business on craigslist for example). There is Twitter, and other phone based applications, the list is almost endless and growing daily.

I have a report on using social networking to establish yourself in the Internet business world, and you can get it free with your purchase of my super sized Business E-Book collection “Marketing Magic Collection 1” which has over 250 ebooks, reports, and articles from some of the most influential writers and Internet marketers, copywriters, etc. such as Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Dan Lok, Brian Keith Voiles, etc.  For only $7.00!

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Use these ideas to bootstrap your success!

David T. McKee

Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee

(This is a reprint of an original article I wrote back in early 2007)

Mmmmm Capitalism!

I love cheesecake.

My wife makes the fluffiest, creamiest, most delectable cheesecake I have ever tasted, slightly browned at the edges, delicious light yellow, dripping with cherries or blueberries.  There is no store-bought cheesecake that can hold a candle to it.

Yet companies like “The Cheesecake Factory” or “Junior’s Cheesecakes” make literal fortunes selling cheesecakes at $50.00 apiece not including the shipping!  Those store-bought or Internet bought cheesecakes are good, but my wife can makes them so much better.

And this got me to thinking: Cheesecakes mass produced under the most ideal conditions are still inferior to those made with love by wives and grandmothers everywhere.  What does this mean for the Internet marketer?  It means a lot, because it points to new niche markets.  Can you get several grandmothers to produce a few cheesecakes each?  You pay them 15 dollars for every one they produce.  They win because they produce as much as they want, and in some cases that may be something that gives them a new purpose!  There are so many widows and others who, having retired and having families that have moved away, have time.  Some may need a few extra dollars too.

You have your own product resource here, a freelance cheesecake factory if you will.  And don’t stop there, what else can be produced in this way?  Knitting? Gifts? Crafts? Cookies? Fried Chicken?

You can sell these obviously superior products online and ship them anywhere in the country, and if you use Ebay as an example, you can do it without even having to set up your own web-presence, just create an Ebay store!

You see older retired people may not want to bother with running their own business, but they may want to feel useful and to get a few dollars for it as well makes it even sweeter.  Why not?  Everyone wins: The customer gets a superior product, the retired person gets worth and dollars, and you make money with your on-line business.

By the way, Colonel Sanders started KFC when he was over 60!  He “invented” something called “home meal replacement” selling complete meals to busy, time-strapped families and called it “Sunday Dinner, Seven Days a Week.”  Could you have some grandparents or others create complete meals, store them with dry-ice and ship them using the Internet?

And no matter what the Mass producers say, properly positioned and skillful marketing will pit them against “Grandma”!  Not an enviable position for them, but a great place for the savvy marketer.

Niches are funny things… They typically exist right in front of you unrecognized by almost everyone, but one thing I have noticed, they always seem to exist close to un-used resources.  This is a case where there is unused wisdom and experience, in our elderly population and amongst those who have skills and abilities but perhaps not the time or energy for full-time employment.  If you can use Internet technology to leverage these resources, you can create wealth where nobody ever thought to look for it.

David T. McKee

Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee

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David T. McKee