Solo entrepreneur with big dreams. Richmond Blogs http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/RichmondBlogs Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:24:27 -0600 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.squidoo.com/backlinks-explained It sounds like some place you go after dark that you shouldn’t go. But, backlinks are actually a good thing as far as getting noticed on the Internet goes. Keep reading and you’ll find out all about them and how they can be useful to you. To put it in the simplest terms, backlinks are links from other websites and blogs back to your website. They increase your visibility on the web and also make the search engines really happy with you. It sounds easy, but getting links can take some time and effort. Also, did we mention the spiders and bots? They work on behalf of the search engines. These technological marvels crawl not just content but also inbound links (backlinks) to your website. So, you'd probably figure that you can go to every website you can and post a link back to your site, wouldn't you? In the grand scheme of things, this is not always a good idea. Here's why. Those bots are smarter than you think. They even evaluate the types of backlinks you get. For instance, let's say that you are just beginning and are trying to establish yourself. You go to other sites and ask to exchange links with them for free. Some are readily eager so you do it. As it turns out, these sites are offensive, plagiarize content and don't know the first thing about keyword optimization. Now, all of these things won't be true at the same time but it goes to prove a point. A poorly kept website or even a troublemaking one can lower the quality of your backlinks and thus your favor with the search engines. What you want is backlinks that are of the same or preferably better quality as your site. internet Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:50:04 -0600 http://www.squidoo.com/outsourcing-outsource You've probably had some experience with outsourcing even if you're not an Internet marketer. Most of us have spent time in customer service hell at some point. Maybe you wanted to clarify a charge on your account or change your level of service and suddenly you were having a conversation with someone speaking broken English who refused to put the script down and help you with your problem. This type of experience has become so common that it has made people roll their eyes toward heaven at the mere mention of the term outsourcing. But what if what you experienced as outsourcing was just bad customer service and true outsourcing was available that could energize the vision you originally had for your Internet business? business-and-work Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:29:42 -0600