Lonnie B. Hodge :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

I know about backlinks – also known as incoming links, inlinks and inbound links or inward links – and why they are important in terms of your blog’s ranking. Positively and negatively.

I understand that knowing more about my backlinks and their quality is an important part of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

But I know also that I don’t know nearly as much as I should. And what is more problematic is that I don’t know what I don’t know.

Which says to me that my sites might be missing out on an improved ranking, just because I’m not paying attention and taking appropriate action.

One reason I know that understanding the whole backlink thing is that my China-based friend and colleague, Lonnie B. Hodge, who is a search specialist, refers often to backlinks and their importance.

And as I’m scheduled to record a conversation with Lonnie this afternoon, I thought it would be timely to do some checking in my own backyard, starting with my Des Walsh dot Com site on WordPress.

I discovered some interesting information and had a couple of surprises.

My checking used three types of tools:

the list of backlinks you see when you log in to the admin section of your WordPress site
the list provided by Technorati on your page there
various automatic backlink checkers you can find with a Google search.

In this post I’m focusing on what I learned from the WordPress site.

When you go log in to the admin section of your WordPress site, it should open at the Dashboard. You see a column of recent comments on the left and a column of Incoming Links on the right as in the screenshot below.

What I found today, as the screenshot shows, were:

a link from the Disaboom site where my friend Glenda Watson Hyatt, a.k.a. The Left Thumb Blogger mentions me – and links to Des Walsh dot Com – in the context of talking about going to Las Vegas for BlogWorld & New Media Expo
a link from my partner Suzie’s Abundance Highway site, where she is recounting a conversation she and I had and linking to the Des Walsh dot Com site
a link from a site which has evidently copied, without attribution, a post which Suzie had sent to our colleague Liz Strauss for her Successful Blog site and which had a link in it to Des Walsh dot Com
a link from the typepad Hacks site of John T. Unger who posted about speaking at BlogWorld & New Media Expo and specifically about the panel he and I are on
a link from the mybloglog page of “Tangos”, who had left a comment on Des Walsh dot Com

How have I used this information today?

I left a comment on Glenda’s post: this was a good thing to do, first because I wanted to publicly acknowledge my friend’s mention of me and secondly because it is about conversation and I coach people to spend time commenting on other’s posts so as to be part of the conversation
I mentioned the apparently unauthorized copying discovery to Suzie, who sent a message to Liz Strauss: interestingly, the person who owned the site had left an easy trail back to his Facebook page!
I decided to check out my backlinks on Technorati - with somewhat more startling and disturbing links. To be revealed in the next post in this series!
also I used a few of the freely available online backlink checkers – that will be a third post.

What’s your strategy or practice with managing your backlinks?

What am I missing that would make me more effective in this department, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?

Just under two weeks ago I posted on my Social Media Show podcast site a 30 minute conversation I recorded with Professor Lonnie B. Hodge, about the workshops on the digital media release, which we are scheduled to deliver in China from July 18 to July 25.

I had intended to publicize the podcast but have not done a lot in that regard. Nevertheless, some people have either listened to it online or downloaded it, presumably to listen to it at a convenient time, on their iPod or other audio player.

What I find interesting from the statistics is that the number of downloads – 99 – far exceeds the number of events where people listened online – 17. Perhaps some people would listen online if the podcast were briefer. Or is that sort of breakdown fairly typical?

Looking at the stats for some other podcasts, another at 32 minutes has so far scored 18 for downloads and 7 for listening online. For a shorter podcast, at just over 15 minutes, the figures are 32 for downloads and 10 for listening online.

Obviously one can’t draw too much from these few examples. It does look as if downloads might trump listening online generally, but the ratio of difference is considerably higher in the case of the podcast on the China workshops than for the other examples.

One of the considerations that emerges for me is that if you are relying on a podcast to get someone to take action – say to book online for a workshop – and you structure your podcast with a call to such action, that call might be delivered while someone is walking on the beach, or working out at the gym, or in a car or bus on the way to or from work. And that surely means that, more often than not, and for more of your target audience, the action will not be taken on the basis just of that call to action in the podcast.

I imagine others have looked at this issue and come up with strategies. I’d love to know what such strategies could be, or the elements of a strategy, if you would care to leave a comment.

Now that I come to think of it, I’m pretty sure we did not actually include a call to action in the podcast. But we did include the details of the workshops in the accompanying blog post.

Here they are. Please forward the link to this post to anyone you know in China who could be interested in attending.

Hong Kong (18 July): http://pr-20-hongkong.eventbrite.com

Shanghai (21 July): http://pr-20.eventbrite.com

Beijing (23 July): http://pr-20-BJ.eventbrite.com

Guangzhou (25 July): http://pr-20.gz.eventbrite.com

For more information, please contact us.