Links in signatures

[Chris L.]

Recently there has been talk about links to members web pages in their signatures. I have always allowed this and I will continue to allow members to do so as I feel it is a great way to get traffic to your site.

One thing I have noticed, some of these links in members signatures are not reciprocated. Meaning, NAFEX is not on that persons links page. This means that every time a search engine finds your link on your post ( in NAFEX) and goes and looks at your site you are getting higher ranked and I am notfrus..

Therefore, if you are going to put a link in your signature I am going to ask that you put a link to NAFEX on your site. I think this is only fair as we should be helping each other out.

If you do not wish to link back to NAFEX I understand but please be sure to take down your link in your signature.

For those of you who have already put NAFEX on your links page I really appreciate it, thank you

if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask

[areal]

Chris Sorry for not replying to your PM before, I'm afraid with the builders here since last week I've been proper snowed under.
Your thread above pretty much says the same thing I would have said in any reply, if anything I'm surprised you've let people get away with non-reciprocal links in their signatures for so long.

For those who dont understand how search engines and link popularity work, lets just say if you run a website of your own, I would advise you to put a reciprocal link back to Nafex and then make responsible use of that piece of advertising real estate that is your signature field.
It may not generate as much traffic as a pay per click campaign, but $or£ spent, you'll get better long term returns from the signature field.

Moving forward, it might be worth starting to get smart about how people link to Nafex (or for that matter to their own websites)
For those who are not familliar with linking websites, the point of doing so is so that the search engines see our sites as effectively "endorsing" the content on the other site. The search engines are machines (or rather machine programs) which can read lots of information, but cant really make a whole lot of sense our of what they see. To make sense or rather give context to the content they read, they rely on the number of times words are repeated, (keywords) and among other things, the number of links pointed from other sites to that website.

You could sit down and write the be-all and end-all falconry manual, put it on the net and it will rank pretty much zero until you start asking the search engines to index your site. There are lots of ways to get them to index your site but the two main ones are by submitting the site manually to a search engine or by allowing the search engine to "find" your site itself through links from other websites.
In practice submitting your site to the search engines does work, but if you built two identical sites, submitted one directly to the search engines and let the other be "found" through links from an already indexed site, the "found" site will list sooner and rank better than the one you told the search engine about. (identical pages!!!)
So links is the way you want to go, but now again take two identical sites (both selling unicorn shoes, we'll call them unicornshoes.com and smartunicornshoes.com)
Now unicornshoes.com gets everyone to put a link with the text www.unicornshoes.com on their links pages.
Smartunicornshoes.com does the same thing, but the ask the linking sites to use the text "Unicorn shoes" or Unicorn Shoe specialist" or "Unicorn Shoes for sale" in their link test.
Now when people search, Unicornshoes.com will come up if someone put www.unicornshoes.com into the search engine, but very few other keywords would return their page. This is not a problem if everyone on the web already knows what your website is called, they wouldnt even need to use the search engines, but if we go back to smartunicornshoes.com, their page gets return by the search engines when someone is searching for "unicorns", "shoes" or "unicorn specialists".
No-one needs me to tell them which site will attract more traffic from the search engines.

So what we come down to is good links and not so useful links (you can also do bad links but I'm not going to teach how to do those, use your imagination if you have ill purposes in mind!!)
The majority of links will almost certainly be www.nafex.net links, which are good, but the same link could be made better by using keywords that Chris would like to target the search engines with.
e.g http://www.nafex.net is an okay link, but
North American Falconers Exchange or Falconry Discussion Forum point to the same place, but give better keyword exposure.

Chris, for the benefit of those who have added links to the forum, it might be useful if you could publish the list of keywords youre hoping to target search engines with.
For my part I'll gladly do a full affiliate page from my website, but I'm not going to be presumtious enough to assume I know which keywords youre targetting.

[Chris L.]

Chris Sorry for not replying to your PM before, I'm afraid with the builders here since last week I've been proper snowed under.
Your thread above pretty much says the same thing I would have said in any reply, if anything I'm surprised you've let people get away with non-reciprocal links in their signatures for so long.

Evan,
No problem man.. Thank you very much for the great post. I was trying to say what you did , but you did a way better job of explaining it to the others thank you.

I never really thought about the reciprocation until i started checking on others' sites on here and they did not have NAFEX listed but they had other falconry sites listed.. not sure why????

Chris, for the benefit of those who have added links to the forum, it might be useful if you could publish the list of keywords youre hoping to target search engines with.
For my part I'll gladly do a full affiliate page from my website, but I'm not going to be presumtious enough to assume I know which keywords youre targetting.

Great idea,
I think it would be great to post a code that they can just cut and paste in their site.

thank you for making a affiliate page, i really appreciate it.

Some key words: ( the top 4 being my most important)
falconry forum, forums
raptor breeding
falconry classifieds
red-tail,
harris hawk
peregrine
falcon
gloves,
jesses
(hell man anything falconry to get a search here)

thank you again for the great post

[areal]

thank you for making a affiliate page, i really appreciate it.

Tell you what I'll do, when I have a few minutes I'll knock the page together and then post the links in a code tag on here so people can copy them for their own use.

[areal]

I think its important to give Chris credit for the valuable real estate he's making available to users who maintain their own website/s here.
When I put my profit head on I'd be inclined to advise him to only let paying members use links in their signatures, but at the same time that creates a nightmare for his mod team to police. (no more than policing reciprocal links but at least his team gets to look at other sites with this system)

If you have a website of your own, particularly another falconry site, I would advise you to take Chris up on the offer to use your signature to promote your site because it WILL improve your site's rankings more than you can possibly imagine.
At the same time you have a number of ways of being creative with how you do the links back to Nafex.
The following examples create keyword optimized links back to various parts of Nafex (relevant to the section youre pointing at)

<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=16">Longwing Falconry Discussion Forum</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=18">Shortwing Falconry Discussion Forum</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=17">Broadwing Falconry Discussion Forum</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=44">Eagle Falconry Discussion Forum</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=38">Imprint Falconry Discussion Forum</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=22">Food Management Falconry Discussion</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=24">Raptop Breeding Forum</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=23">Raptor Health Issues and Treatment</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=40">Falconry Federal/State regulation links, information and forms</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net"<img src="http://www.nafex.net//pics/nafex-header.gif" border="0" alt="North American Falconers Exchange-Falconry Forums" /></a>

The last example will display the Nafex logo on your site with optimized keywords in the alt tag. (If people would like the banner in different sizes I'm sure Chris would be happy to help you by publishing the banner in a few standard sizes.

The main thing is have fun while youre linking back to your favourite forum. If there's a thread you've really enjoyed following on here, then link directly to it from your site/blog. Dont just stick to the same olf nafex.net links, get creative and our bloggers for instance could with the help of just a few well chosen keywords improve the search engine ranking for this site, while giving themselves something to twitter, chatter, bebo or facebook about.

[wesleyc6]

For some reason the banner that was originally put up is very hard to see on my site.

[Chris L.]

Evan,

thanks man. I appreciate you taking the time to do that.

[Chris L.]

Bump for those who have links in your sigs. Please read page one of this thread and link back to NAFEX.

For those of you who already linked back to NAFEX, thank you. If you link disappears you will know why. Burying the link back to NAFEX on your site is not acceptable either. If I can't find it quickly neither can the search engines.

[Lowachi]

Bump for those who have links in your sigs. Please read page one of this thread and link back to NAFEX.

For those of you who already linked back to NAFEX, thank you. If you link disappears you will know why. Burying the link back to NAFEX on your site is not acceptable either. If I can't find it quickly neither can the search engines.

If I ever get mine up... you know it.

[Bryant Tarr]

Thanks for the reminder! It is back on hawkhillhoods.com and I'm proud to have it there. I couldn't get the banner to show up, but I'll keep trying (I'm using primitive drag and drop type editing tools). But at least it is there.

[Chris_Proctor]

Mine is under my the About Me section on my site. Easy to find and the link works.

[poleyc]

I put your Banner and link on my front page hope it works like its supposed to.

[Chris L.]

Bryant, Chris, and Chad,

Thank you for the links back. I really appreciate it.

Kindest regards

Chris

[Chris_Proctor]

Bryant, Chris, and Chad,

Thank you for the links back. I really appreciate it.

Kindest regards

Chris

Thanks for all you do for us too in allowing links in signatures.