A Free Link Exchange Listing and Site Optimization of African-American & related Websites

Blacks Sites Online: A Free Link Exchange Listing of African-American Websites

Search Engine Optimization 101

Before you begin to optimize your site, you first need to determine your site popularity by clicking on Link Popularity Tool and submitexpress and typing your url. Write down the date and the link popularity total from each of the above sites. Save it for future reference. After following the below suggestions, I gurantee you that your link popularity will significant increase after about a month.

1. I have used the following link exchange programs and have found them to be very helpful in increasing link popularity. No setup is needed for b and c. Option a, allows you to check for broken links etc.

a. www.Linkmachine.net
b. www.Linkmarket.com
c. www.Link2me.com

2. You need the ability to update your website or at least your link exchange page

3. Make sure that your website does have the necessary Meta tags. Although it is not require by all search engines, I strongly recommend it. Please see #6 below. Google search on "meta tag analyzer" and enter your site URL for an analysis of your site. Make the necessary change or recommendation.

4. Add your site to to our reciprocal link program. We require a link back to our page prior to doing the link exchange. For more exposure, you might also want to add your reciprocal link to our sister site: http://www.chocolatecity.com. I have been asked, "what if I do not have access to my website to create a link exchange?" Don't worry, we will creat a one way link for only $2.99.

5. Your site needs to have a sitemap. One for Google (sitemap.xml), another for Yahoo (urllist.txt), and (ror.xml) for all other search engines. A sitemap contains links to every page of your site. Within your sitemap, you tell Google how often to visit your site and its priority. For an example of what a Google sitemap looks like please click the URL of our Google Sitemap: http://www.chocolatecity.cc/sitemap.xml. For an example of what a Yahoo sitemap looks like, please click the URL of our urllist.txt Sitemap: http://www.chocolatecity.cc/urllist.txt. Next click the URL of our ROR Sitemap: http://www.chocolatecity.cc/ror.xml for an example of what all other search engines sitemap look like.

5. To generate the above sitemaps, a free and easy to used sitemap generator is located at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. After generating your sitemap, go to google webmaster tool ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html sign in and enter your sitemap.xml. Go to Yahoo’s webmaster tool: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ register and enter your “urllist.txt”

5. A whos-whos among the black sites is www.blackrefer.com. Add a link to www.blackrefer.com and send them an email requested to be listed in your applicable category. An example for African American t-shirt shop, the category will be : black apparel and African-American clothing. Email them at (admin@blackrefer.com) with the following information:
a. Your URL and title of your website.
b. Description of your site (15 – 30 words max)
c. Tell them your prefer category
d. You want to add their link to your site prior to emailing them. Email them the link reciprocal link address.

6. Your website title must be adequate. Words in the title should be relevant to the page content. You need the necessary description tag. The description should be relevant to the page content (utilize the appropiate keywords t-shirt, t-shirts, tshirt, African-American, Afrocentric etc). Once #2 above is complete, it should also overlap with #6. Both #2 and #6 are very closely related. The title section uses at most 80 characters, the description requires at most 200 characters and the keyword requires at least 230 words. Take a look at the following example:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Recripocal Links For Black Sites Online</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" content="Creating a recripocal link with African-American and Black websites."/>
<META NAME="keyword" content="African-American, Black, recripocal link, website, online">
</HEAD>

Ok, the above example might not be the best example, but I hope it gives you some idea.

7. Search engines uses keywords found in IMG (image) Alt tag and you need to utilize them. As an example, in http://www.chocolatecity.cc, I have the following picture: <img src="/include/images/African-American-vote-1945.jpg" width="120" height="190" and added the following tag for it: alt="African American Voters Casting Votes in 1945"></td>

8. Constantly monitor your site link popularity by entering your site URL in a link popularity site. My two favorites are http://www.iconinteractive.com and http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop
Link popularity tells you how many websites are linked to yours. Website popularity is becoming increasingly important, as many search engines are using this information as a ranking criterion. The more popular your site is, the better it is ranked on the search engines.

9. Add your site to the following sites that do not require a link back. There are many other out there. I did the following keywords search “free site submit” to find these. There are many others out there.
a. http://www.google.com/addurl/
b. http://www.submitexpress.com/
c. http://www.freewebsubmission.com/

10. Create FREE public service announcements, yes it is FREE:
a. http://www.free-press-release.com/submit/
b. http://www.prleap.com/
c. http://i-newswire.com/
d. http://www.pr.com/press-releases
e. http://www.free-news-release.com/

11. Congratulations, now pull up the information that was recorded earlier in step# 1. Proceed to Link Popularity Tool and submitexpress again and type your url. Compare the current link popularity total with the ones that were collected earlier in step #1. Do you see any increase in the link popularity?

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