On Tuesday 03 August Alex Crabtree joined Joan and Kate on Giant Squid Open Mike to discuss how to get quality backlinks.

Kate asked if you had to join a lot of directories to get backlinks and Alex said no, the most important thing is to make sure you have good content. That way other bloggers and website owners will refer to your site with a good link.

Alex explained that backlinks are a great aid to navigation. They help people to find more information about their search topic and they also help the Google spiders determine quality sites, which will help with Page Rank.

Dofollow blogs are a great source of backlinks – most blogs require commentors to add a webpage link in order to comment. Leave a comment that is relevant and it gets indexed by the robots, which will follow the link.

Joan asked how often you should do this and Alex said it depends how much time you have but not to worry about doing more than 3 or 4 a day. They agreed that you have to select which lenses you are going to promote and just do it for one or two lenses a week as for those of us who have a lot of lenses, it will be impossible to promote very many each week.

Kate, Joan and Alex also discussed how easy it is to lose your focus if you get too embroiled in Web 2.0 networking. You can get trapped into feeling you have to keep up with so many networks that you spend all your time networking and not enough time publishing.

You need to find blogs that are relevant to your niche and keep visiting them, so you can build up a credible reputation.Blogs that allow CommentLuv are especially useful as it can help with traffic back to your blog.

Alex reminded us that each blog post has a permalink and it is these that you should post in your comments on other relevant blogs, NOT your blog home page.This will also help with indexing and establishing your reputation as a quality blog with Google.

There’s lots more tips from Alex in this excellent broadcast – I really recommend that you get yourself a cup of coffee (or tea ) and allow yourself 30 minutes to listen. You may like to have a notebook handy!

Although, this was the “first Tuesday” broadcast which I generally do with Alex, I was away for a few days and my slot on Giant Squid Open Mike will be next Tuesday August 10, when I will be talking about what it is like for someone who is English and living in England and who spends a lot of time publishing and networking on what is primarily an American site.

Tonight’s Giant Squid Open Mike, hosted by Joan and Kate, will be about using articles and article directories to get quality backlinks and in the Link Wheel, for your Blogs, websites and Squidoo lenses.

Alex will join me at 5pm EST, which is 10 pm AJT (AJ Time). Log in to the Chatroom and post your questions there and we will try to answer them on air. You may need to have the radio link playing on one browser tab and the Chatroom on another.

If the time is not right for you, there will be a recording available at the link. I will also summarise the programme in my next post on here.

Hope to see you there!

Remember the movie Field of Dreams? I know it doesn’t have anything to do with food, it’s the quote people. If you build it…

Well from my experience they won’t just come…it takes cajoling and  a little bit of elbow grease. People also want to know what’s in it for them…eek that looks harsh when it’s written in black and white – harsh truth though. Okay so <—that banner over there (go ahead click on it!)  is my (and Rajays) new baby that grand opened 01/2010.  For the Internet realm it really is a baby – why do I feel so impatient?

Well, #1 that’s just me, #2 it’s such a cool food site I thought everybody would just migrate there, and #3 with the organic search results we’ve been getting I thought you woulda found it by now! When I’m passionate about something and get edgy with impatience…it’s time to take action! Today I did just that and it felt so damn good.

I started visiting Squidoo lenses by searching for keywords for the recipes and food links I wanted to add to the site and left the lensmaster a note about why I loved linking their lens to the site…with an invitation to join. See why I felt like I accomplished something today? Or maybe you think I’m nuts, no worries I have been accused of that before

Cannot close without giving you the best points about Food Lovers Web…

• It’s free to join
• We have a revenue sharing program in place that is administered by Crowda.com
• Great place to add your food related links – Google juicy, backlinks
• Socialize with other foodies, gourmets, chefs, moms, people that love to talk about food – if that’s your bag
• Bookmark your favorite food sites to share with others
• Write a review – talk about what you know and love; cookware, a cookbook, your fave eatery, plus more
• Hope to see ya there…one less thing for me to be impatient about

TIP: When you visit the site make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page for links to FAQ’s and more. Any direct questions are welcome – drop your personal note to me via…info@foodloversweb.com