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Do Link Exchanges Still Work?

QUESTION: (Gerald) I have a number of people asking me to exchange links. I have read that this is good, but can’t find anywhere how to do it. Any suggestions, or is there an article you have that would help me. Appreciate it.

Good question, Gerald, because we really don’t hear as much about link exchanges as we did in the past.  I think the big reason for it is it’s effectiveness (or lack thereof).  Search engine spiders are much smarter than they were 2 or 3 years agos.  And most will recognize a “link exchange” rather easily.

For those who don’t know what a link exchange is, it is when you approach another website (usually with similar content to yours) and ask them to place a nice, keyword-rich anchor text link back to your website.  In exchange, you will do the same for them.  Remember that an important part of SEO is backlinks (i.e., receiving links from other websites pointing back to you).  A few years ago, a lot of this “linking power” was represented by a Page Rank.  Getting high Page Rank websites to point back to you effectively will increase your own page rank.

Personally, I think Page Rank is a bit of a farce these days (at least the public one).  I do think the major search engines (like Google) have there own ranking system based on popularity, but it would not be public.  Still, getting links from “authority sites” with relevance (to your niche) is always key. 

Now getting back to the question…I think link exchanges (or “reciprocal linking”) is really not going to help or hurt you.  Any backlink (in most cases) usually will help you.  But if there is a reciprocal link, the spiders will usually recognize this and probably not give you proper popularity for it. 

Again, like everything SEO, this is speculation, but I know there has been a lot of abuse of link exchanges over the years (like link farms, paid text links, etc.) to draw a lot of attention to it.  I used to do it quite a bit.  I don’t really do it any more (unless I am quite friendly with the website and we exchange primarily for the traffic, not the SEO).  I think your efforts would be better suited to article writing/submission, press releases, even directory submissions. 

You can also consider n-way link exchanges.  For a 3-way link exchange example: Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A.  You can do this rather deeply, too.  But still, the search engine spiders are smart and may start recognizing the linking footprints.  The larger the “n”, the better off you are…but of course, this is a hell of a lot more work and requires some skillful coordination.

Personally, I have become somewhat of an a-hole about link exchange requests.  I don’t get as many as I used to, but when I do I usually ignore them. 

cheers…matt

P.S. If you want to know more about Getting Backlinks, check out SEOExciter.com.  (There are 10 free videos over there that shows you how!)

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In a previous post, I made the mistake of saying that you could not render videos from Camtasia 6 into a format that YouTube will recognize as high quality.
This is because Camtasia’s MP4 format does not render in a frame rate greater than 15.
But if we look BEYOND MP4, we still see that we can [...]

In a previous post, I made the mistake of saying that you could not render videos from Camtasia 6 into a format that YouTube will recognize as high quality.

This is because Camtasia’s MP4 format does not render in a frame rate greater than 15.

But if we look BEYOND MP4, we still see that we can render as a h.264 type format using Quicktime (MOV).  To do this on a PC requires you to have Quicktime installed on your computer, but this is a free download at the Quicktime Download Page.

Here, we create a few simple “adjustments” to video and audio options in Camtasia 6 (both pre-recording and post-rendering).

The Result: HIGH DEFINITION in YouTube!

Watch in HD for YouTube

This cannot be missed.  Here are a few screen shots below:

PRE-RECORDING

img11.gif

img2.gif

img3.gif

img4.gif


BE SURE TO CHANGE THE PROJECT SETTINGS BEFORE EDITING!…

Camtasia Project Settings

POST-RENDERING

img1b.gif

img2b.gif

movie-settings.gif

img3b.gif

img5b.gif

img6b.gif

Upload to YouTube…Your video will be in HD a few minutes after processing!

Watch in HD for YouTube

cheers…matt

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11 Responses to “YouTube High Definition from Camtasia 6”

  1. [...] YouTube High Definition from Camtasia 6 [...]

  2. [...] is what we essentially created in the last blog YouTube High Definition fromCamtasia.  One thing to note here, though, is that if you are using a camcorder to record yourself, you [...]

  3. Excellent tutorial. Love the screenshots! One correction though, you *can* produce to MP4 at 30fps in Camtasia Studio, though I admit this is not obvious. By default, the frame rate for MP4 is “Automatic” which will use the maximum frame rate of all the source clips on the timeline. This setting gives you the smallest file since producing at a higher frame rate would only duplicate frames from your source. Camtasia Recorder defaults to 15fps, which may have led you to the assumption that CS would only render at 15fps.

    If you choose “Custom production settings” on the first page of the Production wizard, then MP4, and go into the Flash Options dialog, you can change the MP4 frame rate. Note: In version 6.0.0, the drop-down should have included the number 30, but it was omitted by mistake. You can manually type the number 30 in the frame rate box for MP4 though and it will produce at 30fps. We’ve corrected the dropdown to include 30fps in version 6.0.1 which should be out very soon.

    Hope this helps,
    Dave O’Rourke
    Camtasia Studio Lead Developer


  4. I did as u said. But i got watch in high quality instead of watch in HD. please help..


  5. Hey Dave,

    Thanks for that feedback about the frame rate for MP4. I tried to find that answer in Techsmith forums but it seemed like (as you say) an update to version 6.0.1. This quicktime work-around is working great for me so far, though.

    And again, Camtasia is perhaps my the most valuable tool that I own. Great product!

    cheers…matt

  6. Hey Adrian,

    Without knowing more about your settings or seeing the video, there is not much I can do. One thing to point out, though, that is not in the video, but IS shown above in the images is to be sure to set your Project Settings to “HD” or some similar setting that keeps the resolution in 1280×720px. The other settings, like “YouTube” will kill your resolution resulting in High Quality, not High Definition.

    cheers…matt

  7. ONE THING FOR SURE, CAMTASIA PRODUCE ONE OF A Hell HD, i have that and I always produce my videos in HD and all are saying to me, how did you do this thing?you have a high,quality video always haha tnx for this camtasia. ive tried those settings and the time just kill me, ive waited for about 4 hours and the rendering is still not finish, so i have to switch on my old stuff, just choosing HD in the dropdown box then save it, that’s it.

  8. One quick note: Camtasia 6 has fixed the original MP4 problem that it once had (essentially, it could not render MP4 in 30 frames per second…now it can). So the new version you don’t have to go through as many hoops. Still, you do need to take caution on the recording settings that you choose. If you don’t record it in hi-definition, nothing will be able to render it in the HD quality…cheers…matt

  9. [...] to learn that Camtasia is the tool of choice for creating screencasts.  Plus, I found some great tips for using it to create YouTube HD screencasts.   I was very relieved, for instance, not to have [...]

  10. [...] - the video was recorded over 3 days on Windows using Camtasia 6 via these suggestions with a Shure SM58 mic with some of the work being done in several Adobe programs.  Jay has also [...]

  11. Thanks Matthew
    You explained that very well. I love Camtasia and your tutorial ironed out some bugs for me.

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