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Author: John Krycek Article source: http://www.hotlib.com/. Used with author's permission.
Links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings, but you must be very careful about to whom you link. I'm going to help you develop a simple link strategy for your website that will help you decide which sites to link to so you're making your way up the search engine rankings and not accidentally hurling yourself backwards.
So the natural questions are:
Should I link to everyone I can find?
Should I allow everyone to link to me?
Should I get one of those "link to 2,000 site for $10" things?
The answer to all of the above is NO!
Develop A Link Strategy
We're going to do an easy-to-digest version of what a search engine optimizer
would do if you were to hire one. There are many reasons for having your site
professionally optimized which would take up articles in themselves. This is one of
the attack strategies for determining optimum, quality links for your site.
Step 1 Where are your competitors linked?
Don't arbitrarily find random sites that you like and link to them. A little bit of
research goes a long way. Start with your competitors. Type the keywords for your
site into a search engine. You have them, right? This is the list of key word phrases
that you want to score the number one position when someone types them in a
search. Who appears in the top 10 positions? They're your direct competition that
is doing something right or they wouldn't be coming up first. So let's look
underneath and see how they got it to work and save you a year of work!
Go back to your search engine and type "link:www.competitorsite.com". Up will pop
a long list of sites that have a direct link to your competitor. Do this for your top 10
competitors. Do you see any trends in those results? Do you see any similar sites,
or perhaps directory listings? Take some notes. A spreadsheet or a few sheets of
loose-leaf paper is helpful and analyze what you've uncovered. You should have a
good solid list of links that are helping your competitors rank high!
Step 2 Search for similar themed sites.
Look at your keyword list again. Do these words appear more so on any of the
pages you have listed so far? Narrow down your list to sites that have at least the
same theme or related content to yours. Even your competition will have quite a few
odd links.
If there are 300 links to a site that sells pumpkins, it's natural to have a car dealer or
an airline in there too. Chances are they were so pleased with their pumpkin
purchase that they added the site to their own web page. You can disregard these
right away.
Take your list and look at the potential link site for similarities to your topic. If in
the pumpkin market your competition links to a site that tells all about how to cook
pumpkin seeds, see if you can find other sites that tell how to make pumpkin pie,
make jack-o-lanterns AND cook pumpkin seeds. Make a list of these sites as
potentially better ones.
Step 3 Look at the Google Page Rank
You can find a page's page rank by looking at your Google tool bar if you have it
installed or by going to a site like http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php.
The actual importance of Google Page Rank to Google searches in particular seems
to depend on whom you talk with. It shouldn't be the make or break, but it can help
to choose between several similar sites if your unsure of which one to go with.
Page Rank is more of a relative scale of the number and quality of links to a site.
The higher the rank, the higher the number. The lower, the worse. It's not unheard
of for a link from a site with a Page Rank of 6 or 7 to boost up a low score by a
couple numbers. This seems to, at least in Google's case, get a site indexed much
faster. And the faster you're indexed, the faster you can start climbing.
Step 4 How many sites link to your selections so far and how good are they?
The more links a site has pointing to it, the more important it appears to be to the
search engines. Say your looking at company ABC to put a link on their site to you.
Let's first see how many sites link to company ABC. (Just as you looked at your
competition). We know search engines place more weight on sites linked to you
that have similar content. Now the big search databases seem to know what kind of
content is on those linking pages.
Using the pumpkin model, if your potential target is teaming with 100 inbound links
from gambling, girls, horses, moons, leprechauns and horoscopes then throw it in
the trash pile fast, even if it has a Page Rank of 8 (very rare).
Find that site that has 10 links good, quality links to it. From a pumpkin farmer, a
vegetable recipe blog, Halloween and Thanksgiving festivities, how the first settlers
used the pumpkin to build houses, etc and has a Page Rank of 5. This is the better
choice. Quality, related themes and content to your site and keywords outweighs
quantity of random, useless links.
Step 5 Your final list
Don't think you can do this in an hour, or a day! It's quite a bit of work just to find
good, potential targets. Here's a bonus… when you have your finished your first
wave a link possibilities, here's great way to give it a solid foundation.
Find some relevant directories to list with. Directories of a given theme will have
many, many similar links pointing to it. Directories are usually considered to have
Authority. (It's not uncommon to have to pay a fee for the good ones anyway.) Try
to find a directory of pumpkin farms and pumpkin recipes to build your other links
upon.
Another bonus. Avoid this mistake at all costs! Do NOT link to Link Farms or Free
for all sites or any sites that will give you 1000 links for $10. These are not
directories, but collections of completely unrelated links that exist solely to try to
boost search engines rankings. Search engines ban many of these sites. The
consequences of being listed with a banned site could ban you, and then you're
doomed. The only way to succeed is to build your links honestly and strategically
with a plan and method.
Note: Search engines give more weight to one-way links rather than reciprocal links.
i.e. links that link to your site without asking for one in return. The
easiest way to get these is to buy them. This plan will work on all the different
kinds of links you can get.
So now you have some potential sites to link to. In the next article learn how to
phrase your link for maximum effectiveness. The sites to link with is only the first
half… the quality of the words you use that make up the link's content called anchor
text are just as crucial! Hint: using the same link in every web site is a very bad
idea. See you soon! John Krycek is the owner and creative director of theMouseworks.ca. Read more articles on the insights
and secrets of web design and development and search engine
marketing in easy, non-technical, up front English!
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