You have heard me say it and no doubt you have heard others say that building links is the key to good SEO. People say content is king, and I agree, but even so, links are really king. Otherwise, Google wouldn’t have so much PR.
Building links is definitely a difficult, time consuming, laborious, boring task, that yields phenomenal results. Here I will explain to you what links are, why they are important, and how to build them.
Links are what the web is made of, and because of this, they will always be very important. Spiders use links to crawl the web, and because of this they have a lot of power.
If you are running for mayor, in hopes to someday be governor, then president, you have to deal with votes the entire way. Links into a site are like votes for a site, but the only difference is the links must be relevant to really matter. If you own a pet store, and my plumbing website links to your pet store website, it will help a little but not as much as another pet store linking to my site. Now lets say Petco links to my pet store site, this is a serious inbound link because Petco is huge and well known.
There are many different types of links that have different grades of importance:
Text Links: By far the most powerful link available text links lend more than just a vote, they offer relevant votes. If you own a pet store site that links to my pet store site and the link text (a.k.a. Anchor Text) only says “click here” then there is not much relevance shared. If your site links to mine and the anchor text says “pet store Atlanta, Ga” then my pet store site will rank higher for searches like “pet store atlanta”. The other thing about text links that makes them so amazing is that more people are inclined to click on a text link than on any other kind of link. Lets say I am telling you about a video of the fastest car in the world, wouldn’t you be more inclined to click the link back there or would you rather click here? Point proven.
Image Links: You can link to a page with an image, but the link juice isn’t really as powerful. Using a good ALT tag helps share the relevance as well as placing plenty of content around the image. You see these links a lot in banner ads like the banners over to the right -> and they usually don’t yield as many clicks as a text link.
Reciprocal Links: These links are less popular than one-way inbound links. A one way inbound link is self explanatory, a site that links to yours no strings attached. A reciprocal link on the other hand is when I link to you and you link back to me, we then share each other’s link juice. You find these sort of links a lot in what is known as link farms.
Link Building Strategies: We only briefly covered the different types of links available, but building those links is the main focus here. Let us focus mainly on trying to get several high quality, one-way, relevant, in-bound text links. (whattamouthful)
Directory Submission: This is an old trick of the trade that still works very well if you just want to build good links. If you submit your site to DMOZ in order to be listed in their directory, you will have to wait a long time for a response, but if you are added to their directory the link is very powerful. Submitting your site to other directories that share your niche is a very good means of building high quality links, but how do you do this? Simple!
Lets say I own a pet store website; I go to Google and in the search field I type: “pets” + “add url”. This is called a search operator for an advanced search query. You will then receive a list of sites that have the words “pets” and “add url” somewhere on their site. These tend to be either directories or sites that offer links from their pages. You can also search allintitle: “pets” + “add url” to get a little more specific.
It is best to not add your website to a huge list of links on a single page because it is a wast of time for you. Also, do not ever link to another site without analyzing that site to see if it is either related to yours, useful for your readers, or important enough to link to. You could end up linking into a link farm which will destroy your rankings over night.
There are many directory submission companies out there that for a small fee, will submit your site to tons of niche category directories in order to build links. Be cautious and see what kind of directories they submit to before paying them to submit your site. Some directory submission services will even take a screenshot of the approval page for every directory submission they make so you know for sure that your site is listed.
Google’s Pagerank: Google has a system for ranking sites that they call the PageRank algorithm. The official Google PageRank algorithm is:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Truly, I do not understand it, but here is a rough explanation: Pages T1…Tn all point to page A. The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. Google usually sets d to 0.85. C(T) is defined as the number of links going out of page T.
The previous information was provided by Web CEO University.
Google considers sites of high authority if they contain several inbound links from trusted sources. The Google Hilltop Algorithm categorizes sites as expert sites. Sites like Yahoo!, DMOZ, Government and College or University sites are all considered expert sites by the Hilltop algorithm, and any site that receives a link from one of these expert sites will notice a tremendous increase in their page rankings and traffic.
If a site with a high PR (PageRank) number links to your site and your site already has a lower PR number, you will receive an increase in PR from the linking site. This in turn helps your search engine rankings for your given keywords.
The Google Toolbar for Firefox has a PageRank bar that allows you to see what the PR is of any site you visit. You can download it here.
PageRank is important for search engine rankings, but Google updates their PR every few months and so your PR levels may change very drastically. The PR# in the bar doesn’t always determine true PR levels either.
Hierarchy Link Structure: Developing a link structure that places your most important pages on the top is a good method of receiving higher PR and traffic levels. The way to do this is link to the most important pages heavily from other pages within the site, and build one-way in-bound links to those specific important pages.
Building Link Bait: If you want tons of links for next to nothing, the best thing to do is write about something that many people will be interested in and link to, or build a program, tool, or utility that people will like and use. If you have an idea for a phenomenal tool that will help people and you don’t know how to build it but you have the funds, consider posting it as a project on Elance and allowing programmers to bid on it. You may know of a programmer, writer, coder, or someone who has designed or built a tool that will help you get more inbound links.
After this lesson I will continue to update you on several new techniques for building links, improving your website, building traffic, monetizing a blog, acquiring leads, making affiliate sales, and making money online. If you wish to receive my special tips, techniques, and tools of the trade: Subscribe via email or subscribe through an RSS reader.
December 14th, 2007 at 3:06 am
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