Links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings, but you must be very careful about to whom you link. Im going to help you develop a simple link strategy for your website that will help you decide which sites to link to so youre 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
Were 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
Dont 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 Theyre your direct competition that is doing something right or they wouldnt be coming up first. So lets 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 youve 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, its 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 pages 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 shouldnt 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. Its 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 Googles case, get a site indexed much faster. And the faster youre 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. Lets 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
Dont think you can do this in an hour, or a day! Its quite a bit of work just to find good, potential targets. Heres a bonus when you have your finished your first wave a link possibilities, heres 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. (Its 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 youre 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 links 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 . Read more articles on the and search engine marketing in easy, non-technical, up front English!
As I waded into the Make Money Online waters on the Internet, I felt I needed to do some research on what keywords might help me generate traffic for my websites. I am very, very new to this whole Internet marketing arena but at the simplest level it seems that the keys to generating income are:
Blog >>> Choose Target Keywords >>> Write Articles Incorporating Keywords >>> Create New Pages For Articles >>> Link Article Pages To Blog >>> Link Article Pages To Each Other >>> Populate All Pages with PPC Links >>> Submit Articles To Outlets >>> Submit All Pages To Search Engines
Did I say it was simple As I said, I am new to this area so there may be a step or two (or 5, or 10, etc...) Ive missed. Your end goal is to get your links to appear on the first page of the major search engines when someone searches on your targeted keywords.
Smithutopia.com (http://www.smithutopia.com) was developed utilizing one of the leading blogging systems today, Googles Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com). A blog is a great place to cut your teeth writing articles. As you post your ideas, situations, actions and events you will notice that some of your items start to resemble articles. All it takes is a little polish at that point to have a finished product.
How does all of the above steps help you achieve the goals you have set forth The magic word is backlinks. Backlinks are the links that people have placed on their websites that lead to your website or any of the pages of your website. Several of the major search engines place a high value on the number of links that go to your website from out sites and thus place you in their search engine accordingly. Here is a simple example.
Site A has 1000 sites that link back to it.
Site B has 10 sites that link back to it.
Site A should place higher in the search engines when someone searches for a targeted keyword/phrase that both sites covet.
At this point, some of the more seasoned web gurus are crying foul at my above statement. Relax, I realize there is more to it but Im just taking one step at a time.
Next time...Quality of backlinks, Placing targets on keywords
Donnie Smith is a technology specialist. You can read more about this subject and others at his online blog, Smithutopia ( ).