In parts one through three of this tutorial, I discussed selecting the best keywords for the page you want to rank, analyzing the competition for those keywords, and optimizing the web page format so that the search engines know it is relevant to your chosen keywords. In this article I will discuss why you need to get other webmasters to link to your site, and how you go about doing so.
Step 4 : Getting Links
Now Im ready to start getting in-bound links. In-bound links serve two purposes:
If its a new site, they will get your site crawled by the search engines and put into the index.
They will help a site rank well if the link text contains the keywords youre targeting.
Theres a couple of methods you can use to get in-bound links, but I only use one of them.
You can pay other sites to link to you.
You can swap links (called reciprocal linking) with other sites.
When Im actively trying to get links, I only do number two. Im told that number one works better than number two because one-way links are more highly valued by the search engines than reciprocal links, but Ill tell you why I dont care.
First, though, a little explanation of one way links. A one way link is a link that points from some other site to your site, but your site does not link back to the other site.
The search engines value one-way links more highly because they figure its not just artificial link trading going on, but that somebody has given you a real live vote for your site without you asking for itthe greatest compliment.
Yes, one way links are more valuable. But I dont care.
Why not First of all, as I said before, I dont go after fiercely competitive keywords, so usually reciprocal links work just fine. Secondly, if you have a quality site with quality content, after getting some reciprocal links into your site and getting some visitors, people will start to link to your site with one way links, and you wont have to pay for those!
If you decide to go my route and do reciprocal linking, here are the steps you need to take to do it right:
1. Do a search at the engine you want to rank for using the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Go to each page that ranks well and email the webmaster offering to trade links.
3. Once youve emailed all of them, do the link: command on each of those ranking pages and email all of the webmasters who link to those pages to see if they will link to you, too.
If it sounds like an enormous amount of work, thats because it is.
Well, it is if you do it all manually, and I hate to do things manually. I guess thats the programmer in me coming outI want to automate everything.
So how do I automate the process How do I drive dozens or hundreds of in-bound links into my site without writing a manual email to thousands of webmasters The tool I use that makes the whole process a breeze will be discussed in the final installment of this five part tutorial.
Jonathan Leger is the creator of the first commercial AdSense Tracker script packages available, which has grown into the widely-popular product set,
The full 5 part SEO tutorial is also available in an ebook which you can download from:
Directories serve two purposes in your web development efforts. One, a link from a directory is counted as a back link and hence increases your link popularity. Two, some directories will send you targeted traffic.
Webmasters who use directories for increasing link popularity should check out the directory first to see if the directory is SE friendly or not as, only a SE friendly directory will give value for their links.
So, how do you detect a SE friendly directory Here are some tips, which will help you do so.
1) Check the url format of the directory. Some directories have urls in the format http://sitename//index.phpid=1&c=10... for their category pages. This is called a dynamic link andsearch engines find it difficult to crawl such pages.
Urls for the category pages should be in a static format. Example : http://www.indexbizz.com/cat1.html . Search engines ccan easily crawl such pages and your link will also get crawled.
2) Your link should not be a JavaScript link. Some directoriesuse JavaScript to jump to your site from their category pages.Search engines find it difficult to crawl such links.
3) The directory must not ban search engine robots from crawlingthe category pages. You can check whether such a condition existsor not by looking at the robots.txt file of the directory. Thisfile is located at the root level of the directory. To see thisfile just type robots.txt after the domain name of the directory.Find out what this file is saying, for example -
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This will allow all SE bots to all the folders and files in thedirectory.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will keep all SE bots away from all files/ folders in the directory.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mydirectory/
This will keep away all SE bots from crawling the mydirectory directory and all files under it.
So be wise in your selection of SE friendly directories, and putyour efforts towards getting links from such directories that fulfill the above conditions.
Author O.S.Mundae writes for .