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!
Written by SEO Tipster on August 26th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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Wordtracker has recently released their free keyword research guide.
Download is available free at:
http://lists.wordtracker.com/t/166692/237113/45410/13/
Written by SEO Tipster on August 26th, 2005 with no comments.
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The top 200 long-term keyword report
Below figures represents the complete queries from the largest
metacrawlers on the web (Metacrawler/Dogpile etc.) for the
last 110 days.
Nos. Count Keyword
===========================================
1 193204 paris hilton
2 136384 google
3 131956 games
4 115041 playstation 2 cheats
5 112202 yahoo
6 106479 funny jokes
7 106457 ebay
8 104011 poetry
9 95920 tattoos
10 93357 carmen electra
11 93212 jenna jameson
12 88958 jessica simpson
13 87677 girls
14 84041 games cheat
15 82815 mapquest
16 77383 pamela anderson
17 77126 britney spears
18 76235 dogs
19 75777 music lyrics
20 71103 anime
21 67543 50 cent
22 62249 yahoo.com
23 55695 star wars
24 55674 top 100 baby names
25 55340 maps
26 54049 angelina jolie
27 54038 eminem
28 53038 thongs
29 52036 jokes
30 50166 green day
31 49512 hotmail
32 49472 jennifer lopez
33 49410 system of a down
34 46949 dictionary
35 46402 vagina
36 46267 cars
37 45948 thong
38 45665 hilary duff
39 43893 bikini
40 43315 nudist
41 43156 mariah carey
42 42401 jessica alba
43 41610 search engines
44 40891 hot
45 40812 googletestad
46 40337 american idol
47 40270 xbox cheats
48 40115 teen
49 39446 lyrics
50 38946 breasts
51 38813 gwen stefani
52 38639 movies
53 38379 weather
54 37760 ask jeeves
55 37405 funny
56 37231 play games
57 37194 lingerie
58 36950 hotmail.com
59 36949 radio stations
60 36726 dog
61 36491 family guy
62 36439 home depot
63 36422 women
64 36403 beyonce
65 36152 dog breeds
66 35617 sedu hair styles
67 34158 my chemical romance
68 32786 briana banks
69 32380 danica patrick
70 32261 ebay.com
71 31779 slipknot
72 31750 panties
73 31626 katie holmes
74 31073 recipes
75 31010 music
76 30915 babes
77 30749 pam anderson
78 30624 google.com
79 30457 free games
80 30442 christina aguilera
81 30369 trish stratus
82 30326 teens
83 30282 funny quotes
84 30130 girl
85 30050 p
86 29836 path client
87 29798 usher
88 29617 gay
89 29295 harry potter
90 29261 asian
91 29151 kelly blue book
92 29045 akon
93 28701 yahoo mail
94 28696 tera patrick
95 28656 simple plan
96 27888 game codes
97 27764 ciara
98 27511 map quest
99 27434 online games
100 27317 flowers
101 27138 msn
102 26888 linkin park
103 26872 lowes
104 26742 ludacris
105 26085 simpsons
106 26073 kelly clarkson
107 25931 a
108 25868 free online games
109 25529 b
110 25456 jennifer aniston
111 25310 baby names
112 25006 song lyrics
113 24967 brooke burke
114 24860 www.yahoo.com
115 24774 natalie portman
116 24768 images
117 24570 thehun
118 24369 nelly
119 24245 sears
120 24201 cats
121 24058 lil kim
122 24032 college girls
123 24000 beach
124 23991 tara reid
125 23752 amoxil
126 23718 metallica
127 23660 blink 182
128 23507 dogpile
129 23481 southwest airlines
130 23333 south park
131 23322 pokemon
132 23201 amazon.com
133 22885 gorillaz
134 22782 obituaries
135 22636 used cars
136 22601 halle berry
137 22457 wedding vows
138 22342 jenna
139 22329 tattoo designs
140 21639 jesse mccartney
141 21617 aria giovanni
142 21566 target
143 21447 driving directions
144 21384 love
145 21325 mature
146 21124 airline tickets
147 21068 jordan capri
148 20966 names
149 20915 white pages
150 20912 katie price
151 20850 cameron diaz
152 20676 people search
153 20441 best buy
154 20364 booty
155 20322 poems
156 20278 cat
157 20222 nudism
158 20185 jobs
159 20155 clitoris
160 20033 aol mail
161 20008 myspace
162 19936 love poems
163 19884 big
164 19836 free
165 19708 hollaback girl
166 19493 good charlotte
167 19471 ashanti
168 19244 nipples
169 19130 manga
170 19039 the hun
171 18975 cartoons
172 18965 michael jackson
173 18943 wet
174 18801 olsen twins
175 18799 thehun.com
176 18780 candy shop
177 18542 mike jones
178 18534 sky lopez
179 18472 jordan
180 18383 s
181 18366 horse
182 18300 puppies
183 18248 the used
184 18165 x box game cheats
185 18091 runescape
186 18065 ashlee simpson
187 18032 wwe
188 17981 breast
189 17959 eva longoria
190 17925 jessica biel
191 17921 anna nicole smith
192 17903 msn.com
193 17818 disney
194 17720 l
195 17661 horses
196 17559 jenny mccarthy
197 17552 funny movies
198 17505 cnn
199 17491 nudists
200 17490 travel
Written by SEO Tipster on August 26th, 2005 with no comments.
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No one outside of the major
search engines knows which algorithms (the rules used to determine site rankings)
are used. Each search engine algorithm is different. It is almost impossible to
get all of the pages on your site ranked for your target keywords at the first
try.
This is where monitoring and tweaking comes into play.
Monitoring Your Site’s Rankings
You need to know where your site ranks in the various major search engines for your
keywords. Currently the major search engine spiders are GoogleBot (Google),
Yahoo Slurp (Yahoo!), Teoma (Ask Jeeves).
Sites generally do not rank instantly - give it time for your site to appear.
Sometimes one page will be indexed and appear in the search results before another -
this is perfectly normal. Spiders generally index the home page more often than
other pages.
Do not monitor your position on an hourly or even daily basis - search engine
rankings fluctuate on a day to day basis. This is normal. You should be concerned
with long term trends. Therefore leave a minimum of one week between monitoring
your position.
You can either check your site’s positions manually, or use one of the various
commercial or free monitoring tools. Contrary to popular belief there is no way
a search engine can ban your site if you running automatic queries, they can
however ban the IP address of the machine making the query. Therefore If you do
decide to run an application to monitor your site’s position ensure you run the
checks from an IP address other than the one your site is running on: This is not
an issue when your site is hosted elsewhere but on a corporate site you may want
to outsource reporting for this reason.
Once you have a report, check it against your previous report - it’s the trends
you’re interested in not individual rankings. Is my keyword going up the rankings
or down? Is one or more keywords under performing?
When monitoring your rankings, don’t forget to check your log files. Your site
might be found for keywords you never even thought of. Some of the keywords might
be lower in the results than you’d like and can provide excellent secondary
keywords to target.
Tweaking Your Site’s Contents
This is fine but what do if none of your site shows up - for anything. Pick an
unusual phrase on your site and search for that with quotes around it. If you’re
not showing up for this unique phrase then it could be that your site is not indexed
correctly.
If you’re starting to show for some search phrases on some search engines then don’t
worry, it takes differing amounts of time for the different search engines to index
your site and update the SERPs.
If only one (or a few) phrases are not showing in the search results it may be time
to revisit the text on your site. For each search phrase that isn’t ranking:
- Find the page that this targeted phrase is on.
- Check the meta tags - is the phrase in the title, description and keyword?
- Check the page, is the phrase in the
tag.
- Check the text, is the phrase used once per paragraph? Does the page read
nicely, if not reduce the number of occurrences.
- Check the images, make sure the phrase appears in the ‘alt’ tag of the site.
- Check incoming links (internal) - do you use the phrase in the link text.
- If this page is sharing focus with other phrases you may want to split this
phrase on to its own page. If you create a new page you will need to create
400-600 words specifically targeting that phrase.
- You may want to change the text you use for reciprocal links to include the phrase.
Written by SEO Tipster on August 5th, 2005 with no comments.
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With so much talk about search engines putting a damper on direct reciprocal links, the hunt for the elusive one-way inbound link is on.
As someone who works with small business website owners, I’ve heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In the end, I’ve only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links.
Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies
Yet there’s perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much potential as the five major ways of getting links.
- Link farms nevër seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down the line. Link farms can get you delisted from search engine indexes, so don’t even try them.
- Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use affïliate software that links directly to your site rather than through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing all their affïliate links in redirects of their own invention, to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply apply to the program themselves to get a discount.
- Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way inbound links, but they’ll only have search-engine value a small percentage of the time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically encase links in scrïpt, or use robot instructions to prevent spiders from following links.
- Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into the great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.
- Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testïmonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply chain.)
Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of the more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.
1. Waiting for Inbound Links
If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:
- Unfortunately, “eventually” can be a very long time.
- Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can’t get search engine traffïc, or other non-paid traffïc, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffïc, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?
2. Triangulating for Inbound Links
Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:
- You need to have more than one website in the same general category of interest or the links won’t be relevant.
- The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.
- As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is that the links are mostly on “Resources” pages that are just lists of links. There’s only a small chance of getting significant traffïc from these links. Plus, any “Resource” page may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if that hasn’t happened already.
3. Submitting to Directories
They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing, no-fee-charging, and actually well-run directories of relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO acquaintance tells me he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head. Plus, there are other kinds of directories: directories of affïliate programs, of websites using a certain content management system, of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.
Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it’s a good deal if you can get it. But let’s say you do get links from all 200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche directories–now what?
4. Paying for Inbound Links
Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has become big business. Buying good traffic-generating “clean” links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising, which confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of pitfalls of relying primarily on paid links for SEO:
- The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial search engine traffïc can become prohibitive.
- As soon as you stop paying, you losë your link–you are essentially renting rather than owning, with no “link equity” building up.
- Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links on rankings, as revealed in various patent filings. A website can try to mask the fact that the links are paid, but how well it does that is out of your control.
- Given Google’s mission to dampen paid links’ effectiveness, paid link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential paid link partner is “passing PageRank.” But identifying appropriate PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in itself.
- Google also has a stated mission of dampening the value of any “artificial” links. Having most of your links on PageRank 3 or higher web pages would seem to be a dead give-away that your links are “artificial,” since the vast majority of web pages (note: not necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1 or lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have so little impact on a site’s PageRank that it would not be worth the expense.
5. Distributing Content
All of the above four inbound-link-generating methods really do work. But it is the fifth method of getting one-way inbound links that is the most promising: distributing content
The idea is simple: you give other websites content to put on their sites in exchange for a link to your site, usually in an “author’s resource box,” an “about the author” paragraph at the end of the article.
The beauty of distributing content for links is that the links generally generate more traffïc than links on a “resources” page. Plus, your article will pre-sell readers on the value of your site.
The downside, of course, is that it’s no small amount of work to create original content and then distribute it to hundreds of website owners. But nothing good ever came easy. And on the internet, one-way inbound links are a very good thing.
Written by SEO Tipster on August 5th, 2005 with no comments.
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Few search engine don’ts:
- Don’t stuff your keyword tag with unrelated keywords, the search engines know your
page is not about ebay, free music downloads, etc because the text on the page doesn’t
back it up.
- Don’t keyword stuff hidden parts of the page - image ‘alt’ tags, comments, etc.
- Don’t keyword stuff, period - don’t repeat the same keywords multiple times in a row
anywhere on the page.
- Don’t use page generation tools - the search engines know them all and can tell which
pages are created by a tool and which manually.
- Don’t duplicate content either within the same site or across multiple sites.
- Don’t hide text by using white text on a white background, small fonts. Even if its
unrelated to your keyword the search engines will see hidden text and blacklist your site!
Any of these can get your site banned, and once banned its extremely difficult to get your
site back in the search engine results.
Written by SEO Tipster on August 5th, 2005 with no comments.
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A few ‘rules of thumb’ for integrating keywords into your website page:
- Try to stick to one or two keywords per page, perhaps up to four if they are related.
- Repeat the keyword roughly once per paragraph.
- Put the keyword at the start of your title, description and keyword tag.
- Put your keyword as close to the start of the text as possible.
- Name your page the same as your keyword; for example “search-engine-optimization.html”
- Name your site after your major keyword; for example www.my-seo-tips.com (for seo tips)
- Put in original content.
Remember your website copy should be written for your visitors first and foremost,
by targeting a page per keyword you are ensuring the page is focused on the keyword without
being considered spam.
Written by SEO Tipster on August 5th, 2005 with no comments.
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