By: Admin

Optimizing the content of your web site is only part of the equation for improved search engine rankings. Most major search engines also rely on link popularity to determine the most relevant web sites for a particular search.

If you have a great web site, others will link to you naturally. But how long will that take? You can proactively research links from other web sites that make sense both from a user’s perspective and considers search engine benefits.

Linking to drive traffic to your site

Identify high traffic sites that would be visited by your target audience. These include: publications, buyer’s guides, product review sites, shopping sites and guides

Low Hanging Fruit

Look for a links like: “submit site” “add url” “submit product” or “contact us” to contact the site editor to see if they will list your web site or product. Some of the sites will have a form for you to fill out. When it asks for the site name, use a name that includes your keywords.

Keep your message short, simple, keyword rich and accurate. If the site does not have a form for you to fill out but provides a contact email address, be sure to include how you want the site to link to your site. It is very important to point out the benefit to the site editor of why they should add a link to your site. Typically this format works best:

Title: Site Name (add keyword here)
Site: http://www.domainname.com

Description: Site name keyword offers keyword rich and compelling description here.

You could also provide this as HTML code to make it even easier for the webmaster to just copy and paste your link onto their web site. An example:

DomainName.com - Keyword - Site name keyword offers keyword rich and compelling description here.

You might also consider paid listings on high traffic web sites. Some sites charge a one-time fee and some charge by the month. Ads that appear near the top of the page are best.

Improve search engine rankings

Search engines rank pages of web sites based on many different factors and each major search engine uses unique algorithms for determining relevancy. One factor that all major search engines use to some degree is link popularity. If two sites are have equally relevant content, but one has a larger number of high quality links to it than another, the site with more links will often rank higher.

If your site contains quality content, then other sites will link to you because of the content. An active link building campaign should only speed up this process. Your goal is not to acquire a large number of links in a short amount of time.

What’s important is to find “quality” sites that have related content and ask them to link to you using text that includes your keywords. Avoid reciprocal linking or link exchanges. Many, many sites are abusing this method of linking and search engines will soon discount the value of any links shared directly between two sites that do not match certain criteria.

Quality is better than quantity.

By “quality” I mean sites that you need links from need to be considered authority sites on topics related to your own site. These include subject matter resource sites, publications, etc. Sites with .org, .edu are great. Chances are, there are many, many web sites out there with a theme similar to your site. Most that explicitly offer links require you to link back. When this happens, ask yourself if you would like to this type of site anyway - even without a link back.

Also, is the page where your site will be listed related directly to your site? The page that is linking to your site should have less than 40 links on it to other sites. 40 is not a hard number, but the lower the number of outgoing links the better. The links to other sites should be following a similar theme as your web site. For example, all “auto” related links or “real estate”. If the links go to many different types of sites, that is of little value for you. If the links page has many, many links it may not be of any value at all. The smaller the number of links to other web sites, the better!

How to find links!

Go to google.com and do a search for one of your keywords. Check each of the top 10 sites in the search results to see if there are opportunities for you to get a link back to your site.

You could also search Google and Yahoo using your keywords plus phrases like, “add site”. Example: keyword phrase “add site” or keyword phrase “submit site”. These queries may result in sites that are open to accepting links.

There are many other ways to find links so be sure to watch as you surf the web for link opportunities.

Remember, when you get links from other sites to yours, it is important that they are text links and that the text includes your keywords. Also, you shouldn’t always use the same keywords and you don’t have to link to your home page each time. Links from other sites to your specific product or services pages are very helpful.

Example:
Link Title: Product Keyword
Link URL: www.domainname.com/product-keyword.htm

Link Description: Order your product keyword online from domainname.com
By attracting links to important content within your site, you can build more focused link popularity for improved rankings in those areas.

To Reciprocal Link or Not?

Avoid reciprocal links. Focus on one-way inbound links. It’s good to have a resources page pre-populated with links to authority sites in your industry. These would be one-way links out to other industry, association or resources web sites. Try to keep the number of links you have going out to other sites to a minimum compared to the number of links coming in. If it really makes sense to trade links with another site, you can use your resources page to link to them.

Building links to drive traffic directly to your site can also help build your link popularity. Just keep in mind that text links are ideal and they should include keywords relevant to the page you’re linking to. Set aside a few hours per week to research new links for your web site and mix up the links between your home page and the major category pages of your web site. Over time you’ll build link popularity across your entire site and rankings will follow.

To conclude, part of the time consuming process of the link building process is that we can spend 10 minutes just looking for a site that links to our competitor that could link to us. There are techniques to speed up this link hunt. These link building tips can allow you to get the most powerful links with the least amount of effort.

Using the above ideas in a creative way can allow a person with no automated software, no money, and a good idea worth spreading to quickly dominate search results. You are now an advanced Google link building stud.

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