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It could be said that in some ways the Internet mimics life. If we see an attractive person we might say, “She’s hot, what a 10,” or, “He’s not bad, I think he’s a 6.” Seems to me the same thing is done with websites. PageRank is given to websites on a scale of 0-10, and if your site is really hot, wildly popular and has many backlinks from relevant high authority sites then you might be scored a 10. (more…)
You may have tried link building campaigns in the past and been disappointed in the results. Perhaps you got barely a blip in the major search engines or you saw your rank rise only to fall a few months later. Whatever the reasons for your disappointment, it’s a good bet that the main reason you were disappointed in the results is that whatever link building tactics you used or paid for lacked two important qualities: balance and consistency.
The Importance of Balance in Link Building
Some people advocate the importance of content-rich websites, others focus on blogs and still others will insist that directories are the most important link building campaign features. The truth is never as simple as some people try to make it. It can seem like blogs are the place to link one month, and then be out of fashion just a few months later, with forums replacing them as the Holy Grail for link building.
The truth is, all of the many places you can link to and from (with the exception of unsavory linking sites that are tantamount to spam) are important to provide you a balance of coverage in your link building campaigns. Search engines are constantly changing, growing and evolving. They become more complex, develop new algorithms and morph so that you can’t ever keep up with how they are weighing the relative importance of any one kind of link, so you shouldn’t even try.
The solution is to balance your link building strategies for the greatest possible coverage over a multitude of formats. If you do this, you’ll find that you are always hitting on multiple cylinders. Although you might not be getting great results from every single link strategy, you’ll be getting pretty good ranking from several of them. It’s like playing a good point spread – coverage is key.
A good link building campaign with optimal coverage will include all of these:
• Directories with real editors. Well-known directories that are always updating and actually review the links are a hot destination for many industries.
• Forums. Links to your site from various forums provide dynamic attention for you – forums are the equivalent of the water cooler – the site where the latest and most interesting topics come up. Be present at the virtual water cooler and you’ll be talked about – and linked to.
• Article directories. Submit relevant, informative articles to directories to easily multiply your links. These article directories are used by others to provide content for everything from newsletters to special reports – if your content is good, you’ll quickly become a recognized expert.
• Reciprocal links. Provide links to sites that compliment what you are offering and ask that they link to you. Similar sites that aren’t direct competitors are powerful link partners.
• Contextual links in blogs and reviews. Another instance of the power of the people – reviewers drive people to sites because they are recognized as experts, so try and get reviewed and be sure a link to your site is included. Some people won’t even know they need you until they read a great blog about you –and then they will hot-foot it to your site for more information.
If you use a good mix of link building techniques, you’ll be balancing your exposure over all of the many kinds of linking that the major search engines use so that you’re always noticed without the risk of falling down in the ranks because one particular link strategy is out of favor.
Why Consistency is Key
Many individuals start out in overdrive when they start a linking campaign. They submit to dozens of industry directories, pack their website and article directories with great content, get noticed on blogs and in reviews, set up links on complimentary sites and enjoy the fruits of their labor – top rankings.
Then something happens; they find that they just don’t have the time to continue writing articles, they stop visiting blogs because they are overwhelmed with new customers….and they stop building links or slow down considerably. Unfortunately, they discover that they are now dropping in the search engine rankings and they can’t understand it. After all, nothing’s changed, right?
Actually, that’s precisely the point – nothing is changing. If you stop actively creating links and building a following, you will fall in the rankings because your competitors are actively building links, adding content and quietly passing you in popularity. The search engines are dynamic, so you can’t afford not being dynamic yourself – you have to consistently build on what you started in order to stay ahead of the pack. It’s a long-term commitment that you have to make if you don’t want to lose in the long run.
The perfect link building campaign is a combination of balance and consistency. If you continue to spread your links out over many venues and keep the content and information flowing every month, you’ll be successful in building a valuable network of links that will send you to the top of the pages.
[tags] link building, link popularity, directories, article marketing, contextual links, forums [/tags]
Once you have your website up and running, you may be shocked if, after a few months, you aren’t getting any visitors and you’re still in the dungeons of the major search engines. If you have good content, lots of SEO and a great product or service, what’s keeping you from being seen? It’s most likely your lack of links. The importance of links to your site’s placement in the most popular search engines can’t be underestimated – links tell the search engines how popular your site is with others who are on the web.
You could, of course, simply submit your site to a paid links site that promises you “thousands of links” for your site and hope that whatever they throw at the wall sticks, but that may not be your best bet. After all, search engines are increasingly savvy to how links work, and if your site has hundreds of links that aren’t really relevant to your product or service, your link popularity will probably remain quite low in the rankings. On the other hand, what help is there in having highly relevant links in limited numbers? It is this balancing act between link popularity and link relevance, or pop that is so hard to maintain. Finding the right balance is essential.
Link Popularity – The Case for and Against Numbers
Every site should try to cultivate multiple links to their site. One-way links from other sites to yours indicate that lots of people are interested in what you have to offer, and search engines do recognize this link popularity and reward it in the rankings. Reciprocal links are also a good way to increase your presence in the search rankings. With reciprocal links, you can show up in searches for your own product or service and searches for the products and services of those sites you’ve linked to.
The down side to this type of linking is that you can also be penalized in the ranks if you have hundreds of links – one-way or reciprocal – to sites that have nothing to do with your own site’s purpose. It’s why submission to paid linking services can be a bad idea – if you end up linked to sites that are too diverse or questionable in their content, you’ll drop quickly in the ranks. A site selling baby clothes linked to hundreds of baby product and care sites will do well. A baby clothes site linked to thousands of sites peddling porn, vitamins, diuretics and auto loans won’t.
How to “Pop” – Understanding the Importance of Quality
When establishing links, be industry specific – a handful of links from other sites that are focused in some way on your industry, whether it’s cleaning products, income tax preparation or natural food supplements will help pop you closer to the top in the search engines. If you make natural herbal teas, look for links to natural health and living, teas and natural cures – all inter-related topics that are relevant to what you offer.
Industry directories are also a great place to submit links that are high quality. Why? Because the larger directories are set up with complex search capabilities. Their category descriptions, Meta tags and keywords all result in highly relevant, top quality links. Because they were designed expressly to make finding particular industry information easier, a lot of time and effort has gone into the links and how they are interconnected.
Links are “graded” by the search engines based on complex algorithms that detect not only how many links there are to your site, but how relevant those links are (keep the whole diuretics/porn links problem in mind) to your own product or service. A higher relevancy score in the search engines gives you more weight based on the authority of the sites you’re linked to. Will ten incoming links from little-known sites equal one link from a site featuring recognized experts in your field? One hundred? One thousand? Or will your small cache of links from big, important sites count you out because everyone else seems to have thousands of links, relevant or not, compared to your hundreds?
The fact is, the algorithms that determine which sites are the best are evolving daily. A balance of link popularity and link “pop” is essential to being recognized by search engines and moving up through the rankings. Once you’ve achieved that status, however, you have to maintain it. That means constantly “tweaking” the links to and from your site – fine-tuning both number and relevance – in order to maintain your spot. Finding the proper balance and adjusting your Internet presence to optimize both content and links is a never-ending process that, when done properly, can place you on the front page of the best search engines.
[tags] link popularity, quality links, SEO, paid links, one-way links, reciprocal links [/tags]
Text links have increasingly been the topic of discussion for websites around the globe recently. The importance of keywords and keyword phrases and direct paid links is well known. However, what many individuals don’t realize is that keywords or phrases mentioned in relation to your own site on other sites can be just as powerful in driving traffic to their site or sites, even if their site isn’t optimized for those words or phrases.
How is that possible? It’s because certain phrases are very popular and very powerful and can lead to an incredible number of links that you, the site owner, haven’t even thought about. Often, reviewers, bloggers and other sites will use a particular phrase to indicate their take on your site’s product or service and link to you. Used often enough, these text links can actually indicate to search engines that your site is the best possible answer to anyone searching for those phrases.
Good Text Links Gone Bad
One famous example of this is the phrase “miserable failure,” which, until recently, would result in a top-ranked result of “whitehouse.gov/president in Google and Yahoo searches. Google has since removed this result, but it’s an interesting example of how important it is to be seen as the expert in your field or the right result for a particular text link. Because so many people indicated on websites around the world that they felt the president was a “miserable failure,” search engines thought that the best possible site to direct searchers to was the site for the president.
A less controversial example is the Abode site, which pops up near the top of any searches for the phrase “click here.” The Adobe site isn’t optimized at all for this phrase, but so many other sites use the term “click here” in reference to Adobe that search engines assume that Adobe is the best possible site for information on the phrase “click here.” Fortunately for Adobe, “click here” has been entirely positive. Not so for the president and “miserable failure.”
Link Popularity Services Can Increase Text Link Results
A simple way to explain the importance of text links is that they are essentially votes for your site provided by the many other sites on the Internet that have a text link for your site. In the world of web popularity, text links are popularity votes that are tallied by the search engines. No matter how much you optimize your site, if you don’t have lots of relevant text links to you coming from other locations, you aren’t going to rank high in the search engines. You want to rank high for things relating to your product or service.
Link popularity services can give your site valuable insight into how you want to be presented in order to establish you as an expert in your particular industry or on a particular subject. Interestingly, you don’t have to strictly be an expert on the industry itself; in fact, being an expert on something that is a part of that field or related to that field may net you remarkable results, generating numerous text links that will draw visitors to your site.
An example would be a site that sells swimming pool and spa parts. You may find that placing yourself as an expert on swimming pool care, proper spa maintenance and how to clean and protect your pool or spa will generate tons of links from other sites. In fact, you’ll probably get more links this way than by being an expert on just swimming pool parts themselves.
Link popularity services are essential to helping a website develop a two-pronged approach to increasing text links and therefore link popularity which will drive websites up on the search engine rankings. First, a good service will help you develop a reputation as an “expert” with articles and content that will give your website clout. Second, these services should determine what truly relevant content that will generate relevant links is. After all, the swimming pool and spa parts store doesn’t need a thousand links from sites that talk about hotels with swimming pools. The magic combination is to establish text links that are relevant and diverse (from many different sites and sources). If you can find this, you will quickly establish yourself as the expert in your field and your site will move into one of the top slots in major search engine results.
[tags] text links, paid links, link popularity, link popularity services [/tags]
By now, most webmasters know that link popularity is the single most important factor in driving top search engine rankings. But did you know that some some links can actually kill your search engine rankings?
The importance of links has led to the creation of "links programs" such as LinksToYou and others. If you’re already in a links program, hold on to your hat, because I’ve got bad news for you.
How Links Programs Work:
In a links program, every member of the program uploads a page or pages to their website. These pages carry links to the other program participants’ websites.
Why They Don’t Help Search Engine Rankings:
All of the major search engines are aware of these programs, and most of them use automated processes to weed out "identical" pages. Even if a search engine recognizes the link, they won’t give it much weight.
How Links Programs Can Kill Your Business:
The most popular search engine in the world today is Google. In late 2000, Google began a systematic campaign of permanently removing links program participants from their index. Altavista has begun a similar program, although recent problems kept them from executing it.
Don’t the operators of links programs know all this?
Of course they do, yet they continue to operate and proliferate. Tobacco companies know cigarettes kill people, yet they continue to sell them.
What To Do If You’re In A Links Program:
First, immediately remove all of the program’s pages from your site. Second, remove all the links they had you set up on your other pages. Third, if possible, cancel your membership… then get to work creating some legitimate link popularity.
Creating True Link Popularity
If you want your site to have lasting popularity and relevance with the search engines, you need links from related sites. Dedicate 10 minutes a day to locating and contacting other webmasters to swap links, adding your site to directories, and publishing articles in your area of expertise.
Create Multiple Layers Of Links
For some search engines, links to your home page are good enough. At least some of your links, though, should be targeted at your internal pages. For example, if your site sells tools for gardeners, get some links set up to your "how to" and FAQ pages too. This will help you get more of your site’s content into the search engine, and increase referrals significantly.
Get Those Links Indexed!
It doesn’t do you any good to set up links if the search engines never find them. You can submit the pages that link to you, but most search engines nowadays won’t index them unless there are other links to those pages somewhere on the web. Consider adding a "resources" page to your site, linked from your home page, with links to all the individual pages that link to you.
My Secret Recipe: How To Make Sure Your Links Get Indexed
In order to ensure that the links pointing to your site get indexed, you really have to take an additional step, and set up a second domain and website – ideally with a completely different hosting provider. For instance, the gardening website in the above example might need a partner site like "gardening-resources.com" with a single page linked to every webpage that links to your site.
Once you’ve set up the secondary domain, add a link to it from your main site’s home page, and wait for the search engines to index it. Don’t forget to link back to your main site, of course. You should submit this additional site to the same directories that you use to list your primary site.
It also helps to ask for an additional link to your secondary domain when you set up links swaps. Just explain how the secondary site helps both partners, by adding link popularity and helping the links pages get indexed. Any sensible webmaster will gladly add the second link.
What Happens Next?
As the link popularity of both of your sites grows, they begin to feed on each other. Don’t neglect to track any search engine referrals to your secondary site – if they grow to a high level, you may want to turn it into more than just a links page. If you’ve done a good job of optimizing your primary site, though, chances are your secondary site will never outrank your primary site on any search.
If you take these initial steps today, and commit to a program of link building for ten minutes a day, your site’s traffic will begin to rise dramatically within just 2-3 months, and it should only get better if you stick with the program.
Provided by Dan Thies. Check out his Search Engine Optimization Fast Start.
[tags] link popularity, search engine optimization, search engines, webmasters [/tags]
