The main purpose of this blog is to present link building best practices so that others can learn from our experiences – good and bad.  We have written many posts giving tips and advice, but we would really like to hear from our faithful readers. 

We realize most of us in the business do not want to give away our "very best secrets", but surely some of you have had one or two nice successes that you can provide that will help others and still not reveal any strategic concepts you may have developed. 

As always we will certainly give you credit and link juice if you add your story below.  Feel free to change the name of your client to protect them. We will get things started with this success story…

We have a major client that has many related websites, all different domains, most on unique class C IP addresses.  For this example we will say they are flower shops.  There are 15 franchises, all with their own unique names and locations around the United States.  They have outsourced their link building to us, asking us to get as many contextual links on quality sites as possible, using a mix of their business name and some important keyword phrases for the anchor text.

We are tasked with getting them about 5 – 8 new links each month for each store.  We look for links in a variety of places, including niche directories, appropriate bloggers, some articles, etc.  But we also do some very basic approaches to link building that many often over look.   Some webmasters think link builders cheat or use some magic to get the job done, but really it just boils down to working hard, smart  and efficiently.

In this example, we just conducted a Google search for something like "flower shop links", which is about as simple as it gets.   We went through the results and quickly found a few sites where we could add links to links pages on their site.  The pageranks were decent, but these were link pages, so not the best link juice (although later some of them showed in Google’s backlinks). 

But then we hit on a nice success.  Down on page 2 or 3 of our search results, we came across a site that was all about the flower industry.  It had a few pages that were categorized by "flower types", "flower wholesalers", "flower growers", etc., but no "flower shops".  These pages were perfect.  Nice descriptions for the sites listed and only 10-20 sites in each category.   So we wrote to them asking if they would be interested in adding a page called "flower shops", we would provide all the content for 15 different flower stores across the US.  They would get fresh, unique content, and we would be willing to compensate them for their time to add the page.

They responded with an offer to add the content for $150 which we quickly accepted.  We sent over our page of content which included 15 paragraphs of great, highly relevant text and our text links back to our client’s 15 flower shops.  The best part is, this would be considered an authority site, as it was old, had a PR6 home page and many PR4 & PR5 inner pages.   All of their "category link pages" were PR4 and we are certain this new page will provide plenty of link juice to all 15 of our client’s stores in no time (we also sent a few links to the new page as insurance).  Not bad!

Vertical Measures

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]

Vertical Measures