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Links Range from Good to Bad to Ugly: Ride Your Links to Success
By Frederick Townes (c) 2007

As a site owner, it's important to devote what link building
time you have to creating connections that count – really count
– as far as search engine spiders are concerned. In fact,
there's a range of site link types – links diversity. Some are
more valuable than others. Spend your time and resources
building the highest quality links and you'll quickly see the
value of these efforts.

Hosted Content

Hosted content, also sometimes called pre-sell pages, makes your
site look very good. The problem is, there are usually costs
involved. Here's how it works.

You, the content expert, write an article. It should be longer
than 600 words but no longer than 1200 words. It should be
well-written, completely researched, edited, re-edited and
finally proofed so that it's letter perfect. Okay, now you have
host-worthy content.

Hosted content is content that's placed on another site for a
fee. In other words, you rent a page on another site to display
your work. Now, what do you get for your money?

First, position your article on a site that's (1) related to the
topicality of your site and (2) has a tons of one-way links to
content that's "deep" in the site (in other words sub-pages that
rank well in SERPs based on their title tags, for example).
These two factors are the best way to measure and quantify the
strength your page has in the target site, and ultimately, the
link love it creates passes to your site. As you already know
hosted content creates editorial inbound links, also known as
pure gold.

Second, because it's your article and you're paying for the
space, you can embed text links directly to specific pages of
your site. This does a couple of things. First, you spread your
web net further. Links to your site now appear on other sites –
some several incarnations removed from your own site. This,
ultimately, increases your site traffic as people read your
interesting commentary and click on those embedded links to see
what else is on your mind. That's good. More hits. More page
views. Higher conversion ratios.

Third, if you spread your words across the web, you start to
develop some name recognition within your niche. Unless you're
Dan Kennedy or Skip McGrath, it's tough building name
recognition. However, by crafting numerous, informative articles
you'll start to be recognized. And wait until you Google your
name and find 15 SERPs because your articles appear on dozens
and dozens of sites.

The downside is the cost. Site owners charge you for the use of
their space. If you're well capitalized, no problem. Spend the
money to spread your words. If money is a problem, choose your
host sites carefully. Use Google Analytics or ClickTracks data
to determine not only number of unique visitors you create from
these pages of hosted content, but quality of traffic as well.
Look for sites that match the two criteria above. Very
important.

Article Submission

Okay, money is a problem. You don't have a lot. You can still
get your name and your opinions out there through various
article submission sites.

Once again, site owners need great content and many rely on
article submission sites to pick up fresh content for free.
Here's the deal. You write an article and go through the same
steps of researching, editing and proofing until the piece is
pristine and makes you sound like a savant. Perfect.

Now you place that piece on sites like www.goarticles.com or
www.ezinearticles.com for free use by other sites. The plus side
is, if the content is solid, you'll get picked up by literally
hundreds (even thousands) of sites. And in return for the free
use of your written brilliance, the sites that display your
content are obliged to include a link back to your web site. So,
you put out 10 articles on topics related to your business, each
one gets picked up and used by 20 other sites and you've got 200
non-reciprocal inbound links. Well done.

But isn't this the same model as hosted content except it's
free? No. There are two key points to consider. First, with
articles you syndicate it's much more difficult to embed
editorial links to your targeted web site. Instead, you take
advantage of the target link and anchor text in your bio box
that appears at the end of the article.

What does this mean? Ultimately syndicated articles are not
unique content like hosted content is, and ultimately it's more
challenging to place links to your own site editorially without
appearing to be hyping your goods or services. So there's a
tradeoff when you go the article syndication route. The key,
just as with hosted content, is to have killer, useful
information in order to entice webmasters to repurpose the
article for their communities and give you credit, a bio and a
back link.

But, it doesn't cost you anything but your time, assuming you
can string words together into cogent sentences, or at least
your brother-in-law can.

If you're good at syndicated content or article submission, you
control the anchor text – the actual links readers click on. You
can also embed editorial links in syndicated content. Now, these
aren't links directly back to your site, but they will take the
readers to a target page that you want them to read, so if
you're building links for other sites in your portfolio, this
approach has a proven track record.

Reciprocal Links

Sites still exchange links. The concept isn't moribund, but it
certainly doesn't have the impact a non-reciprocal link has.
Reciprocal linking is simply an exchange of links. You link to
my site; I'll link to yours. And since spiders follow links,
it's not a bad arrangement.

A couple of warnings, however. Any site with which you exchange
links should be related to the topic of your site. If you're
selling baby clothes on your site and you've got a link to a
transmission fix-it site, you'll get nicked by the search
engine. Remember, the whole purpose of a search engine is to
provide useful, relevant content to users so any links you
exchange should be considered from the point of view of the site
visitor. Is that link going to further the search of the site
visitor or is it a dead end?

If a site appears to have a significant number of back links,
and better yet, ranks well in the SERPs, it's a likely candidate
for a link exchange even if it's a PR 2. Look for quality sites,
or at least quality characteristics.

One-Way Link Building

This comes in several forms. First, there's the ever-popular
'link begging' where you contact a site owner (you can find that
information in Whois, if it's not on the contact page) and
basically plead your case to have that site owner accept your
link. This is a tough sell because, naturally, the site owner
wants to know what's in it for him or her. Custom written,
tailored emails tend to do better than form letter emails,
obviously, and there's definitely nothing wrong with a phone
call provided you make it abundantly clear what you have to
offer.

There are paid links programs. For example, www.textlinkads.com
lists web sites willing to sell links to your site. You can bid
on the cost of the link, agree to the length of time the link
will appear and where it will appear. There are other programs
that will hook up sites – usually with decent PRs – with site
owners looking for good deals on paid links. Again, don't forget
to buy links with relevance to your site.

You can pay to advertise on another site with banner ads, though
this has been shown to deliver lukewarm results unless you know
your market very well. Do a competitive analysis and see what's
working for the competition. The click-thru rate on banners is
less than 3% but they aren't usually too expensive.

Finally, you can post your thoughts and opinions on forums and
blogs related to your site. Each post will create a back link,
but one that spiders will recognize as a blog back link – not a
bad thing, just not a gangbusters way to build site credibility,
especially considering that most links have a nofollow added and
forums capable of giving any link love tend to moderate (and
eliminate link spam) quite heavily. Don't be fooled though,
links even with a nofollow attached still have some magic – even
on Google.

From hosted content to blog posts, anybody can get a little
recognition on the web. And if you've actually got marketing
capital, you can pay for hosted content and watch your site grow
quickly.

Very quickly.
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Frederick Townes is the the owner  of W3 EDGE Web Design
(http://www.w3-edge.com/). W3 EDGE is a Boston web design company
that provides extensive conversion optimization, SEO-friendly
web designs and Internet Marketing services. W3 EDGE is also
pleased to offer their clients reliable professional web hosting
solutions (http://www.w3-edge.com/solutions/web-hosting/) with
tons of features and extremely fast servers.
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