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Inbound Links for Search Engine Optimization – Do You Deserve Them?

By Scott Buresh in Featured

As part of a comprehensive search engine optimization campaign, gaining inbound links to your website is critical. But what exactly does this entail, and how should you most effectively go about gaining these types of valuable links? When an arduous task presents itself, it is human nature to try to find a shortcut. Sometimes, these shortcuts work and the quality of the end result is not sacrificed. But often, the shortcut either turns out to be a short-term fix or worse, it backfires leaving you worse off than you were before. And, in my experience, such is the case in regard to building quality inbound links to your website as part of your search engine optimization campaign.

After many years of trying to find shortcuts myself, I finally recognized that the best, highest impact, longest lasting links that point to a website are EARNED – not bought, begged for, or stolen. And how does one go about earning quality inbound links? By actually offering something of value – whether it is value found on your website or value you provide to other websites. Below are a few simple ideas that take a good deal of work, but when applied appropriately, almost always pay off for your long-term search engine optimization efforts.

How Many Links Does It Take To Get To The Middle Of Google Page One?

By Bill Platt in Featured

Everyday it seems, people are asking me the optimum numbers of inbound links they need to acquire for their website in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links – of equal or higher quality – than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God”.

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder as to how many inbound links they might need to acquire in order to rank in the Top 4 of Google’s search results or even the Top 10 of Google’s SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone.

Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

No one can truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until one has take the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

• You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
• You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of “no consequence” links in their results.)
• You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that offer links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a “snapshot” of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking, and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a “snapshot” picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle”.

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, then you need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the “snapshot” offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

• If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
• Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the “quality of your content”, rather than the “quantity of your content”.
• When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

=== Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

Bill Platt has provided SEO services since 2004. In 2009, he transformed his SEO service, into one that helps people defeat negative search results in Google. By improving the rank of positive website reviews in the search results, negative search listings begin to disappear from the public eye. If you would like to learn more about how Bill’s Reputation Management SEO service can help your business, visit: http://911reputation.com/ Bill has also owned http://thePhantomWriters.com/ since 2001.

Read more articles written by: Bill Platt

SEO Triple Play; Ranking, Branding and Profit

By Scott Jason in Featured

This article will show you how to run a simple promotional marketing campaign that has an unusual side effect; Top placement on Google for your most important keywords. With one quick and easy task you can:

1. Get top ranking on Google,
2. Build incredible brand or company awareness
3. Earn an additional passive income while doing it, if you wish.

The concept is pretty straightforward. You post a piece of software (along with a simple PAD file) to shareware download sites like Download.com. They provide inbound links to your site. Simple right? Definitely! But that’s only part of it. If you know a couple inside tips you can have the link to your site contain your most important keywords as anchor text, which will skyrocket ranking on Google. And you can have your links point to any page you want using that keyword rich link! By the way, there are well over 1,000 well known download sites there for the linking!

Reaching Out to Attract Inbound Links

By admin in Featured

When you are trying to develop your backlink strategy it is important to understand the different ways to gain links to your site. The easiest way to get links to your site is by doing a link exchange.

Link exchanges are done with similar sites with both sites placing a link to the other. Link exchanges have been penalized by search engines because of heavy spam but there still benefits to doing a link exchange, so don’t be afraid to try.

The best links to get our inbound one way links. These links are sometimes difficult to get because there is no exchange. It requires the other web site to link to you without you linking to them. Gaining one way links should rank near the top of your off-page optimization strategy.

In order to get one way links you have to get noticed. Getting noticed online is not a whole lot different than getting noticed off-line.

In order to get other sites to link to your site you have to provide unique original content on your site. One way to develop this content is to add a blog, Forum, or other method to regularly add content to your site. If you have a static web site it will be much more difficult to gain links.

Applying SEO techniques such as the above can bring great benefits. As an example if you are trying to optimize a site that sells vitamins. The first step would be researching highly ranked competitors. After analyzing their sites you can use their blog or forum to determine what topics are hot. Typically in these community sites hot topics will draw quite a bit of traffic and comments from readers.

Snagging Inbound Links

By Andy MacDonald in Featured

Inbound links are now so important in the constant battle to achieve top search engine rankings, that tons of people are using every tactic under the sun to gain that one additional link. You must be careful when it comes to linking though. You could jeopardize your whole linking plan by getting links in a shady manner which could have an adverse affect on your search rankings. These inbound links are seen by search engines as votes for your site within a particular community of sites.

Anytime you’re being voted for, you want to have as many votes as possible. however you want to be using tactics which are going to pay dividends in your linking strategy, not do more harm then good. Below i list some of the best and safest methods around for generating inbound links for your website. Some can be more effective than others:

• Requesting Links: The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved in the market are. Then, you contact each one of the sites and ask them to link to your site. In most cases, the person you contact receives your request, but providing links to other sites is the least of their worries, so you may never hear from them. If you do, it can sometimes be months later. So, you put a lot of time into requesting links from other sites for a relatively small return on your efforts. For more on requesting links, i recommend you checkout The Do’s & Dont’s of Requesting Links.

• Writing Articles: One of the most effective methods of gaining inbound links is to offer an article for other companies to use as long as they include a paragraph at the bottom that includes credits for you as well as a link back to your site. This method of gaining inbound links works well, because web sites are always looking for good content to include on their pages. The catch here is that the article you write should be well written, accurate, and useful to other sites in your industry. Once you’ve produced an article that meets these requirements, you can begin to let others know you have content available for them to use for free; you can do this by having a ‘free articles’ page on your site or submit the content to article directories. For more on article marketing, view Bill Platt’s in-depth article, Article Marketing for Links.