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Building backlinks is an essential, yet tedious
job for most webmasters. Here are a few tools
and tips to make that job just a little bit easier…

I am a member of many online forums. Most of these
forums have to do with online marketing and site
promotion. Recently, I came across a post on Ken
Evoy’s SBI forum that truly caught my attention.

It basically described how to use Google Alerts
to build your backlinks. Now for those not familiar
with Google Alerts a little explanation is probably
needed.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free program run by Google
that allows you to keep track of any topic on
the web. You select your “keywords” or “urls”
and Google will alert you via email whenever
links/content containing your selected topics
appear anywhere on the web.

It is an excellent way to keep informed about
your own domain or name. It is also perfect for
keeping up-to-date on the latest information in
your market niche or niches. It’s also a great
way to find out what other people are saying
about you or your site.

For example: if you have a site on “antique cars”
then you would create a Google Alert for those
keywords. Google will alert you by email whenever
a new link/content related to those keywords
appears on the web.

This is a great way to stay informed in your niche,
but it is also a valuable source of potential
linking partners. Many of those links are blogs
that will allow comments with a link back to your
site.

Google Alerts will probably send you 10-20 links
each day, depending on the popularity of your
chosen keywords. Just go to these blogs/links
and see if you can leave a comment with some
valuable additional information on what’s been
discussed.

Don’t Spam

Please Note: Don’t spam; there are intelligent
people behind most of these blogs, and they will
recognize keyword spam when they see it. Your
main goal should be getting targeted traffic back
to your site and any link PR should be secondary.
Always put the reader or viewer first, especially
if it’s on someone else’s site. Don’t talk about
your site or your marketing - just join the conversation
and add your comments/opinions/suggestions…

Enhance their site and they will reward you with
traffic and a link. But you still have to keep
your own interests in the equation! You have to
make sure you get your targeted keywords in the
anchor text.

Keyword Market

First, if you’ve done your homework, your main
keywords should already be in your domain name
or url. Another way is to add your “keywords” +
“guide” to your sig or signature. Such as:
Name, Your Antique Cars Guide. If you’re an
expert in your particular niche, many webmasters
will kindly welcome your comments and links.

Since your main goal is the traffic, many
webmasters don’t worry if there is a “no follow”
attribute attached to the link. But if you are
concerned about this - one way is to look at
the source code to see if it has the “no follow”
tag. I usually copy the whole source code of
the page to my text editor and then do a simple
“no follow” search.

No Follow

There is also a great little free comment tool
called “Comment Kahuna” co-created by Jason
Potash which will search blogs and tell you if
they have the “no-follow” attribute or not, it
will also give you the PageRank of each blog post.
If you’re going to use blogs as a source of
your backlinks, I suggest you try Comment
Kahuna - it will make the task much easier
and it’s free.

Actually, while the “no-follow” issue may be
a concern for some webmasters, the savvy ones
will realize these are links/sites Google is
actively indexing and spidering, otherwise you
wouldn’t get the alert in the first place. You
must get your links into this whole mix of related,
relevant sites to help raise your own rankings.
Also remember the other search engines may not
even consider the “no-follow” tag.

Trackbacks

Likewise, creating trackbacks are another way
of linking relevant content. Keep in mind, a
trackback is simply an acknowledgement via a
ping signal that is sent from Site A (originator)
to Site B (receptor). Then the receptor often
places a link back to Site A showing its worthiness.

Again, I am mainly concerned with the quality
of the blog or link, rather than the linking
structure. I want the targeted traffic, and it
doesn’t really matter whether the link has
“no follow” because interested visitors only
see a link they can click for other helpful
information.

Other Linking Options

Since we are on the topic of link building,
another useful way to build backlinks is to
use Google Search or Google Blog search. Now
if you’re looking for niche-related blogs just
type in:

“(Keywords)” “powered by (blog scripts)”

For example, if you’re looking for some
“antique cars” related links on WordPress
blog, you would search for:

“antique cars” “powered by wordpress”

And Google would give you a whole list of sites
on antique cars.

Now if you want to find the links that will
allow comments, just repeat the Google search
with:

“antique cars” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment”
-”no comments”

Remember the “-” means posts that have no
comments will not be displayed.

If you’re concerned with PageRank, Number of Backlinks,
Alexa Ranking… of particular posts you can download
and install the SEOQuake plugin. This handy SEO plugin
can be attached to your browser and will give you helpful
SEO information on the link or links you’re viewing.

Please Note: If you’re using SEOQuake in FireFox you have
the option in Preferences to tick a Line-through “nofollow”
and “noindex” links. Really handy tool to find those “nofollow”
links…

Used in conjunction with Google, it can sort thru all
these blog posts and give you the ones with the highest
PR? Highest traffic? Highest number of backlinks? The
more knowledge you have, the easier and more effective
your link building will become.

Just remember, finding quality backlinks is probably
the most tedious job for most webmasters. It takes
time and it takes patience. By using Google Alerts
you can have relevant keyword related links emailed
to you each day. Use this information to help build
your backlinks in relevant related niches. Do this
consistently over a period of time and your site will
get noticed and ranked higher.

Tags: , backlinks, building links, comment kahuna, google alerts, link building, seo, seoquake

In this second article, we examine some more things to watch out for when you are creating a link building campaign. Hopefully by the end, you will be in a better position to obtain and maintain good quality backlinks that help launch your site up the search engine rankings.

1. Is The Links Page Indexed By The Search Engines?

If a link on pages is not being read by the search engines, then it is not of much use to you. The further the links page is from the home page, the less likely it is to be indexed. If a page has PR, then you know that it has been indexed (by Google at least), although no PR does not mean that the page has not been indexed. You can conduct your own test by typing cache: followed by the url of the page in question. If the page has been crawled, you should see some results.

2. Should You Be Wary Of 3 Way Links?

Many people feel that direct reciprocal linking has limited value these days. One way around this is the idea of 3 way links; where site A links to site B, and site B links to site C. Site C then links back to site A again. One problem with this is that it is harder to control where exactly your link is going to end up. If as a matter of policy you have decided that relevance if of paramount importance, then 3 way linking may not be for you, Or at least, it may be harder to organise.

3. Association With Particular Sites?

Your decision whether to link or not should be a bit easier having read this article (hopefully). You should have some criteria in mind as to what constitutes a site you want to be associated with. If the site in question meets your criteria, then add a link. Equally, if that site does not meet your criteria, then steer clear.

4. How To Keep Track Of Links Back To Me?

This is perhaps the hardest and in some cases the most time consuming part of your link building process. Obtaining links is a painstaking and time consuming process, and you don’t want to give your work away too lightly. To protect your links and the integrity of your sites, you should check that your link partners are keeping to their side of the bargain and keeping your links live. You could do this by maintaining a spreadsheet of all of the links, and checking them one by one. Ouch! I can suggest an easier way to do this which will save you many hours a week though. I will go into that at the end of this article.

5. What Are The Best Links To Have?

There is no definitive answer the this question. Maybe one way to answer this is the links that deliver the most traffic to you. Or perhaps the links that give the best value to your customers. There is no right answer. One way to find good potential partners is to type in a specific keyword into the search engines, and contact some of the sites that come up at the top of the results. These should be good potential partners.

What you have now are some good ideas for a link building strategy that allows you to make good decisions based on sound principles, and now you should be better placed to make those decisions.

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Charlie Cory - You can make your link building life an easier by using tools that save you time and money. Link Checking is a breeze when you have the right tool to help you. This tool can also help you find better link partners. You can try some new link building techniques. These are very successful. Techniques that take the pain away from the link building process.

Tags: link building, linking, Linking Strategies

Search engine optimization encompasses link building as one of the cornerstones of off-page optimization. Off-page optimization deals with the number of inbound links a site receives from other websites and how they reference and link to the target site.

Before you look outside of your own site for links, harvesting the “link equity” and internal link opportunities that exist within your own site are paramount when acquiring competitive keywords.Internal links are link wine, they get stronger with age, so how many pages do you have within your site that have page rank (a healthy volume of link weight) that you could harness for a common goal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Anchor Text SEO and Internal Links, Leveraging Internal Links and Link Equity, link building, Think Before You Link

Swapping links is still a tremendously popular method of building incoming links to your website and so increasing your visitor numbers.

But there are still an astonishingly large number of ways in which web masters make it difficult for other people to exchange links with them.

And let’s be honest - the easier you make it for other web masters, the more links you will end up with.

So let’s examine some of these ways as examples of tactics you should avoid if at all possible in your campaigns. All three of these examples are things I have seen on live websites in the last week or so, so these are really going on right now.

1) Demanding A Minimum PageRank (PR)

To many web masters, PR is the be all and end all of link swapping. To a certain degree this makes sense but be aware that Google is getting smartrer all the time. If it spots a site with no PR0 sites linking to them then this may well look unnatural.

And Google doesn’t like annatural. It’s one way Google ascertains whether you’re trying to “game the system” and if you get caught you may find yourself delisted from Google altogether.

What’s more, a PR0 site will likely gain Page Rank at the next Google update if it’s a new site, so you would have had a quality link on that site if you were willing to be patient.

Infact, I’ve had sites go from PR0 to PR4 in a single indexing (and plenty of other people have experienced the opposite as their Page Rank vanishes overnight).

So the point is - you’re making decisions based on a highly fluid and flexible quality like Page Rank whihc will be constantly changing. And as a result you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Make the *quality* of the site in question the primary decision-making factor and I think you’ll have a far better long-term strategy.

2) No Blog Links

It’s true that spam blogs (or “splogs”) are rife but equally there is an ever growing number of good-quality blogs with excellent content, high readerships and lots of incoming links.

Excluding blogs altogether rules out exchanges with a huge pool of sites that are perfect for link exhcanges so take off your blinkers.

Indeed, with blogs being accepted into standard search engines and directories *as well as* specialised blog and RSS directories, this can even mean that they offer your site even more that a standard website.

3) No Link Exchange Form

Too many sites still expect web masters to email them to exchange links rathet than filling in a small form on their website. Not only is this frustrating for potential linkers because it’s so slow but emails increasingly get lost in cyberspace or in today’s spam filters and so may not even be received.

So use a contact form which makes life easier for visitors to your site and also ensures you get all the information you need to make a decision about te suitability of potential link partners.

Richard Adams is the creator of an exciting, brand new course on how to build your own website from scratch in 7 days or less with no technical knowledge. Take a look today at Ecommerce Website Design

Tags: link building, link exchange

Two of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.

In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.

Before we get started, it’s important to understand the fundamentals…

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. An ‘internal link’ is a link within the same website. An ‘external link’ takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The term ‘backlink’ means when another website links to yours.

There are 4 different types of links:

* URL Link - This is simply a website url that is a link.

* Text Links (aka static links) - This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)

* Image Links - An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

* Dynamic Links - These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have ‘extra codes’ to perform special functions.

(these types of links can appear in many different forms)

It is important to be able to recognize these types of links, even if you are not familiar with web design and programming. You don’t have to memorize the codes, just learn to identify each type of link.

Links provide navigation for human visitors and for ’spiders’ (aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit and ‘index’ your website. This means that they gather information about your site in order to list it in their search results.

When the search engine spiders index your website, they follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It’s important to know that search engines cannot follow ‘dynamic links’ and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says ‘no follow’.

The place where ‘no follow’ is commonly found is in the “meta tags” section of the website. Simply put, meta tags are information that is for the spiders only and is not seen by human visitors. You can see the code for any website in your browser by choosing ‘view source’. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)

If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.

What types of links should you get?

There are 2 types of links that you can get:

* One-way links - A one-way link is when another website links to you and you don’t link back to them.

* Reciprocal links - A reciprocal link is when a website links to you and you link back to them.

One-way links are more valuable in the eyes of the search engines. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, etc.

Also, it’s important to know that you can get links that have ‘no value’ in the eyes of the search engines, but they bring you hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors…

Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the better. However, building links takes time and energy and if you focus on getting ‘high-quality links’, you will get a bigger return on your investment. 50 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective than 1000 ‘low quality links’.

What’s a high quality link? - Links that brings you Page Reputation (which shows the search engines that other related websites consider you to be important), and links that give you PageRank. Sometimes both at once, sometimes not…

To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain links for targeted keywords. For this reason it’s necessary to start with Keyword Research.

If your website is about “bird watching”, the first step is to ‘do keyword research’ and find out which keyword you should aim for. While you could just start getting text links for the keyword phrase “bird watching”, if no one is searching for that - you won’t get any visitors. There’s no sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no one is looking for.

Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you might want to pick a “lower hanging fruit”.

Here is a great free keywords tool. (The numbers you see are searches/day.)

Another important part is making sure your page is optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are focussed on building one way links to your site but the links have anchor text which doesn’t even appear on your page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely assuming that you have some competition for your targeted keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn’t matter).

In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or maybe you are building one way links to your site but they are just url links and not anchor-text links. Another site that has less links than you but better quality (anchor-text) will be likely to rank higher.

Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have anchor text which includes the primary and secondary keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word with their keywords. Their algorithm looks at all the words on your page and how they relate to each other.

So, there’s no sense in building one way links if your content is not worthwhile. You want to optimize your pages for your visitors first. Then, you can go through and “sprinkle” your keywords. Then, go out and get one way links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords, ideally getting most of these links from websites that are related to yours.

Yes, Google also looks at the relationship between your website’s content and the websites that links to you’s content. Fewer links to your business site from other business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more links coming to you from a site about video games..

Don’t make these link building mistakes:

* Don’t spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites with no PR.

* Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. Especially be careful about Site Wide links. If your website only has a few backlinks one day and the next day you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.

* Don’t spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.

* Make sure the links you get are actually worth something, don’t get “No-Follow” links.

Happy Link Building!

Jason Storm is an SEO Expert who consults for small-business owners who want to increase their search engine rankings by using content optimization and one way link building strategies. Visit his website Affordable SEO Services for more info and articles.

Tags: link building