1
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.
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Tags: inbound links, Linking Strategies
8
Here in part one of “Linking Practices” I will run through and explain in a little detail. While each method of linking has its benefits it also often has disadvantages. More often the advantages outweigh the disadvantages - if done correctly.
Reciprocal Links:
While many believe reciprocal links to be dead, these links have the potential to be either very useful or very useless; it all depends on the source for this one. A reciprocal link is a link swapped with another website. While the search engines don’t really give these all that much weight (unless from an authority site) these can be useful in driving traffic to your website from related websites. With enough of these links each driving small amounts of traffic to your website the increase in traffic can be quite noticeable.
A reciprocal link from an industry leader or a related industry leader can often lead to good volumes of traffic to your website. The greatest benefit here is that these are visitors that are already interested in your product or service. The disadvantage of running reciprocal links is that you get the world and his brother wanting to swap links with you, usually with absolutely no relevancy at all.
One Way Links:
These are the most valuable links when considering the search engines. A “direct “or “one way” link is a link to your website that is not reciprocated. The reason that this is so much more valuable is because in this case it a website that has linked back to yours without any solicitation (or at least that is how the search engines see it). The theory behind this and the PageRank algorithm is that every link to a website counts as a vote. Obviously the more votes you have the move important you site is seen to be. However it is also believed that every vote that you have to send out weakens your importance. Kind of like if you had a group of 10 people that all gave you $10, you would be up $100, but if you also had to give out $10 to each of them, then you simply break even. In the same way, the more votes that you are able to “bank” (not handed back) in this case the better off you are.
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Tags: deep links, Linking Strategies, links
5
The strategies I am going to reveal in this article are tailored for getting excellent search engine rankings in Google. The reason that I am solely going to concentrate on Google is because it is the largest search engine on the planet. In other words, most of the strategies I will reveal will also get faster rankings in other search engine such as Yahoo and MSN. But to be honest with you, Google is where to play and that’s where I will concentrate our linking efforts. Link Building Basics
You see, the search engine algorithms are always changing. But throughout all the search engine madness, there are some link building principles that have stood the test of time. That said, one of these axioms that has lasted is that it is the quality and quantity of back links to your site that determines your position in the search engines.
Google is smart enough to determine if a site has high quality links and delivering quality content relevant to the searched keyword. If a site has bad content, others will not want to link to them and Google will penalize them with a lower ranking. So, you see, in essence, the quality and quantity of links connecting to a site is one factor that determines the quality of the site and in turn, search engine ranking.
Another determinant in link building is the “anchor text” of a link. This is defined as the text in the link on a site. For example, if I have a site about ‘making money online’ and am trying to optimize for that keyword, I’ll try to get as many sites as possible to link to mine with ‘make money online’ as the anchor text. This tells the search engines that the site is indeed about ‘make money online’ and will give more weight to that link. Whereas if the anchor text is ‘teaching your parrot how to talk’ the search engine will not give that link much weight.
Google also gives more weight to a link that has anchor text relevant to the site. For example, the site that’s linking to me in the above example has to be about “make money online” if they are going to give extra weight to that link. It’s another way to determine that the user is finding what they are looking for and they’ll reward relevant links by giving you a higher ranking.
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Tags: link building strategies, Linking Strategies
