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Links… aren’t we all a little tired about hearing about links?  Don’t link to bad neighbourhoods, don’t link to link farms… don’t get links from bad neighbourhoods; don’t get links from link farms.  Don’t buy links.  Don’t sell links.  Don’t have too many links on one page.  Don’t let all the links pointing to your website have the same anchor text.

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Tags: links, paid links, sold links

Google is all about linking. And if you want to snatch a top spot in Google’s search results you need to link like a pro.

But don’t worry. Linking is a whole lot easier today than it was a few years ago. Experience has taught us a lot and with the information in this article you won’t need to worry about endless trial and error. We have a repeatable process that anyone can do, as easy as 1, 2, 3.

That said; let’s take a look at the linking strategies that Google will give you the most credit for…

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Tags: Linking Strategies, links, reciprocal linking, seo

Here in part three of “Linking Practices” we will cover how to maximise the benefits of those links we discussed previously (check out part 1: “Links Defined” and part 2: “Links Applied“).

This section could also be classified as: Tips, Hints and Cheats. While I recommend and try at all times to adhere to ethical and honest practices there are many webmasters out there that do not. While PageRank still remains a prize in eyes of many webmasters there will always be a handful that will do anything to try and game the system. These are some of the usual ways in which they do this:

Robots.txt

The robots file is a little plain text file that resides in the root directory of a website. The purpose of this file is to notify the search engine spider of which pages should be indexed and which should not. After all you wouldn’t want the backend to your website indexed in the search results. This file stands alone and you cannot know its contents by looking at a standard webpage on that site. I know many webmasters have now started using the robots.txt file to exclude their link pages from the search engine spiders. By doing this they are effectively preventing the search engine from seeing the link to your page. This in turn makes your link back to them seem like a valuable one way link.

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Tags: linking practices, Linking Strategies, links

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

Search engine optimization has been around almost as long as search engines have. It probably started about five minutes after someone realized there was money to be made on the Web, but only if your site could be found easily enough.

The reason for optimizing a Web page is the same today as it was a decade ago but the methods have changed quite a bit. Actually the methods seem to change every few months but a lot of this is just hype and fads. The three things that will get you to number 1 on Google are the same today as they were in 1998; keywords, content and links. And the thing that keeps you at the top is constant monitoring.

Keywords are easy to find with the right tool. But please don’t go buying any fancy keyword software just yet. We’ll use Google’s free keyword research tool in just a minute and that’s more than good enough to do the trick. Before we do that though there’s one very important thing to consider; good keywords are only half the battle. We want to find the best keywords with the least competition.

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Tags: keywords, links, strategies