Building an Essential Linking Strategy - Marketing & SEO Discussion List

Essential Linking Strategies

Summary: A list of 5 fundamental steps you can take to springboard an effective linking campaign. The advice is simple and straightforward, and can be put to use immediately by any Webmaster; it should prove especially useful for new sites and those inexperienced with search engine optimization. For more on linking visit the Linking School at linkpartners.com.

Keeping Your Link Pages Tight and Building Them Right

People have written textbooks - thick, heavy textbooks - about linking strategy. If you want to find that depth of information, visit LinkPartners.com and read all the articles in the "Linking School." That will get you as much, and much more accurate, information on linking for free than you'll get from any $40 textbook.

What you're going to get here is something very different, a short list of five linking "dos" and "dont's" for relative newbies. If you've already got a site with a high page rank and a robust link network, you don't need this information. If on the other hand ....

Don't confuse quantity with quality

Heaven knows it's tempting. All those enchanting ads ... "get 5,000 or 10,000 or 25,000 links for $29 or $39 or $199." What's wrong with that? Nothing at all if you don't mind your site dropping into the Google cat box or disappearing from the Yahoo index.

Don't confuse quantity with quality. Googlebot and the other major SE bots NEVER, EVER confuse quantity with quality. Of all the stupid search-engine spamming schemes ever invented and sold to gullible suckers, the idea that you can fool a search engine by burying it under thousands of bogus links is arguably the dumbest.

If you don't pay attention to anything else in this article, pay attention to this: For the past year, for the past entire 12 months, the NUMBER 1 or, very rarely, NUMBER 2 (occasionally Wikipedia's DVD article has been #1) return in a Google search for "DVD" has had about 300 links.

That's number one (occasionally two) out of over one billion returns. By contrast the site in the number 50 position had more than 6,000 links, five times as many as the top-of-page-one site. In a late February 2007 Google search for the term "web site creation," the number one return had 78 links and the number two site 10. Other sites further down in the returns had hundreds or thousands of links.

Do remember linking is about more than search-engine rankings

This may seem odd coming after a warning about over-linking, but reciprocal linking, in which you trade links with compatible, relevant sites, can drive significant traffic to your site and provide great value to your customers seeking information on products or services related to, but not exactly the same, as what you offer.

Having not enough links is no better than having too many links. The key really is quality. Unlike bogus search-engine-scam-type links - of which there are an infinite number - there are typically a limited number of quality links available in any one field of human interest, thus the law of supply and demand will ensure that you'll never get too many of them.

Don't assume everybody will jump at the chance to link with you

As noted above, the law of supply and demand applies to linking as it does to every other form of commerce. Not every quality webmaster you approach will accept your invitation to trade links.

Truthfully, the majority of them will probably turn you down until your site has been established and around for awhile. This is not a bad thing, you don't want to link with sites which accept link proposals indiscriminately. You want to be choosy about who you link to and you only want to link to sites who are equally choosy.

That said, there are ways to increase your link-solicitation success rate. The best method is to forgo sending generic link request e-mails or forms and send a personalized request that lets the recipient know that you've seen and admired their site and gives a reason or two why you think a reciprocal link would benefit both of you.

The second way to get more of the link partners you want is to keep after them. Persistence is rewarded and some webmasters are reluctant to link to sites until they've been on line for six months or a year. Being persistent shouldn't be confused with stalking. It will do you no good to harass someone every week. But a reminder that you'd still like to link up every three or four months can produce excellent results, particularly if you point out ways your site has evolved for the better in the interim.

Do use labor-saving devices, but don't let them do your thinking for you

There are an untold number of products promising to fully automate the creation and maintenance of link pages. Products that restrict editorial control conflict with ethical web practices and violate search-engine linking guidelines.

Fortunately, that doesn't mean you have to do all the time-consuming coding and design of link pages and the grunt work of checking for dead links and uploading new ones yourself. Editor-based link management systems do most of the link-related data-processing and page creation chores for you while leaving all the decisions about who to link to and when completely in your hands. The best editor-based link management applications also include fail-safe features to prevent users from inadvertently violating search engine guidelines.

Don't be afraid to be bold

There are no rules, not in search engine guidelines or anywhere else, that say links have to be a one-line headline, followed by a line or two of anchor text that never changes. Link enhancements such as LinkBlogs, combine the power of linking and blogging by automatically adding fresh, timely content to your anchor text. At least one editor-based link management program offers an add-in that allows you to apply an almost unlimited number of styles to your links, which can dramatically improve the click-through rate of your links.

That's it. Five "do's" and "don'ts" to help you safely, efficiently and effectively get your link exchange campaign off the ground and into cyberspace. Of course, setting up a linking campaign that drives traffic to your site is only one half of the battle. The other half is making sure your site is full of top-quality content that enlightens, informs and turns visitors into customers.

Comments (1) add comment

Isyaias said:

Thank you for this fresh topic. It re-fresh my mind about create a good link behavior. It's help me re-mind what is web essensial being.

Great and Super Days be with us.

July 13, 2007

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