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Link building tips for search engine results

Link building is one of those time consuming things that all webmasters need to do. It does take a lot of time and resources however given the results that can be achieved through link building then it will be worth it. Link building is one of the most important elements of SEO

Link building is the best method of obtaining search engine results.

  1. Submit to well establish quality directories – Try to go for the best – some don’t offer the ability to use your anchor text, however they do carry great value.
  2. Article submission – Don’t just use article directories; get your article published in other sites. Don’t just write one article and promote it everywhere – Googles duplicate content filter will place multiple copies in the supplemental index.
  3. Buy links – ‘Yes’ Google say they can detect these links but in reality it is very difficult for them to do this. Google may be able to detect some paid links but most should go undetected. Try to get links placed within the content. These have a better chance of getting through Googles ability to detect paid links.
  4. Link baiting – This is the process of creating content so that people will link to your pages naturally. This requires a bit of skill and obviously you need to provide something link worthy. Promote your article through social networking sites like digg.com. Remember that most people who use these social networking sites are web savvy and can spot spam a mile off.
  5. Link exchange – many people say it does not work any more – they are wrong! There was a day a few years back when you could run hundreds of link exchanges and get a great ranking however those days are gone. Be more selective and don’t just go for a conventional exchange between two link pages – what about content exchange, article exchange or exchange with links being placed within the content? Remember link pages do not carry the same value as they did a few years back.
  6. Write testimonial’s for products/services that you have used – Although you may not get to use your anchor text in these links many of these links carry value in Google.
  7. Ask for links! Do not be afraid to contact others and ask for them. This is a tactic better used when/if you become an authority within your genre. Be polite and give them reasons why they should link to you. Even if you get 1 link out of every 50 requests it still will be worth the effort.
  8. Offer to write content/blog posts as long as you get to add links within your content. Provide quality examples of the content you have written and maybe suggest some topics you could write on for the site you are contacting.

Driving traffic to your Affiliate site

Having your own affiliate network website can be a very useful thing, as you can sell other peoples products and services on your website and earn commission by selling affiliate stuff.

The key to earning money from any website and to increase sales is traffic. When you have visitors and users coming to your website, it will definitely increase your sales and earnings. However, driving traffic to your site, especially an affiliate site can be a big problem. This can be due to several reasons:

  1. You are taking data directly from some affiliate network, in the form of XML Feeds or fetching and displaying it on your site using an API key.
  2. Your site has very little content and data of its own, so the website you have mainly has duplicate data from the affiliate network website like Amazon shop.
  3. Your Title Tags, Meta Tags and content is not unique, so most of your pages might end up in Google Supplemental Index (Supplemental Pages)

Such a situation can be problematic for your website and for its business. Duplicate sites and sites which mainly use some kind of feed to display and fetch data, like RSS Feeds sites, Affiliate network sites etc. usually suffer from these problems and hence have a hard time in getting traffic from the search engines.

More Traffic more Sales

There are various ways by which you can drive traffic to your website.

Paid Advertising

PPC, also known as Pay-Per-Click Advertising by using Google Adwords or similar program. This can be effective and fetch highly targeted traffic if you carry out a proper PPC campaign. However, over time it can get very expensive.

Website Promotion and Marketing

Online and Offline Marketing and website promotion can also drive traffic to a website. These methods include banner advertisement, link purchases, Press Releases and offline promotion like newspaper ads, hoardings etc. Please note that Paid Advertising like PPC is also a kind of online marketing and promotion technique.

However, the results for these are short term, and only last while you spend money on your advertising campaign. As soon as your advertising budget exceeds, and you stop the promotion, you lose all kinds of traffic coming to your website.

Search Engine Optimization

This is the most effective of all these methods and also leaves long lasting results. Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO involves changing your website pages in a way so that they become more Search Engine Friendly and hence achieve high rankings in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Some of the most important factors involved in SEO include:

  1. Keyword Research
  2. Market and Competitor Analysis
  3. Creation of Landing pages for the website, and defining a directory structure for the pages which is search engine friendly
  4. Content Writing and Addition to the website, related to the Keywords and website theme
  5. Title Tags, Meta Description and Keyword Tags generation for all the website pages
  6. Search Engine Friendly URL writing for all the pages
  7. Website submission to Search Engines, Web Directories, Article Directories and Social Bookmarking sites
  8. Getting Links (One-way links to the website) with appropriate Anchor Texts
  9. Monitoring the website progress and ranking on the Search Engines
  10. Improving the website and optimizing it, adding more contents and getting more links on a regular basis

SEO is a time taking process, and a new site can take up to 8 – 10 months to start showing in rankings for niche and competitive keywords on Search Engines. However, the results you obtain after all the efforts are fruitful, after which you can enjoy traffic coming to your website directly from the Search Engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Using Keywords in Anchor Texts

Before you start a links campaign for your website, or directory submissions, you need to decide the Keywords you will be targeting and the Anchor Texts which you will use for your links campaign. These anchor texts will use your important keywords in them which will help you in Search Engine Rankings for these Keywords.

Here are a few tips which will help you make your anchor texts.

1. Only use the most important Keywords in your Anchor Text

It is a good idea to do some Keyword Research using a Keyword Tool like Wordtracker to decide the most important Keywords related to the theme of your website. You should be using the popular search terms in your Anchor Texts which show up in the Search when you use the Keyword Tool.

You can find a very good Keyword Suggestion Tool at Digital Point.

2. Do not make the Anchor Texts too long

Long, rambling, keyword stuffed Anchor Texts make no sense and might actually harm you in Search Rankings. Search Engines might penalize your site for using a long keyword stuffed or spammy Anchor Text. Remember, your Anchor Texts should be short and to-the-point and should make sense.

3. Make your Anchor Text Useful

Don’t simply paste Keywords in the Anchor Text, separated by commas, like Keyword 1, Keyword 2, Keyword 3. This looks completely absurd and users won’t be interested to click on it. Your Anchor Text should be a coherent sentence or a short phrase which makes sense. Make your Anchor Texts natural.

4. Use Anchor Text variations

If you are targeting 5 or 6 important keywords, it is always a good idea to make 5 or 6 different Anchor Texts, each focusing on the targeted Keyword. You should use these variations when submitting your site to link directories.

5. Make different Anchor Texts for different Landing Pages

If you have several important landing pages in your site, which you want to promote using link building, make different Anchor Texts for each of these landing pages. Use a Keyword Tool and research for the Keywords for each of these landing pages. Then create 3 or 4 variations of Anchor Texts for each of these landing pages. You can then use these Anchor Texts to submit your site to Directories and Link Forms.

6. Relevance is most important

This might seem obvious, but relevance is the most important thing in Anchor Texts. If you are making Anchor Texts for a page for Blue Widgets, make sure you use Blue Widgets in the Anchor Text, instead of using keywords like Green Widgets, Cheap Widgets etc.

Remember, Search Engines also give importance to Relevance. If your anchor text has Blue Widgets in it, and your page also used the Keyword Blue Widgets in the Title, Content and Body of that page, the anchor text will work perfectly with that page.

These tips are useful for all sort of anchor texts, whether internal or from other websites. When you link to an internal page of your site, always use some meaningful anchor text like ‘Find more details for Blue Widgets‘, where Blue Widgets should be the link, instead of ‘Find more details for Blue Widgets here‘.

You can also find more tips for Anchor Texts by following these links:

Better Anchor Texts by John Chow

Anchor Text Optimization Tips

Too many Blog Comment Links can be Harmful

Many webmasters and website owners today have changed their focus from reciprocal links to non-reciprocal / one-way links due to the importance Search Engines give to one-way non-reciprocal links. There are a number of strategies that can be adopted to increase the number of one way, incoming links to a website. One of these, which you’ll come across, while reading many link building and development guides, is Blog Comments.

Leaving Useful Comments on blogs related to your niche is no doubt a very good idea to get links and users to your website. It is the easiest and most targeted method through which people will find you and will link to you if you provide useful comments and are a regular visitor to those blogs.

However, there is a very fine line in using Blog Commenting the ‘Ethical Way‘ and the ‘Unethical Way‘. If most of the incoming links to a website are from Blogs, and specifically from Blog Comments, Search Engines might end up penalizing your website.

Search Engines now consider websites that have a high percentage of links from Blogs as ‘Bad Neighborhood‘ sites. Domains that have a high occurrence of links that appear to be from blogs may be penalized by Search Engines. It may be normal for blogs and forums to have lots of incoming links from blogs, but for many commercial websites, a large percentage of links from blogs could indicate an attempt to increase search engine rankings through blog comment spamming.

So if you have a new website, and you plan to promote it and bring traffic and users to it through blog comments, make sure you have some other methods of attracting links to your website also, to even it all out. Incoming links from Blogs only can be harmful for your website.

Killer Link Building Strategies Mini Guide

I finally took out the time to write my own guide for some great link building strategies. The guide is now online at Killer Link Building Strategies. It still needs a lot of additions and I need to cover more topics in more detail. I’ll keep updating it regularly and make it the ultimate guide for link building for all the newbies out there learning link building and how to collect links for their websites.

I’m also thinking of making an even better and detailed version and maybe put it on my site in the form of an e-book.

PR 5 in a few months for your new site?

Is it true that an aggressive link building campaign can get you a PR 4 or PR 5 site in just a few months for your new site, without buying any links?

During the last 2 to 3 years, I’ve been working and managing a number of sites and finding link partners for them. I’ve found that hard work and persistence can easily get you a Google PageRank of 4 or 5 for your brand new site, in a few months, all with free link exchanges!

Getting things ready for your links campaign

It’s true about the aggressive link building campaign. What you really need is persistence and hard work. Firstly, add a links directory to your site / link pages, what ever you are comfortable with. These should be in place so you don’t have to go make new pages again and again whenever a new link request comes. You should spend some time looking around web directories and link pages to see the categories and sub-categories that you are planning to use in your links directory. A link submission form should also be added. Adding a links directory should be a few hours work, and a days work if you’re a little lazy.

Finding Good Link Partner Sites

When this is in place and functional, you can start finding good link partners. To find good link partners, you should see sites linking to other competitor sites, those that are ranking high on Search engines, those that accept links and have a links form on their site. Find websites that are already doing well on search engines for keywords like “your keyword + directory submission”, “your keyword + link exchange”, “your keyword + submit URL”, using several other variations and also using the allintitle, allinurl commands on Google. If you are having difficulty in finding good link partners, spend a few hours searching for websites that give you useful tips and tricks on finding good sites to exchange links with.

Other than these, you will be much better off if you contact a lot of low PR, industry related sites. These are sites that don’t even make to the top ranking positions, but actually exist with PR 4 or 3 or lower. You can easily find such sites through some directory, like the Yahoo! directory, or DMOZ, by browsing to the relevant category/sub-category, or using some other search engine like MSN and Yahoo. Most of these low ranking websites will be willing to give a link without you linking to them!

Your plan for finding and contacting webmasters

Try to add and review at least 100 – 200 sites every day. You should be working full time only on finding good websites to exchange links with. 200 websites a day makes 25 links/websites every hour if you work 8 hours per day. Once you have a list of 800 or 1000 link partners, start contacting them. You (or some resource) should be working on it full-time and contact as many partners for link exchange as you can. It will be a good idea if you use some tool like Arelis, by Axandra, to manage your links campaign. Now time yourself, and you should be sending 20 – 30 emails every hour to link partners. If you have a links manager tool, you should be able to send more requests per hour. This way you’ll have contacted the 800 or 1000 sites you collected in just 2 or 3 days. The more emails you send, the more likely you’ll get a response.

So, you should be spending 4 to 5 days on finding good link partners and then contacting them in the next 4 to 5 days. A few points that you should consider are that you shouldn’t be spending too much time on reviewing websites. You should be able to figure out in 1 or 2 minutes if you will be willing to exchange links with a website or not.

Plan and time yourself

This is the trick I’ve been using to get links. Just plan and time yourself in everything you do. You should start getting replies from link partners in a day or two, once you start sending those emails. You should be making 4 – 5 links or more on average per day easily if you use this approach. Some link partners are slow in responding. Others don’t inform you at all if they link back. But you will be able to find out the other sites linking to you once you start seeing referrals in your website statistics.

Avoid Search Engine Penalties

Repeat the process again for the next few weeks. Keep a target and achieve it. Say, 60 links every month. Make sure you rotate the link texts and descriptions often to avoid Search Engine penalties of getting lots of links quickly in a short period of time.

The good thing about this campaign is that most of the sites will link back without even asking for a link from your site. These will be free incoming links to your site and will have more weight as they will be non-reciprocal links.

Web Directory and Article Submissions

Apart from this, write articles and submit them to as many article directories as possible. A well written article should get you more than 300 – 500 links alone. And don’t forget to do directory submissions. They can help you boost your link popularity and help you get a lot of keyword rich text links. For a list of Free Search Engine Friendly directories, you can visit http://www.seo-reloaded.com/ . You can also find a list of Niche Link Directories.

 

Note: Please feel free to link to the article if you find it useful, or use it on your blog or article directory with a functional link to my SEO Blog and website, or submit it to article sites if you want, with the links intact.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome. You can submit your comments below. 🙂

Free Web Directories

Heres a short list of free directories to start submitting your site to. I’ve started submitting my sites to directories and I’m looking for free directories only to submit to. So I’ve decided that I’ll be posting the directories I submit my links to here on a regular basis.

http://www.hugedirectory.net/
http://www.web-directory-submit.com/
http://www.directorynew.com/
http://www.lfaj.com/
http://www.pius.us/directory/
http://www.zopso.com/
http://www.d911.net/
http://www.linktomysite.net/
http://www.roqz.com/
http://www.plugxl.com/
http://www.ofcourse.us/

Most of these directories are very new and are offering free submissions for a limited time only, so hurry and add your link today!