Linking strategies used to be the core of SEO practices. Because the web moves as slow (at times) as it moves fast, there are still many SEO firms which cite link-building as the core of SEO and have a price tag for 1,000 links, 5,000 links and so on.
In SEO forums I go to I often hear that 'link building' will drive your PageRank (PR) up which will then affect your position on the Google Index. You will then get more traffic, more customers and be more successful in your online business. I really wish that it was that simple. Unfortunately it isn't and many SEO newbies simply repeat the benefits of link building which they have heard in marketing emails by some SEO firms.
Let's dispel some myths first:
This does not mean that link building is not part of your SEO. On the contrary it helps as much as ever, it drives your PageRank (PR) and it is one of the metrics Google uses in its search algorithm to update the true PageRank (PR) of your website which determine sits ranking (this may be updated on an almost hourly basis for some sites and daily for the majority).
To help your website perform better online you definitely need some links and you need to have a linking strategy in place. More than that your linking strategy should be two-fold, first internal (which is easy to perform and you can control) and secondly external (harder to get right and one which needs a little time to take off).
An internal link-building strategy has very specific benefits:
If, however, we took a website such as one selling shoes, categories such as 'Walking Shoes', 'Running Shoes' would be a lot easier to cross-link to and the right kind of information relating to them would allow an easy way to get indexed the same way as Amazon is.
In order to create an effective, internal link building strategy you need to have some degree of automation and some logical criteria to help you create internal links. Here are ten easy suggestions to make this task manageable:
01. Use a sitemap – This is a sitemap which details your site structure to visitors. It is usually found at the footer of a website and it details pages such as 'Contact', 'Technical Information' and so on. Some dynamic websites like Joomla and WordPress have plugins which allow the dynamic creation of sitemaps which are automatically updated as the site expands. If your site is plain vanilla HTML then you will need to create it manually. Alternatively point your browser at Writemaps and create one using their automated process.
02. Create a FAQs page - Frequently Asked Questions pages can help you to get internal links to your posts while using highly targeted keywords and phrases. Create some common questions readers might have that can be answered by your blog posts. Pose the question on the FAQ page and partially answer the question and provide a link to a particular post for more information. When phrasing the questions, use keywords that readers are likely to use when performing a search, as this can help to improve traffic from search engines. Also use keywords in the anchor text of the links to your posts.
03. Link to related posts - Linking to posts on similar topics can help your readers to find additional content that may interest them. Just as importantly, it can also improve the number of internal links to your blog posts. You can manually create related links at the end of your posts, or, like I have done here with cross-linking to internal pages relevant to this post, you can create in-line links in the body-text of the post itself.
04. Include links to your most popular posts on your sidebar - Many blogs contain links to specific posts in the sidebar. Linking to those that are the most popular is a good way to increase your page views and also to improve your internal link strength Ideally this should be done automatically so that it helps to reduce your workload.
05. Write a series of posts - One easy way of building up the number of internal links going from one post to another is to write a series which has a unified theme. As the series is written and published each post can link to the others. If you have a very long post, consider breaking it into a series. Be careful not to do this all the time as your readers may start to feel like you are using them to gain page views. Series have the added advantage that they also tend to generate a great many external links.
06. Do a weekly or monthly summary - Many webmasters wrap up each month with a post that links to some of the most popular recent posts on the blog with a brief description of each. This obviously gives you a chance to add some internal links, and it can help readers who may have missed some posts as well as new subscribers to a website who may not have had the opportunity to read some of your best work.
07. Place links on your 404 pages - Error pages are frustrating to visitors. Help make your 404 error pages more-user friendly and drive a little bit of extra traffic to some of the most important posts. To do this you will need to manually edit your 404 page which means that you will need to either go into your hosting account control panel (cPanel provided by United Hosting allows you to do that) or find a way to edit the 404 page manually.
08. Include links in your footer – Footers should not be wasted space on your website. Consider placing links there to some of the most popular sections of your website or some of the most important posts you have created.
09. Use a 'related posts' sidebar – One of the easiest ways to generate relevant, internal cross-links is to have your site programming pick up relevant posts and display them in a sidebar alongside each new one your visitors are reading. In dynamic websites this is an automated feature requiring no work at all from you (apart from setting it up in the first place, of course). In plain vanilla HTML websites it can be done manually if necessary.
10. Include a promotional link at the end of specific posts – This is something you should consider doing sparsely, but at the end of long posts you can add a large promotional link offering something specific.
Provided you follow these ten basic strategies you should end up with a consistent, powerful and very logical way of creating internal links on your website. This now leads us to the second part of your linking strategy which is external links.
External links are the links leading from other websites to yours. These are important because they:
Now that we know the benefits and before we see how we can get some let's do a quick recap of what, popularly is known about external linking.
There are six types of links:
1. Reciprocal link – A reciprocal link is when you agree with another webmaster to give them a link and they give you one. This was, back before 2007, perceived as a win-win scenario and was abused to death. The Google Florida update in 2007 discounted almost every reciprocal link they could find and penalized those who overdid it by dropping their PageRank (PR). A reciprocal link or two, today may be OK but you do need to make sure it is 100% relevant, comes from a kosher site and the page it comes from does not link to 100 other sites (in which case it is a link farm and you will raise Gogle flags).
2. Three way linking – Three way linking came into effect after the 2007 Google Florida update and it was an attempt to trick Google into believing that reciprocal linking was more natural. Basically it went like this: site1 – links to site2 – which links to site3 – which links to site1. The attempt here is to provide a more 'natural' way of creating a link. Again, it works in a very limited fashion and is likely to hurt you more than benefit you.
3. Automated linking – This happens only if you become a member of a link exchange website. Members of these sites will typically agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites. This is link spam at its worst as there is little control and few checks and you are likely to end up with just the kind of links the Google Panda update looks for to penalize.
4. Link exchange - An alternative to the automated linking above is a link exchange forum, in which members will advertise the sites that they want to get links to, and will in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generated through such services are subject to editorial review so they are likely to be of a better quality and higher relevancy. Over a short period of time link exchanges full Google. Over longer periods of time inevitable patterns develop in the way links are exchanged and Google catches up to them.
5. One-way linking – One way links are also called inbound links or incoming links and they are the primary metric for assessing the PageRank (PR) of a website. They are created when an external website provides a link to a page without any exchange in links are all. These are the links most webmasters want which is why they are also the ones being frequently 'sold'. Those which are for sale are often low quality or from bad neighbourhoods and should be avoided. The 'Holy Grail' of SEO (from a narrow point of view) is to get as many one-way links as possible.
6. Multi-way linking - Multi-way linking is a technique used for website promotion whereby websites may create similar one-way links that each involves three or more partner sites. This provides each website with a one-way, non-reciprocal link. This technique has evolved from reciprocal linking. The term multi-way refers to the fact that the link exchange is between three, four or more websites, however each link is singular by only pointing to one other website. Multi-way linking is a 'grey hat' SEO technique. It artificially boosts a website's inbound link count without it deserving it.
If you have plenty of time and cash to burn the above link building techniques are great. They will form a good part of your SEO, will help with time, to increase your website's PageRank (PR) and will lead to more traffic and a better ranking, though nothing what you might expect.
Link building is important but on its own it now forms a tiny component of SEO which is why you need time and money to do all the things above. So, is there anything you can do which will work for you in terms of link building?
The simple answer is yes, there is. First of all try and create, on your website, the kind of content which others would want to link to anyway. This means that your website posts should really give information which is:
Then implement a social web publication strategy for each post. Publicise them on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg and the Google + 1 Button should be the minimum part of your social bookmarking strategy.
There are a few more social bookmarking websites you should be aware of. Ideally try to use as many as you can.
By going through the social bookmarking websites you generate external links to your own site, you succeed in making its presence felt in the social web (which means that Google and BING take notice) and you also make it easy to share your content on the web and link back to it by those who find it.
As external link building strategies goes this is one of the most cost-effective, time-saving, and robust ways in terms of what its impact is on your SEO and website ranking and it has the additional benefit that it never raises Google's flags.
So go to it!
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