Link building is the number one priority for any person who wants to make a website successful once your content is basically completed. You always want continuously new and updated content but the quality and quantity of the links to your site will determine its success online.
Easy way to begin your link building campaign
The easiest way to begin a link building strategy is to blog on other websites like yours. You want sites with high Google Page Rank to link to yours and therefore research is crucial. Find an online tool that helps you determine page rank.
The Google toolbar will do at minimum for displaying the page rank of any site you are looking at. We suggest using Firefox with a search engine optimization tool like SeoQuake. It will show you the age of the website, the page rank and importantly the number of links that site has to it and even the number of links to the page you are thinking of commenting on.
We also suggest using marketsamuarai.com and “dofollow diver.” All these tools show the “authority” of the page you are looking at. That way you don’t waste time blogging on the wrong type of websites.
Warning about most SEO browser tools
Be careful with these tools though. Google and Yahoo see most browser SEO toolbar that do mass amounts of automatic information requests as a possible virus or spyware. Usually you can only use it once a day with Yahoo before they block your IP address for the day. Google will let you use it several times before they start asking you to insert the captcha codes to make sure you are a human. MSN never blocks it as far as we have experienced.
Do not waste your time on links with zero SEO juice
Don’t waste your time on sites that will not pass any SEO juice to your own site. The higher the number of worthless links you have to your site the less your other links will be effective. Search Status is a good Firefox plugin that you can add to your browser.
It has a setting that allows you to know not just the page rank but also the Alexa ranking which is the overall traffic rank. The lower the Alexa rank the higher the sites traffic. It will also show you the Compete rank which can help. The main thing you want though is to enable the “highlight nofollow links” feature.
Nofollow links and how they could hurt your ranking
Nofollow links are links that are specifically coded to tell search engines that it is a low valued link. Search engines do not give your site as much SEO juice for these type of links that are coded with nofollow. Hopefully you can see the advantage of being able to go to a site and immediately see that all the links in the blog comments are nofollow links. This will help you focus energy and time commenting on pages that will benefit you the most in exchange for the amount of time it takes to write a healthy comment.
Reciprocal link exchanges can help your site
Link Acquisition Optimization
Now you are pointed in the direction of blogging on other sites that have dofollow links. While you are there on that site, and likely logged in, you might as well click the “contact us” button and send them a message that you are interested in doing a content exchange or reciprocal link exchange. Explain the uniqueness of the content you can provide for their site. Odds are only 1 out of 100 will respond positively. Even so, it is well worth the effort.
Resist the lazy man’s temptation to resort to spamming
Keep away from the temptation to spam their site. It is usually the same comment moderator for every section of the site. If they see you posted the same comment multiple times anywhere on their site, or even another site they control, it would be stupid for them not to delete your comments. There goes your links! Make sure that you do not create situations where you make a webmaster or website moderator have to chose between deleting you or being stupid. No one will chose the stupid option.
Which pages on your site should you link to?
Many also make the mistake of pointing all there links straight at there home page or the home page of their blog. The search engines look for patterns of natural linking and unnatural linking. If you were at Google and you were doing a manual review of sites and one site had 1,000 links, but most of them were pointing straight at the home page from blog comments, would you put that site on the first page of Google? Not likely.
What is a good ratio for home page linking?
Link 2/3rds of you incoming links to content in your site that is not on your home page. If you are blogging on a site talking about “Search Engine Optimization” then point your comment link to your page that discusses “Search Engine Optimization” or a very similar topic. Google scans your whole page and the page you are linking from and makes an associative analysis. It grades that link based on the content relevancy of the two pages.
Use bookmarking code to associate keywords with your domain name
Another option for home page linking is putting bookmarking links inside you page. So let’s say you want to optimize your home page for more than one keyword phrase. Put the “name” attribute in the code of a section of your site naming that section. Example we could place the code:
<p><a name=”search_engine_optimization”>EXAMPLE CONTENT SECTION</a</p>
as a bookmark tag inside the code of our home page section that talks about that subject. Then when I link to my home page I can link to http://optimizationtutor.com#search_engine_optimization (NOT OUR REAL HOME PAGE). This makes those keywords become associated with the content of that page. If someone clicks that link it will auto scroll down the page and focus the browser on that section of content. Those keywords better be in that content section or this will hurt you with the search engines.
Warning about url bookmarking
It is widely believed that bookmaking codes in url’s and other types of url structures are ignored by Google. We have found several instances where we click on a Google search result and it takes us to a section of a page that is far from the top. Other times comment structures are similar and Google may provide that comment link in search results. So for our purposes here we believe that bookmarked sections of a page is should be part of any SEO campaign.
Internal site linking is vital to keyword association
Internal site linking is vital. In every post on your site you should have keyword links to other posts on your blog. There are WordPress plugins that do this automatically for you but we have found that they can slow down your site. If you are talking about “link building strategies” as we are here when you mention another keyword or talk about another subject covered more thoroughly in another section of your site like “Marketing Strategies” then link to it.
