But essentially, once you know how to do all
that, it's not difficult to get it right for all
your pages/sites.
It's also less important in the long run than
getting sufficient links to your site/pages from
other sites.
Getting links to your site is fundamental to
getting visitors, and without visitors all the time,
effort and money invested in getting your site up
and running, and looking "nice", is irrelevant.
So links are essential to the health of your
site, and indeed your business, but all links are
not equal in value to your site.
Reciprocal links will help, but they are far less
effective than one way backlinks, i.e. links from
another site where you don't have to link back to
them. These "One Way" backlinks will give your site
a far greater boost in the search engine results and
bring you more traffic, providing of course that you
have chosen good (relevant) keywords for your links.
There are many ways of getting these powerful one
way backlinks, but most you will have no control
over the anchor text used (i.e. keywords) in the
link, which means their "power" is unfocused and
therefore of less use to you in achieving the
targeted keyword results you are looking for.
For example, submitting your site to website
directories can be a very effective way of picking
up some high quality one way links from high PR
sites, but you will seldom be able to choose the
keywords/anchor text used for the link, often ending
up with the site name as the link.
This is not a waste of time, as the Pagerank
passed to your site will, with the correct internal
linking structure, be passed on to your sites
internal pages, helping them to rank better for
their targeted keywords.
So how can you get highly targeted one way links?
It's fairly common for webmasters to now buy or
"rent" links to their sites through services like
Text-Link-Ads.com, and these services will allow you
to choose the anchor text, but they are far from
cheap. A link from a PR 8 site can easily cost $150+
per month. In fact there is now a business model
emerging based on building sites simply to sell
these kind of links (see LazyGitMarketing.com).
Google has also publicly stated that they
disapprove of this practice and are actively seeking
to downgrade the value of such "paid links",
although personally it seems like a valid form of
advertising to me, but maybe I just don't have
Google's wisdom in these matters. ;)
As always in business, there are entrepreneurs
who have identified this need in the market and a
whole new branch of linking services are popping up
offering new solutions for one way backlinks.
I've been testing some of them out over the last
few months and have found a couple that have had a
significant positive effect on the sites I used them
for.
The Backlink Solution
This first solution is a monthly subscription
that provides a network of high quality blog sites
for you to post comments on, including a link to
your site(s) using your chosen anchor text.
Note: As you make the link yourself, you
can also link to internal pages on your site to
improve their rankings as well, which you can't do
with directory submissions.
It is a manual process, but is easy enough that
it can be outsourced fairly cheaply.
The Pagerank of these blogs varies, but the links
provided are very "natural" in appearance to the
search engines, and as you can post unique relevant
content on market related blogs, the links are
highly relevant. You are also limited as to how many
blogs you can post to each month, to ensure that the
links grow naturally over time, rather than all in
one go.
Three Way Links
The internet marketing market is highly
competitive, so it's hardly surprising that another
service with a different twist has popped up from
this market.
This is an automated "three way links" system,
where you link to site A, which then links to site
B, which then links back to you. Whilst this is
arguably not as powerful as true "one way backlinks",
it's still a significant step above one way
"reciprocal" linking that is the more traditional
method used by the majority of webmasters.
The process is also automated for you, making it
very hands off. You can submit up to 20 sites with
just one account and you can specify three different
anchor texts to be used as the links for each
site's, making sure you don't incur any penalties
for over use of just one text link keyword or
phrase.
t is also set up to gradually build up the links
over time to make it all appear very natural to the
search engines.
Your Own Authority Blog
There is one final service that I've found to be
very useful, although it is more ideal for people
with multiple sites to promote.
The service gives you your own blog on an
existing high PR authority site. The site has
833,039 backlinks listed in Yahoo and gets spidered
several times a day by all of the major search
engines. For example in June 2007 Googlebot visited
it 14,470 times and Yahoo Slurp 52,436 times, so you
can see why it's regarded as an "authority" site.
I have used this to link to brand new sites and
had them indexed by Google within 24 hours, so it's
a great way of getting a new site in to the SE's
quickly, and the link weight will obviously also
help any site linked to.
As a side note, I've also found that my blog on
this site can get fairly significant traffic itself
when I take the time to keyword optimize the posts,
which is always a nice added benefit. I haven't
traded reciprocal links for any of my sites in
almost two years, and you can probably see why I
don't need to. Using powerful new linking tools and
services like these means I am able to take total
control over the "off page" SEO linking strategies
for my sites in the same way as I do for the "on
page" SEO factors.
Wouldn't you like to do have the same level of
control over your sites search engine rankings?
About The Author
Article by Matt Garrett © 2007
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