Water into Wine No Water Into 3 times more potent than gasoline.
This article shows how I was thoroughly laughed at by my friends when I told them cars would run on water... but guess who's laughing now.
Author: Dave Davies
Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website
highly on the major search engines. There, now that we've got
that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let's move
on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch
into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would
be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are
important and the different elements of them. Being a beginners
guide this won't be an entirely complete list but it will be
enough to get you going on the right path. Understanding what
you're trying to do will help you do it better and more
importantly, understanding the "why" of the situation will help
you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on
link building.
Why Are Links Important?
To put it simply: a link is a vote. Every link pointing to your
site from another website tells the search engines that the
other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines
read this as a vote for your site. So it must be about getting
tons of links and you're done right? Wrong. This is incorrect
as ...
Not All Votes Are Created Equal
Unlike your own vote in an election, some votes are worth more
than others and some votes are worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than
yours (unless of course you're a content writer for the
Google.com domain in which case you obviously have the top
vote). The basic factors that affect a link's value to your
website are:
The site strength – the strength of the site that is pointing to
yours is a significant (and historically abused) factor in the
valuation of links. In the absence of other easily-visible
criteria let's look at PageRank as a key valuation of a site's
strength. If a site with a PageRank 8 links to your site, this
vote is worth significantly more than a link from a PageRank 3
site. This is because a PageRank 8 site is, in Google's eyes, a
more important site than the PageRank 3 site.
Relevance – the relevance of a site linking to you is, if
anything, more important than a site's strength. If you run a
bed and breakfast in Utah, a link from a PageRank 3 bed and
breakfast will be worth more than a link from a PageRank 5 web
design site. This area is a bit grey in that it relies on the
engine's ability to determine what is relevant and what is not.
However, we've seen evidence that this area is strong at this
stage in the game and is only becoming more important over
time.
Anchor text – the actual text used to link to your site is
extremely important. I've seen extremely strong sites get
beaten out by weak ones simply due to the poor use of anchor
text. If you're building links to your site, be sure to include
your keywords in the text that links back and, if possible, the
exact phrase you are trying to rank for. At the same time, you
can't make all your anchor text exactly the same – how can that
possibly look natural?
Position – the position of a link on a page and the number of
other links on that page impacts the value of a link. A link in
the footer of a page is given less weight than a link near the
top, a link in the content of a page is given more weight than a
link in a list of links and a link on a page with 50 other links
is given less weight than a link on a page with only a few other
links. If we think about it – this makes sense. All of these
things indicate whether the site with the outbound links
actually intends for one of their visitors to click the link or
not. From an engine's perspective – the more it appears that a
site wants a link to be clicked on, the higher the weight that
link (or vote) is given.
Admittedly there are a number of other factors but this is a
beginners guide. Following the considerations above will insure
that as you make each link decision – your odds of making the
right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore
them. Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned, but it
will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less
valuable links and thus need to build far more than following
the right methods.
So far we've covered briefly the why of link building, now
let's get into the real-life, here's-how-to-do-it side of
things. Below I'm going to cover three of my favorite link
building tactics. These are tactics that apply to virtually
every scenario. The number of ways to build links is only
limited by your imagination, however, and this should not be
viewed as a comprehensive list. This is, after all, a beginners
guide and I'm trying to list the tactics that apply to
virtually every scenario.
Side Note: Reciprocal Link Building
I'm not going to count this as one of my favorites and so it
won't count as one of the three noted above and I'll only
touch on it briefly. There have been a number of assertions that
reciprocal link building is dead. This is simply not the case. I
have seen and competed against sites that were very successful
with reciprocal links as their primary link source.
The problem with reciprocal links isn't so much in their value
which does seem to be a bit lower than non-reciprocal links
however often more easily attained. No, my problem with
reciprocal links is in the management. Unethical webmasters'
removing links after you've put the link up to them, sites
expiring and not being renewed, sites getting penalties of their
own due to their bad tactics are all inconveniences the
reciprocal link manager must deal with.
As an SEO company, a huge issue we faced was leaving our clients
with this task after a campaign was over if they decided not to
go on a maintenance package. Non-reciprocal links may be a bit
harder to attain in some cases, however, that issue is much
easier to overcome than the sum of all these issues.
And now on to the top three ...
Articles
If you're paying attention as you read this, you'll probably
have guessed that I'm a fan of article writing as a link
building method. If you look to the "about the author" section
you'll notice a link to the Beanstalk site (and if you don't,
well ... let me know as somebody's stealing it without
permission). While I genuinely enjoy writing and sharing my
experiences with others – the purpose of getting the article
distributed is primarily as a link building tactic, secondarily
as a great source of qualified traffic and thirdly for my own
enjoyment.
You are an expert in your field. Who knows more about your
business than you? So share. Writing an article may not be easy,
but it is rewarding. If you can't think of a topic, think of
what you get asked. If you're asked common questions repeatedly
then chances are, it's a good topic for an article. I often get
asked about link building, and you're reading the result.
Once the article is completed you need to get it syndicated.
Using an article submission service such as Article Sender
(http://www.articlesender.com/) is a simple way to get your
article out to a large number of publishers quickly. On top of
this you'd do well to seek out specific sites in your field
using one or all of the major search engines to find highly
relevant sites that accept articles and submit to them.
And oh, don't forget an "about the author" section. :)
Directory Submissions
Directory submissions are likely the most painful of the link
building tactics you'll employ. Why? Because it's tedious and
time-consuming work.
To be done right directory submissions must be done manually.
The titles and descriptions must be tailored to the
specifications of the directory in question and often, you'll
have to decide if a review fee is worth it.
While there are a good many directories that accept free
submissions there are also a large number that require a
review fee. The fee can range from a few dollars to a few
hundred. If you see that a directory has a low PageRank, is
general in it's nature (i.e. it isn't about your specific
field) then it likely isn't worth more than a couple dollars if
that. If the site is strong, and strongly related to your site
then it's obviously worth more.
There is no hard-and-fast set of rules for how much a listing is
worth. I'd recommend to start your hunt for directories (don't
forget the topic and/or region specific ones), submit to all the
free ones and make a list of all the ones that require a fee.
After you've gotten a solid number in your "need to be paid
list" you can get a general idea as to what's out there and
what you can get and for how much. This will enable you to make
solid choices knowing what all your options are.
Forum Posting
I just know I'm going to get a couple comments and/or emails
for listing this as a link building tactic, but if it's done
right, there's nothing wrong with it. Forum and blog posting got
a bad reputation as a link building tactic when it came under
huge abuse by unethical webmasters spamming forums with useless
garbage just for a link. They even went so far (and still do) as
sending out spiders to automatically submit posts. To this end,
I have to agree that it's a bad tactic, however ...
If you're seeking out forums related to your site, reading the
threads and responding with solid advice or with questions and
not just firing off some sales-pitch, then you're doing what
you're supposed to be. Another perk to this is that, like
articles, if you do this right, you're gong to see traffic as
well and what more can you ask from a link building tactic than
traffic as well as links.
Conclusion
Above we've covered the basics of link building. As I've noted
repeatedly, once you're done reading this and applying some of
what you've read, you'd do well to read other articles, forums
and blogs. This isn't a complete breakdown of everything
link-related (that would be a full book) but it will keep you
out of trouble and save you countless hours of wasted time
getting poor links that haven't held value since 2003.
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization,
Inc. http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/ . Beanstalk offers SEO
services, consulting, training and link building services
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/services/link-popularity.htm).
Dave has been involved in SEO since 2001 and shared his
experience through articles, speaking at conferences as well as
on his weekly radio show Webcology
http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Show-Hosts/Dave-Davies/ on
WebmasterRadio.fm.
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phillip.skinner commented on 07 Dec 2008, 04:51:03
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