I am secretly testing two new semi-automated backlinking tools, so I have had “links on the brain” this week. (Don’t worry – I will be revealing at least one of them to you in the next few days.)
I know I sound like a broken record, but this deserves to be repeated. If you want visitors to your site, you need to make sure that Google knows what your site is about, and you need to have backlinks. Period.
It’s really that simple. Aside from making sure that your page is targeted at a keyword, link building is the most important step in search engine optimization. I am amazed at how many people will build a website, and then fail to take the time to promote it.
See, when you build backlinks to your site, the site becomes stronger, and the search engines (especially Google) will find it more easily.
What Is Linking?
I remember being frustrated by all this “internet marketing speak” when I first started out, so let me cover one thing really quickly for all you new people out there (sorry, but this is important).
What is “Linking?” Linking and gaining backlinks is an important part of search engine optimization. Linking is simply adding a hypertext link that leads from one site to another website. When we link out to other sites, we’re showing people that these sites should be seen, or that we may recommend them.
If you are gaining links back to your site from another website, this is called backlinking.
Deep linking (a feature of both of the tools that I am currently testing) is linking to a page that is deeper in your website. A link to your home page would not be considered a deep link. A page such as an individual blog post, or a page not on the surface of your site is considered a deep link.
In SEO, backlinks are vitally important in helping you gain better visibility for your website. When you work to acquire links for your website, this is called link building. Make no mistake about it, link building is extremely important, and people are paid good money to do this professionally!
But How To Get Those Links?
The question is how do you build backlinks? Where do you get back links from? There are a lot of different places where you can gain back links (I’ve talked about several of them before).
- You can ask other similar websites if they’d like to exchange links.
- You can write articles and submit them to directories, adding in your links.
- You can submit your website to directories.
- You can create special pages like Squidoo pages or Hub pages and add back links to your site
- You can join “on-line carnivals” where similar topics come together and link to each other
- You can add your link as your signature on forums and message boards
- You can do a press release to gain back links
- You can comment on other websites and blogs to get back links.
- And on and on and on…
When it comes to building your backlinks there are a few things to remember. First you want to build as many quality incoming links as possible. Do not waste your time on junk sites, or sites that are considered “bad neighborhoods”. An example of a bad site is a link farm, or a gambling or porn website.
Another thing that seems to help when it comes to link building is to gain as many links that are relevant to your site. That means trying to stay on the same topic. I don’t actually have hard data to support this, but I know that many “experts” believe this is true. If your site is about dogs, links coming from baseball sites aren’t relevant. The more incoming relevant, quality links you have (so say the experts), the better your website will do in the search engines.
If you have the ability to request how a site links to you, suggest that they link’s anchor text coming into you matches your primary keyword (or a slight variation) that describes your website. Another thing you might want to suggest is that they link using a deep link. Remember, a deep link is a link deeper than your home page. This is seen as desirable.
Also note that while link exchanges will help build your links, one way links are even better! If you can get incoming links to your site, while not having to link back to the site linking into you, these are seen as stronger links.
Diversity Is Key
One thing that I have found is that getting links from lots of different sources seems to help. I think this is especially true if you are using automated systems. Mixing up where your links come from helps to avoid footprints that might be detected by search engines.
That’s why I am testing two new tools (link diversity). If they work as well as I think they will, I’ll be reporting on at least one of them here next week (maybe sooner!)
Talk to you then!
