Guide to Link Building Strategies What is a Link? | How Many Required? | Improving Popularity | Campaign Management   Introduction - implementing an effective linking strategy is a critical success factor in achieving high search engine ranking. It requires patience, belief, tenacity and a very good understanding of the factors search engines used to rank web site links. We hope you find the following informative with regards to the issues involved, and possible implementation actions you must take...   What is a Link? - a link is link from one webpage to another webpage or website.  It is technically known as an HREF. Links pointing to your website are called 'inbound links' and links which you place on your website to other websites are called 'outbound links'.   What is Link Popularity? - the practice of exchanging links is commonly used by most webmasters as a means of increasing link popularity. Practically, it is initiated via the exchange of e-mails between two webmasters requesting and agreeing simple exchange of links from each others website. Most websites have a 'useful links' page or directory where webmasters are invited to submit their request for link exchange via a contact form.   The purpose of this process is to increase your site link popularity.   Linking in the 1990's - back in the 1990's, link popularity was the primary measure success by search engines.  It is defined as the number of inbound links from other websites pointing towards your website. In simple terms, the more inbound links your website has, relative to competitors, the higher your search engine rankings. As the Internet became more popular, webmasters began exchanging links - this is known as a reciprocal linking. Unfortunately, the practice became so widespread that link farm web sites evolved, creating the ability to capture hundreds of links at once. In response to this form of spamming, search engines devalued the importance of link popularity as their primary measure of website ranking....   The Importance of Inbound Links - search engines mathematically score the 'quality' of the inbound link in terms of the pagerank of the website it came from and the page the link has been posted on. For instance, a link from a website with a Pagerank five on its homepage would normally be worth more that the link from website with a pagerank one on its homepage. More importantly, the scoring is measured from the actual page the link is placed, not necessarily the homepage. So it becomes easy to understand that an inbound link posted in a 'links directory' is valued less by search engines, than a link posted on a 'content page' (that is a page full of relevant textual content). In addition, the number of links on the page your inbound link is placed is relevant - don't swap links with sites where the page has 30 or more links on it.  Lastly the anchor text of an inbound link is critical. For instance, if your website is a UK mortgage broker, you would want an inbound text link to have an anchor text (title) to be something like "mortgage quote uk - get a quote from us". Notice the anchor text is bold and italic (additional scoring factors). This example show to use your primary keyphrase (or a derivative of it) in the anchor text of your inbound links (as opposed to your company name i.e. 'Acme Inc Mortgage Brokers UK'.  So the importance of quality inbound links is still quite high in the ranking factors used by search engines. Search engines assume that good quality websites will encourage other sites to link to them, simply because they are a quality site. This concept is easy to understand for huge sites such as wikipedia (which is an 'authority', non commercial site), where lots of webmasters like linking to it.   How Many Links Does My Site Need? - link building is a never ending process and never stops (because you competitors won't).  As the number of pages on your website increases you will fiond out sites (and in particular directories) will begin adding links to your webpages without your knowledge.  To help achieve top rankings, you could begin to see how many quality links you need by looking at the number and type of links and 'backlinks' from your top 5 competitor sites. Backlinks are referred to as incoming links i.e. links to your web page(s) from other web page(s). To find this out type the following into Google...   your-competitor.com          Gives a measure of all general links back to the site       site:your-competitor.com   Gives a measure of all the pages on the site cached in Google.       link:www.your-competitor.com   Gives a measure of all the backlinks to the site       cache:www.your-competitor.com   Gives a latest copy cached by Google of the webpage   What are the Best Ways to Improve Link Popularity? - there are many ways to get more links for your website, but it takes time and understanding that when you start, your website is in a relatively weak trading position with potential link partners....  As the site you own ages and gets bigger, and achieves a higher pagerank, more webmasters link to you increasing your site link popularity.  You will then find lots of webmaster requests wanting to link to you.  Conversely, when you launch a website, your site is small, has no traffic, a low pagerank value and minimal exposure in any directories; it may not have even got into the search engines.  So you must have a long term linking strategy backed up with patience.  The following methods will directly or indirectly boost your link popularity:-   Write Compelling Content - the long term aim of reciprocal linking is to provide (and receive) really useful external links to great sits that provider a compelling user experience.  Therefore, your site has to provide a large number of interesting pages that will attract the interest of other webmasters seeking link partners.  The sheer volume of quality pages about your topic is key.   If your site only has a couple of pages, webmasters won't be very keen to link to you.   A lot of webmasters are paranoid about 'pagerank leakage' with hence will only swap links on pages of equal pagerank value...  We do not entirely share this view: content is king... Write really useful content and your site will rank more higher anyway... leading to a higher site wide search engine pagerank score.  Google is not the only search engine and so writing compelling content will lead to more webmasters finding your reciprocal links page instructions/ submission form.   Create a Content Based Reciprocal Link Directory - somewhere on your site you will need a directory (set of WebPages) of external links and a 'add url submission form' for other webmasters to request a link on your site.  Without one webmasters will find it more difficult to find you.  Lots of webmasters type in 'add url xyz' or submit url abc' into search engines to help them find like minded webmasters who also run a reciprocal link program.  To see how the process works, you can exchange links with us here.   We would advice include half a page of content and leaving the other half for links.  Useful tips when building and managing the program, are:- Never exchange links with websites that do not have similar content as your own site Never exchange links with link farms, banned sites, seo directory only sites, gambling or adult sites Minimise your 'outbound links' to 30 links per page   Submissions to a Paid Directory  - there a many directories that also provide interesting articles and well organised hand picked links.  Most quality ones charge for a listing.  You must ensure you only submit to manually approved sites (not automatically approved free directories (which are deemed link farms).   Articles and Article Directories - writing really compelling articles to submit to 'article directories', regarding your industry and customer issues is a great way to get inbound links to your site.  Simply write and article that is highly relevant to your industry (do not promote your site or product).  Then submit your article to an article directories such as:-   Articleblotter.com Articlecity.com Articledashboard.com Articlesbase.com Ezinearticles.com   XML/ RSS inbound links - by writing really interesting, unique, informative and opinionated articles, (and offering them as free xml content feeds to other sites), you can obtain one way inbound links.  This is a great way to boost your link popularity.  Portals are particularly interested in getting free content for their website and an xml feed is an easy way offer free content.   How to Qualify a Potential Link Partner - as a webmaster, you must qualify any requests received from webmasters requesting a link exchange.  In addition, you will need to produce a qualified prospective list of reciprocal link partners very carefully.  If any mail arrives in your inbox saying something like 'we have just linked to you, please link back using our link code..' etc etc qualify the request vey carefully.  A link exchange is not worth pursuing if your link is placed on a page:- That has NOINDEX, and NOFOLLOW header meta tag on it. Remember to 'view source'. That has not yet been 'cached' in a search engine That has used script or process to stop a searchbot following the link back to your site.  For instance, the use of re=nofollow, or a form POST or a Javascript link are all unnecessary methods of linking back and may be being used to stop pagerank leakage.  This is sharp practice and unfair to you and your site.   On a site that has a different topic/ theme or content than your own site.  Reciprocal linking to 'bad neighbourhoods' (as Google as referred to them) has the opposite effect and may get your site banned. A bad neighbourhood are websites that contain adult content, medical, gambling, link farms or banned site.   How Can I Manage My Link Campaigns? - to implement and manage a link campaign you must be able to stored a lot of information. These things are ideally stored in a database.  You can use a spreadsheet but the range of information moving around on a daily basis lends itself to a good quality Link Management  software will allow you to:- Emailing - send customised email requests to potential link partners. Managing Links Pages - upload updated and customised links pages to your site Keep a Organised List of Sites You Link To - track which sites you have agreed to exchange links with (so you don't ask for a link from a prospect link partner twice). You may also need this contact information to request further links, or changes to your existing listing. Check Your Link Back Still Exist - check that the url locations of all your links on existing link partner sites (in case they go back on their word, or the page fails or they re-organise their links pages and forget to tell you where they moved the page to). Collect and Prioritise Prospect Link Partner Information - you will need hundreds or even thousands of prospects, as most will decline or simply ignore your link exchange email request. Therefore, by using spider software can gather prospects on mass, then store all sorts of useful qualifying information about prospects.  For instance, spiders can gather metadata of partner sites, email contact information, whois data, pagerank, Alexa rating, the ratio of inbound and outbound links on the links pages etc.  You don't necessarily need to use link management software to collect link prospect urls... simply type in the following into Google:  "add url" or "submit url" or "add a link" YOUR-PRIMARY-KEYPHRASE     The use of " represents an exact phrase match (limiting irrelevant results).  The use of 'or' expands you potential results available, to find link partners who already advertise their link exchange programs.  You could narrow your search using intitle:XYZ or inrul:XYZ. Manage multiple link campaigns simultaneously - it is good practice to amend your link back every couple of weeks or months to vary the link back url location, anchor text and description to your site.  Therefore, you may need multiple link campaigns to run at the same time.  It therefore becomes impossible to log an audit of hundreds of emails sent, links added, notes on partners etc without a software management tool. Importance of Internal Linking on Your Own Website - once you understand the principle of Pagerank (or similar ranking principles employed by other search engines) it becomes obvious that on site internal linking is also just as important as external off page inbound links.  By linking your pages together in the most efficient manner, pages with broadly similar content can help each other up the search engine rankings.  This principle becomes more important the greater number of pages you have on your site.  Some useful tips:- Always use normal HREF text links to interconnect your most important pages with one another When you link pages together, make sure your internal url's are you use is absolute so that directory scrapers will include your full url on their site On your 'important pages' do not link to less important 'minor pages' (in order to reduce the ratio between outbound and inbound links).. remember outbound links are not just off site to link partners but include outbound links to other pages on your site.  So your T&C's, about us, contact us etc can all be found from your sitemap.xml or sitemap.htm page  - don't waste an outbound link (causing pagerank leakage) to these minor pages.  The fewer the number of clicks between your home page and your important pages, the greater those important pages will benefit from the higher ranking of your home page.  Try and link together internal pages on your site that share similar content and relevancy (particularly in the metatitle) - this will help improve the rankings of those pages. Add a rel=nofollow tag where linking internally to less important pages Reduce the number of outbound link on any important page. If you have lots and lots of similar pages (in terms of content), use a NOARCHIVE, NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW in your metatags to concentrae the scoring of the important pages only (that are being cached).