No Comments Written by Anders on July 28, 2008 – 10:59 pm

As a general rule, get linked from websites within your particular discipline. This is important for two reasons:

1. The more people see you linked to within a particular discipline, the more impressed they are likely to be, as Web linking is akin to word-of-mouth. If people see links to you on lots of other websites, that’s a major credibility builder.

2. Search engines like to find logical patterns and groupings for links, and tend to reward you if you are well linked in a particular pattern once the person is searching for a keyword related to that pattern. (This is not always the case, however, as we will see below at “Strengthen your weak ties.”)

Don’t focus overly on the hubs

In a network, a hub is a site, such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, that has a lot of links coming into it. It’s great to get links from these hubs. However, especially when you’re starting out, it may be very difficult to get such links. Sometimes, it can be a clever strategy not to focus too much on getting linked through major hubs but to focus more on minor hubs that still have the capacity to deliver value.

Strengthen your weak ties

A study was done on how a group of people found work, and the results showed that a friend of a friend was more likely to have got them that important job introduction than family members and close friends. There are all sorts of reasons for this. For starters, you have more friends of friends than you have friends. It can be very comfortable to get links from websites you admire and from websites in your peer group, but these might not be the websites your customers are frequenting. You don’t want to be getting links from websites that have nothing to do with your business, but you do need to think outside the box, and, of course, to keep thinking about which websites your reader is going to.

Go for quality, not quantity

There might be short-term benefits from search engines for getting lots of low quality links, through reciprocal linking and other, more dubious practices, of which there are many.

However, just as you should write content for people who search rather than for a search engine, you should get links that are likely to impress your potential customers rather than simply garner some short-term benefit from a search engine. One link from a well-regarded website could bring you far more business (whether or not search engine traffic) than a hundred from lesser-known websites. Less is more.

Be careful about reciprocal linking

The “you give me a link and I’ll give you a link” approach is the easiest – though usually least effective – way to get linked. If their link is dependent on you giving them a reciprocal link, be careful. Unless linking to them provides real value for your reader, don’t do it. Remember, every time you provide an external link, you provide one more exit point from your website, and, if you put up too many exit points, people will leave.

Get linked from websites that don’t link much

If you are one of the few links from a prestigious website, then that says a lot. Some search engines will give you an extra boost for a link from such a website.

Get linked from important Web directories

This is particularly important if you have a new website. Initially it can take quite a while to get search engines to index (spider) you, and you will certainly increase your chances if you can be found in important directories, such as DMOZ and Yahoo. Here are some points to keep in mind.

• “It’s important to read each directory’s FAQ and follow it precisely,” Jill Whalen of Highrankings.com states. “Making mistakes in the submission process could cost you dearly, as directory listings are difficult to change later in the game.”
• Of course, it’s not just the major directories you need to focus on. There may be specialist directories in your discipline that will be well worth getting listed on.
• Don’t go overboard.

There are also thousands and thousands of directories that have few or no visitors and are really not worth the effort.

Get linked with the right keywords

Try to get links that use the most important keywords of your readers. If you offer cheap flights to Dublin, make sure that sites link to you with text that says something like “Best cheap flights to Dublin.” If you have great content on heart disease symptoms, the link you get should read something like “Heart disease symptoms: the five most important.” A link is like a signpost, and as soon as a reader sees a link that includes their keywords, they are much more likely to click.

Go out and get links

The best links are difficult to get and, unless you’re very lucky, you won’t get too many of them without going out and actively looking for them. Be patient. If you launch a new website, don’t expect people to link to you straight away. A link is an editorial decision, and many people will need to feel that you are reputable and around for the long term before they will link to you. Be proactive and set a target for the number of links you want to achieve each month. The network rewards patience.

In a network, the older you are the more preferential treatment you tend to get. (In fact, some search engines ignore new websites until they have reached a certain age.) That means you must think long term to achieve success. The contact you make today may have to be nurtured over a period of many years before you get a link.

If you launch a new website – and even if you do everything right from a search engine marketing perspective – you have to be prepared to wait for what might be a considerable period of time before many search engines will even index you, let alone rank you in the first page of search results. So be patient and stick to your task in a methodical and consistent manner. The diagram over illustrates possible linking behavior between websites. The following points explain the structure of the linkages and the linking rules that apply.

• Website A has websites C, D, E, and F linking to it.
• Website B has only website F linking to it. So, all other things being equal, website A has a better chance of ranking highly with the search engines than website B.
• Website C has four other websites linking to it. This makes it a more valuable link for website A than, say, the link it has from website E, which has just one website linking to it.
• Website F links to both websites A and B. Its link is not as valuable as the link website E gives to website A, though, because E has linked to A only and not to B. (The more links a website gives, the less value each individual link has.)

The rules above apply both for search engines and for readers. Let’s say you are on the CNN website (a website that has lots of links coming into it). You see CNN linking to another website – not a big list of other websites, just one. There’s a lot of credibility in that single link.

The following services allow you to check the backlinks to your blog and website.

• SEO Book
• SEOmoz
• iWEBTOOL
• Backlink Watch