Building Links

Building Links improve search engine rankings (PR)

Originally search engines would base their rankings on page factors like keyword density and the information in meta-tags. This was open to abuse by internet marketers and spam artists who wanted their websites to be at the top of the search engine rankings. People would ‘keyword stuff’ their pages by putting in volumes of irrelevant words at the bottoms of their sites (sometimes in white text on a white background) just to get a higher ranking on lots of search terms.

Since sites with genuine content weren’t concerned with search engine optimization (SEO), they ended up at the bottom of the page rankings. This resulted in a bad experience for the internet users who might search for “search engine rankings” and end up on a porn site.

Now, Google and other search engines look at the number and quality of back links to a website in order to establish the importance and relevance of the site. Sites with more links, particularly links from highly valued websites, will have a greater potential to rank higher in the search engines.

Building links also help to determine which words you rank for. If another site links to you using the link (anchor) text, “building links”, then they’re saying that your page is relevant for “building links.” You have one link for “building links.” If you get a lot of links that use “building links” then the search engines will think your page is very relevant to that topic and you’ll find yourself ranking well for the key word “building links”.

Building Links bring in more traffic

A lot of website owners are struck with “search engine tunnel-vision” when they start optimizing their websites. If a link isn’t going to help their search engine ranking for one reason or another, they don’t want to know about it. It pays to remember that the goal is to get more traffic to your page. If you can get a link from another site that will give you more traffic to your site (even if it doesn’t help your search engine rankings) then it’s a good link! In some ways it can even be a better traffic, particularly if the other site is relevant to your site.

If you only ever had links to your home page it might look a little suspect to the search engines. Usually if you’ve got interesting content on your site, people will link directly to that content, not to your home page. So when you’re building your links, try to get about 30% percent of them pointing to your internal pages. This is known as “deep linking”.

Not all links are created equal. Higher quality links are of more benefit and link quality is determined by four main factors:

  1. The status and trust factor of the domain that is linking to you (e.g., .gov and .edu).
  2. The visibility of the link on the webpage (i.e.,  at the top, in the middle, or at the bottom of the page and is it one of 3 links on the page or is it one of 75 links?).
  3. The relevancy of the anchor text (e.g. ‘building links’ vs. ‘Click Here’).Garmin nüvi 1450LMT 5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Map & Traffic Updates
  4. The location of the link in the site structure (i.e. does the link come from a home page, a prominent inner page, or a deeply nested, hidden page?).

The main thing to remember is to always continue to build links to improve your search engine rankings. You can never have enough.

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PageRank (Off-page SEO)

PageRank (PR) is Google’s way of indexing all content and websites based on importance in the internet community. It is an important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. To establish PR, Google looks at how many other websites are linking to that page. Links are like “votes” and the more “votes” the higher the PR and higher PR is an important contributor to higher search engine rankings.

Not every page link is equal. Pages that have a high PR have more voting power than pages with low PR. For instance, one link from a PR5 page might well give more benefit than receiving 20 links from PR2 pages. It’s quality and not quantity that’s important.

The equation for how much PR value is received from a link is something like this:
PR = 0.15 + 0.85 x (link PR value) and
link PR value = (total page PR value) / (total number of out going links)

For Example: Let’s say a page has a total PR value of 100 and has 20 outgoing links on that page. Then each link has a link PR value of 5. (100 / 20 = 5) That is a simple way of looking at the share of the PR value of the link.

There are many other factors that determine the PR of a page:

  • The amount of PR value flowing into a page from other sites.Samsung Infuse 4G Android Phone (AT&T)
  • Internal linking: PR can also come from other pages on your website.
  • The number of pages in a website: the more pages the higher the PR will be.
  • The number of external site links, also known as backlinks.

The best piece of advice is to keep these points in mind when building your site and try to avoid any on-page factors which might be detrimental to your PR.

1: Build lots of 1-way incoming links (backlinks)
Do this through article submissions, directory submissions, submitting articles to blog networks, buying links, and so on. Purchased links can sometimes be more powerful than links you get by more natural methods. Google will penalize you if they know that you are buying links. One way they’ll nab you is if you buy a link on a monthly lease and then end up canceling it. One link might not be enough to send up the red flag but some people buy and cancel hundreds of links in this manner. A better idea is to buy lifetime links and to try to find links from websites that are on topics relevant to your own.

2: Get some links from good sites
By “good sites” I mean websites that have a high PR, or sites with a high “trust” factor (such as Yahoo, Dmoz or sites with a .edu or .gov suffix). If you can get good links to the pages on your site that generate the most income for you, even better. If you can improve the ranking of these pages you’ll get more traffic, more conversions, and more money!

3: Make sure that pages you gain links from are indexed.
A link to your site won’t count for anything if the page that is linking to you hasn’t actually been indexed by the search engines. The search engines won’t see the link and they won’t give you any credit for it.
The good news is that it’s pretty simple to get all these pages indexed. All you have to do is let the search engines know about the page yourself. To do this you need to set up a webpage outside of your main site, such as a free blog or Twitter.com profile. Make sure that the search engines are indexing this page and then every time you get a new link to your main site, write about it in your blog or Twitter profile! The search engines will see this and visit the other site and presto! The page is now indexed and you’ll get credit for your link.

4: Don’t loop your links
Reciprocal links aren’t as powerful as one-way links. This is why you want to receive one-way links from other websites wherever possible. There are also “reciprocal link loops” where A links to B, B links to C and C links back to A. Search engines see this as one-way links.

Once you’ve done that, work on getting quality links from quality websites. The easiest way to do this is to fill your website with useful and relevant information that will make other sites want to link to you! You’ll often see pages with a high PR being outranked by pages with lower PR. That is because PR is just a part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

In conclusion, to gain higher PR requires building a large number of high value backlinks and that takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight and that is why most online marketers fail because they don’t give it enough time and effort.

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On Page SEO

Search engines consider the content on page and how relevant it is to what people are searching for, on-page factors.  It is unlikely to get the #1 spot in Google with just on-page factors but they could mean the difference between being on page 5 or page 1 or being ranked 1st or 5th on page 1.

5 basic factors for good on page SEO

1.) Include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for in your <title> tags.
<title></title> tags indicate the title of your webpage. Your title shows up at the top of the browser window and the clickable text at the top of your search listing in the search engines. It is really important that the <title> tags contain the keywords that you’re optimizing that particular page for. For example, if you have an article about how to stop a dog from barking, then the title of the page should be: How to stop a dog from barking | Stop Dog Barking. Note how the | separator is used to add in extra keywords to the title.

2.) Include the keyword phrase in the <h1> tags.
The h1 tags are like headlines in a newspaper. The search engines read them first to find out what the page is about. If the search engines find the important keywords in the <h1> tags, the page will be seen as more relevant for that search term. Many people don’t use h1 tags on their sites because the default styling of an h1 tag is rather big and ugly but it is easy to style these tags with CSS so that they look good .

3.) Include the keyword phrase in the first 50 words of content.
Search engines pay more attention to the first 50 words on the page than to the rest of the content, so make sure that the keywords appear at least once within the first 50 words (not including headings).

4.) Include the keyword phrase at least once every 100 words in the text of the page.
The days of “keyword stuffing” the webpage are long gone. A density somewhere between a 1% and 4% keyword density is recommended. Don’t go any higher than this, or your site will look like a spam site to the search engines and may be penalized.

5.) Include the keywords in internal links.
Blackberry Playbook 7-Inch Tablet (16GB)“Google bombing” is where people link to a certain page using certain text and boost that page to the top of the search engines even though that page might be of a completely different subject. This is because search engines see the words in the link text (known as “anchor text”) to determine the nature of the page being linked to. Most sites have the return to home page link on the site by clicking a “home” link when instead the link should contain the page keyword(s). The same goes for all pages on the site and don’t ever link to a page using “Click here”!

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Niche Blog Traffic

You can use the same technique of the ‘Viral Niche eBook Traffic’ – where you spin bland topics into controversial information except post the content on your blog. It’s the quick and easist way to start a blog and grow the content and popularity.

When blogging, not every post needs to be controversial or shocking but it does help to include at least a few “attention-getting” articles into your regular blog posts. The important thing is that your blog posts are consistently full of good, solid information – the type that makes your visitors return again and again to see what you have to say next.

To pull in search engine traffic, the first thing you’ll need to do is find out what keywords and phrases your market is using to seek out niche products, information, and services, e.g. niche blog. To do this, just visit Wordtracker or Google’s free keyword tool, plug in the most common keywords for your niche, and in seconds you’ll have a large list of hundreds of related keywords. You’ll also know how much traffic these words receive and how many other websites are competing on these same keywords.

Unless you’re already a search engine whiz, your best bet is to choose a long string of words that get a lot of traffic but don’t have much competition. Choose several or even dozens of keywords like that and in no time you’ll be collectively pulling in massive traffic.

Your final step is to re-write (or spin) your content around those keywords. Use your keywords in your article title and throughout your article at a two to three percent keyword density rate (meaning your keyword should show up in your article about twice for every one hundred words of content). There is a software package, Rapid Rewriter, that makes this task even easier and works on Mac or PC.

Load up your articles to your blog, spin those articles with Matt Carter’s “Rapid Rewriter” and distribute those articles, in the coming weeks and months you will start pulling in free search engine traffic!

Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G, 6Finally, do you “Squidoo?” This is yet another way to use your content to build web pages that draw search engine traffic. Search engines love Squidoo. Build a site on Squidoo and you will get crawled by Google and other search engines. Squidoo ranks your pages (lens) and the higher you rank the more people who see your lens can click through to your site or onto your affiliate links. Upload content to your site to rank at the top of the search engines.

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