Search Optimization School

I haven’t written a lot the last couple of months on this blog, but it turns out I should’ve been, since I’ve learned a lot about link building lately. The single most important thing you need to do to drive traffic to your blog or web site is building links, er, rather – quality links. First, let’s talk about ‘bad links’. Are you doing harm to your blog? Are you linking to things that can hurt your web site’s reputation? Maybe you are and you don’t even know about it. I encourage you to use a tool I found, the bad neighborhood link checker. I’ve also placed the link in the SEO Tools portion of the sidebar. Run your URL through this tool and see what you come up with. You may be surprised at what you find – I sure was. It made me remove some links, do a bunch of no-follow’s (for affillate links), and even think about what kinds of links I should be adding.

Now that you see where your site stands, you can more clearly think about building quality links to your site.

Top Ways to Build Quality Links to your web site

I’ve read just ungodly amounts of information lately on building links and these are the things that stick out in my mind as most important:

• Write Pillar Articles: This is something that I’d been doing and didn’t even know it. A pillar article is a page or post that you write that is very informative, and may take some time to research and write (but it will be worth it). You want to write about something that you either know a lot about, or can get a lot of information about. It can be based on opinion, personal experience, research on the web, viewing media (print or televised), interviews, statistical data, or a combination. A pillar article will contain information that you think a lot of people need, and that you either can’t currently find on the web, or the info is scattered about – and a page ’rounding everything up’ (I call these ’roundup’ pages) would be well visited. You might even want to do some keyword research to find out what best attract people to the article before you write it. Do some planning before you write a single word. Find out who your competition would be. And most importantly, make sure that your post is completely relevant to your web site’s current content and viewers.

  Now it’s time to write. Organize your article in logical sections, and plan out the headers of each section. Make sure any links you give are appropriate and will help your web site reputation – else ‘nofollow’ them. If you add any affiliate links, be sure to nofollow them as well. Be direct and informative and give as much information as possible. If you article is too lengthy, consider making it a series (Part I, Part II, Part III), or at least breaking it up into multiple pages. I’ll give you an example of one of the first pillar articles I ever wrote. I had obtained a new cell phone (about a year ago), and it was supposed to do everything except slice bread. It was an mp3 player, a modem for my laptop, it played video, it took flash memory cards, and on and on and on. When I was trying to figure out the best ways to store media on it, how to setup the modem part, and how to make my own ringtones and backgrounds the manual that came with it was obviously not the best way to learn. I did however find tons of useful tips and tricks in user-based cell phone forums. I like the phone so much, that I decided to write a page about it on one of my web sites and review it. After the review, I posted all the tips and tricks that I could find specific to that model phone. Last, I added in affiliate links to phone accessories with a little info about each one (especially the ones that I personally purchased).

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had written what would become my first ‘pillar aritlce’! Why? Because it became one of the top 5 visited pages of all time on my web site! It drove people to create bookmarks, and visit other sections of my site. That page got it’s own google pagerank (5), and increased the PR of my homepage and reputation of my site overall. Writing pillar articles is work, and definitely completely different than a 5-10 minute blog post. But they are worth the effort, and every web site should have some. Maybe your pillar articles could be the homepages of different sections of the site? Oh, one last thing about pillar pages. If you have the ability, make sure you have comments turned on, because the more frequently it’s updated and the more it grows – the more important it become to you! Hopefully whatever tool you use to publish your site has a good mechanism to control comment spam, because if you get a lot, it will completely diminish all the hard work you’ve done.

• List your site in quality directories: There are tons of “me too” directories you can list your web site in, but focus on the ones that are reputable and that have great page rank. They will do you the most good. Again – it’s all about reputation online. I read a post on dailyblogtips.com about “5 Effective ways to build links to your blog, and it really got me thinking. He had some great links (to directories to submit to), and even better advice. Give it a read, and pay attention when your surfing online to the chiclets on other blogs and who they’re listing (and linking back) to. More reputable sites will probably be linking back to more reputable directories. I like the link in daily blog tips to the “blog carnival” site. This is a site where you basically “author” a roundup type page on a particular subject. Another site like this is squidoo. It’s a trade-off really, but a good one. You author the page on a subject your familiar with (and have web pages about), and you provide the site and it’s users with some great content. But, in the process – you are linking back (hopefully) to your pillar pages that fit the mold of that subject. Find quality directories and ’roundup’ sites to submit (and write about) your content – it’s worth the time!
• Article Directories: I’ll be honest, I don’t have much personal experience with this one. Back in 98-99 I used to write articles for a few of these sites, but not to drive traffic to my site. It was because it was fun, and they paid me $5-$10 per page. It was good for a little extra spending money. Nowadays – google is trying really hard to remove all the garbage content to display only original and relevant content as often as possible. That means the old article directories that went out of vogue in 2000-2001 are suddenly a diamond in the rough. If you write original content and submit it to these article directories, you are instantly building links back to your site (usually at the end or in the bio). I’ve read a lot on this subject, and I’ll definitely be writing some content to submit myself. My only words of caution would be – make sure you do your homework and submit to the article directories with the best reputation (and pagerank) you can find. Be sure to only submit to the select few you find that are the best (don’t spam your article into every single site you can find, or use article submission software). Also, use the same guidelines for writing I used above for ‘pillar articles’. If I have good (or bad) luck with article directories and submission – I’ll be sure to write it up in a future post.

There are tons of ways to build quality links to your site and many I left off in this short list. I wanted to concentrate on three big ones for you to try, and honestly you can spend a great deal of time with only the few tips I gave. As always, please, if you have relevant comments, questions, or quality link-building practices you’d like to share – please comment now by using the form below!