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!

When someone goes to the search engine and types in keywords the most important thing to that user is to get the most relevant results they can. Nothing is more frustrating than searching for hours for information you need and not being able to find it. Google has the corner on the market when it comes to relevancy. The reason that they are top dog in the search market is because they seem to be able to consistently be able to deliver the most relevant results in the sea of crap on the web. They have top secret algorithms that determine what web site content is quality and what is crap. One of the most important factors for google (and the other search engines) is “reputation”.
What are Backlinks?
It’s just like when you ask your friends and family where to go to get the best deal on a car, or what restaurant has the best food. If half a dozen of your friends told you a certain bar and grill was spectacular - you would just have to go and check it out. But if your friends and your boss at work, your doctor, and your parents told you it was an awesome place to eat as well - you would most certainly be expecting top notch dining wouldn’t you? That’s because it was recommended not only by good references, but also by important and respected ones.
How Pagerank Works
That’s how google operates too. Using it’s “Page Ranking” system google ranks web sites on a scale from 0 to 10. That Page Rank or “PR”. Zero is assigned to web sites that are brand new or aren’t well known. Ten is reserved for sites like google.com or whitehouse.gov. CNN has a PR of 9. To put it in perspective, in the bar and grill example your parents would probably have a page rank of 8 and your friends a PR of 2, 3, or 4 depending on how well you knew them and respected their opinion(s).
<>Why Link Reputation Counts
In contrast to the end user wanting to have the most relevant results, you as a web site or blog owner want to come up as high as possible in those search results. The higher you come up in search results, the more traffic you’ll get to your web site. To come up highest in the search engine result pages you have to prove that you are a “trusted” source of information - an expert of sorts. The measure the search engines use for this is how many other web sites link to yours. The quantity of links surely counts, but even moreso is the quality. It would be much better to have 3 pagerank 6 sites linking to you than 20 page rank 2.
Building Backlinks for Your Web Site
Now we’re going to talk about how to build back links for your site. If you want to keep your site indexed with google the only way to do this is the honest way. DO NOT buy backlinks, do not use link exchange services, web sites, or software. Do not send out link exchange requests in bulk….and MOST importantly - MAKE SURE that all the sites you link are directly relevant (content wise) to yours. The better the quality of sites you link - the better off you are.

Scrutinize every web site offering you something to help build up your backlinks or link exchanges. Everybody has some kind of ulterior motive. Sometimes it’s exposure, sometimes it’s money. What you want to stay from are sites that will bring your reputation down. Your web site reputation that is. If you have a lot of unsavory web sites linking to your that can actually hurt your search engine rankings if you aren’t careful. For example, google doesn’t like sites that are link farms (more links than actual content, basically a spam site). Google also doesn’t like sites with pop-ups, sites that redirect users from one domain or one page to another, or sites with illegal content.
Examples of Link Exchange and Backlink building Web Sites
I’ll give you an example of a site I thought was good, but after I used it for awhile turned out to be not so good. Take a look at www.linkmetro.com. This is a link exchange web site. Membership and use of the site is free, but you’ll notice that the home page advertises an advanced membership. I exchanged links using this site and was penalized by google. Google tells you in their webmaster quality guidelines not to use services like this, so to stay in best standing for their search index - don’t!

*UPDATE* May 31, 2007 I’m going to leave this post up for posterity, but for those of you looking for tricks and shortcuts to ‘build backlinks’ to your web site or shortcuts to get you higher search engine rankings - this is NOT they way. You used to be able to beat the system - but no more. You can probably get away with it for a short time, and then google will impose a ‘penalty’ on your site and you will drop to the back pages of the index. Trust me - it happenned to me (for some of my other sites), and it can and will happen to you. Google now states in their quality guidelines and terms of service in their Google Webmasters Console that you shouldn’t use backlink building techniques and services like this.

How to Get Web Site Traffic

When you have a web site, the thing that everyone wants is all kinds of traffic. Usually (especially at first) the primary source of that traffic comes from the search engines - because no one knows who you are. Over time you get returning visitors, but still a large percentage of traffic always comes from SE’s.

There are TONS of things on the web that you can buy that either try and teach you how to get good search rankings (positioning to get that SE traffic), or try to guarantee to get you good google “pagerank” (PR). Let’s talk a moment about what things usually get good search engine positions (page one or two in the search engine result pages or SERP’s).

• well written content rich with naturally placed keywords
• good HTML title and description
• good page title in header (H1) tags
• some keywords and phrases in bold and / or italics
• linked breadcrumbs on the page
• search engine friendly URL / page name

Now - let’s say you did all of those things, but the topic you wrote about is one that thousands - or maybe even millions - of other pages on the Internet is competing against you in the search engine rankings for? Maybe some like “how to make a web page”. Most of the other search engines work similarly (except for directories), but I’ll use google for these examples. How does google determine what pages should be on the first page of results, and what pages go on the last? Who has the most information, what is most relevant, what’s most accurate, etc.? It would be impossible for google to know this information for everything people search for, so one of the biggest factors that is used in the google algorithm is who’s linking you! These are called “backlinks” or “reciprocal links“.
It all boils down to popularity. Google figures that the more sites that link to you, combined with the actual importance of those sites (page rank) equals where you will be found in the search engine results pages. Now let’s talk about Page Rank for a second….google pagerank is a number from 0 to 10. Ten is reserved for huge sites like apple.com and google.com. Zero is a pagerank given to brand new sites (or sites banned from google). If you haven’t experienced page rank before, download the google toolbar for your browser and enable the pagerank view. Then surf around the web, and check out the PageRank numbers of various sites (including your own). The higher the “pagerank”, the more respected authority google believes you are. Also, every individual URL can have it’s own pagerank. Meaning, www.site.com could have a pagerank of 5, but www.site.com/link.html could have a pagerank of 2.

So, if you and I had competing web pages on the topic “how to create a web page”, and I had pages linking to me with PageRank 5 and 6, and you had 100 pages linking to you that were PR 0, 1, and 2 - who’s going to come up higher in the SERP’s? Probably me. It’s quality of links, not quantity. In addition, if my page were a low page rank - the fact that half a dozen PR 5 and 6 sites were linking to me would probably raise up my PR to a higher number as well! If you had 100 sites linking you with a lower page rank, it shouldn’t bring you down, but it sure doesn’t raise your PR much either. There are of course many, many other factors that go into coming up in the SERP’s higher and that pesky google algorithm, but it’s still a widely known fact that if you have high quality sites with good PR linking to you - you should fare pretty good.

How to obtain lots of backlinks or ‘reciprocal links’ to your web site

So, how do you get quality sites to link to you legitimately? There are many ways to go about it. The oldest and easiest (and free) way to do it is to manually email sites and just flat out ask them to exchange links. This is a whole lot of work, and you might not even get a response. Also, you might find it hard to figure out who to email or contact. Another way (if you have the money) is to just buy them. There are many sites where you can do this. Just make certain to verify that the pages linking back to you actually have a good pagerank first. Do a google search for “buy backlinks” and you’ll find plenty of places that will take your money. Watch out for anything that sounds too good to be true.

You best (and least costly) bet is too find a free reciprocal or backlink service to use. Make sure that it shows you what PR the linking sites are, and browse through the listings to see if you feel they are “spammy” or not. For instance, I checked out www.linkshighway dot net and thought it was just terrible. There was no indication of pagerank for any of the sites listed in their directory, and the listings looked like some bad email spam (most of them). I’ve also used www.linkmetro for many months and I’m not happy with it either. The directory shows the PR of the sites, but it seems to be PR at the time of inclusion in the directory (not live). I had several sites listed in the directory at PR5 request links, only to find out they had dropped to zero (probably from bad linking practices). Also, the directory shows PR of sites, but when you go into the approval section for new links - it isn’t shown there. I found that 95% of the sites requesting links from had no page rank at all. And most of the pages requesting links from me were on link farm directory pages with bad (link-143[34]c.html) url’s. I hated that site - I took my pages out of the directory.

The site I still use and that works for me is www.backlinks.com. I am not trying to sell them, the service is free, and I don’t get anything at all by promoting them here. You just signup, and list your pages. Then add the code to your web page(s), and start choosing some link partners. The biggest reason I like this directory is because to list your pages - they must be at least PR3. If you have no pagerank (or low pagerank), you’ll need to start somewhere else. The interface is very full featured - and you get to all links before they go live on your page. Adding the code is just like adding the snippet of google code, and you get to change it’s appearance (if you need to) in the same way.

Do a little google work and you’ll find similar services to exchange links through. Weed out the bad ones, and post the post you find back here in comments! I’d love to hear of some of the ones I haven’t found yet!