This month we are starting a series on the importance of linking to your website. Thanks to Todd Malicoat of Meta4Creations.com - Search Engine Optimiztion. Dates will be in reverse order this month to keep the article flowing properly.

LINK DEVELOPMENT 101

March 5, 2004

Link Popularity is one of the most important variables in current search engine algorithms. Without too much depth into technical details: YOUR SITE NEEDS LINKS. Basically, each link from another site serves as a vote for your site in the search engines. You WILL benefit from them. Buy, beg, borrow, and steal** for links to your site. **Okay, don’t take this one too literally. I don’t advocate link theft. : )

Below is a quick starter tutorial on how to increase your site’s link-popularity, and ultimately your search engine rankings. To get lots of links to your site, you need to be able to FIND where to get good links. We have broken link searching down to a few simple steps in order to allow any intelligent “Internet surfer” to become a link developer.

1. Understand what type of pages you are looking for. This is important to the effectiveness of your search. This is a general tutorial, but the types of links you are looking for will be industry specific. If you are selling custom hot rod accessories, you will be looking in the automotive type areas in directories. If you are selling plumbing services, you will be looking for regional listings or business listings.

2. Find your starting points. We are looking for quality links from relevant sites. Directories provide the best listings, but there are many other places that are potential link givers. There are several places to start looking for potential link givers. Some of the best places to start looking are the “top” directories. A list has been provided below of some “starting points” for finding your links. Each directory or site should have a category of other directories giving you even more possibilities.

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March 6, 2004

3. Establish if a site is applicable. There are BILLIONS of webpages on the Internet. This leaves you a lot of options for getting links. Don’t spend too long hemming and hawing over whether a site will give you a link. If it is a large directory or site that is in the same “theme” of your site, then go to the next step. If your site is about dog food, and the site you are surfing is about car parts, then keep moving to the next site. Don’t get slowed down reading, keep your mission of link building in mind. Open lots of windows and bounce around. If your site wouldn’t fit, keep moving!

4. Find the best category to be listed in. Directories often have hundreds or thousands of categories. Start at the “top” of the site, and work your way through each relevant category. Commercial product selling sites should often look in the “shopping” or “business” categories. Service based sites should normally go for regional based listings. Each directory that you find may lead you to another directory, but you may also run into dead ends. This is why it is nice to have the above mentioned starting points to go back to when you hit a point where there are no more relevant options (and trust me, there is no “end to the Internet”)

5. Locate where to submit your site Once you’ve established that your site fits on the site, and found where it should go, locate the method to submit your site. Oftentimes, there will be verbiage such as “add url”, “list your site”, “submit a site”, “add link”, or “add a resource”. These links are normally located close to the top or bottom of the page. Keep an eye out and scan or do a “page find” for these words. When none of these are available, find an e-mail address to contact the webmaster. DON’T contact the webmaster directly if there’s a submission form available.

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March 7, 2004

6. Write a good description and document your submission Each site will have specific submission guidelines. Some may allow long descriptions; some may allow no descriptions. Be prepared for a variety of different scenarios. Keep your descriptions in a word document so that you can re-use them on occasion. MAKE SURE that your descriptions fit within the guidelines of the site you are submitting to. After submitting, document your submission. This way you can go back and verify that your link was added without bugging the webmaster. You will also come across the same sites (if they are good) in lots of different places. You probably won’t remember every directory you submitted to, so it is important to keep your work well documented and organized. Be patient, and keep searching…there’s a lot more pages out there that your site could be listed on!

“Starting Points”

http://directory.google.com
http://directory.yahoo.com
http://dmoz.org
http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories/General_Directories/
http://www.jayde.com

Additional Tips Another way of finding sites to link to yours is to find sites that accept site submissions. To find such sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for: "add url" "your keywords" Include the quotation marks to ensure the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases you enter. Also try replacing, "add url" with one of the following sets of search phrases: add site, add link, submit url, submit site, submit link.

In addition, you can also find site submission pages by searching for the actual page. So, try replacing the "add url" search phrase with one of the following page names: addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, submiturl.html, submitsite.html, submitlink.html, add-url.html, add-site.html, add-link.html, submit-url.html, submit-site.html, submit-link.html, add_url.html, add_site.html, add_link.html, submit_url.html, submit_site.html, submit_link.html

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March 8, 2004

Now that you are familiar with the basic process of hunting for links, it is time to improve upon your link development skills. With some advanced tips, you will be able to obtain higher quality links that are actually more valuable in the eyes of search engines than a large quantity of links.

The Google Toolbar
Go to http://toolbar.google.com

This will lead you through an installation process that will add search and other features to your Internet Explorer toolbar. Unfortunately, the toolbar is only available for I.E. currently. Among other cool features, there is a pop-up blocker to stop those annoying non-relevant ads. After proceeding through the installation process, your toolbar should look similar to this:

If you click on the “Google” dropdown at the left of your new toolbar you will get an “options” box.

The options that are important to this tutorial are the “page information” options. Please be sure that “PageRank display” and “Page Info menu” are checked. PageRank is a “litmus test” for link popularity. It gives link developers a rough idea of a site’s reputation in regards to search engines. PageRank should not be held as gospel, but it does provide valuable information when looking for links.

When hunting for links, pay attention to the “PageRank” of a site. The most valuable links to your site will be those that come on pages with few other outgoing links, and high PageRank. This means that a link from a page with a PR6 and only 10 links will most likely be more valuable than a link from a page that has a PR7 and 100 links on it. We will examine the benefits that can be derived from using the “page info menu” later in the “additional tips” section of this tutorial.

Maximizing the Benefit of Your Anchor Text (link text)
The text that is used within the anchor of your link is very important to which phrases you will be found for in the search engines. (Example: This is anchor text ). By using your keywords in your anchor text, you improve your likelihood of attaining good search engine ranking positions (SERPS). Anchor text is an important variable to search engine rankings, and should be used to your site’s benefit as much as possible. As an example of this, if Fake company were to use “fake company fake services” in our anchor text, it would be more valuable towards the likelihood that we will come up for the phrase “Fake Services”, than if we were to just use “Fake Company” or worse yet "click here" in our anchor text. Makes sense after you hear it right?

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March 9, 2004

Deep Linking
Many sites get into the bad habit of only linking to their homepage. While your homepage will most likely hold a lot of “weight” in the search engines, it is important to divert some of that importance to your sub-pages, which probably hold the more valuable information in the eyes of both users and search engines anyhow. Since your site is divided into logical categories, you can link to those specific areas of your site when applicable.

For example, FakeCompany offers many different services enabling us to be listed in a variety of directories. When being listed on a Website hosting directory site, we would link to: http:*/www.fakecompany.com/fake/fakeservice.html with the link text, “Fake Company Fake Services”.

This associates the link text of “fake services” with that individual page. With the combination of optimizing our on-page factors of that page (I.E. Making the title “fake services” or a variation), we are able to increase the likelihood that we will come up in the search engines for the phrase we are hoping to come up for. Since (we're assuming) “fake services” is a highly competitive phrase with a lot of national competition, we are more likely to do well for “Localalized regional modifier fake services”, and our page would be better optimized around that. Find your site “niche phrases” and design your site structure and linking campaigns around those phrases. Examples for description writing will be discussed further in the “additional tips” section of this document.

Deciding if a link is “Straight text”
Links to your site that use javascript or CGI will not benefit your sites link popularity. Now before you shutoff your brain and say, “I don’t understand that fancy coding stuff” just wait a minute. Below is an explanation of how to decipher if a site is using “straight-text” to link to other sites.

Turn on your “status bar” in Internet Explorer. You can do this by clicking “view” then checking “status bar”. If it is already checked, leave it that way.

Identify a link in the same category of the page you will potentially be listed on, and put your cursor (mouse/ arrow) over the link. Look in the bottom left hand corner of your browser. If this looks like the message in the address bar when visiting that page, then the link is probably “straight text”. If the link contains “cgi”, any strange looking symbols or strings of numbers and letters, or is extremely long, the links are probably NOT text links, and NOT valuable in the eyes of search engines. Focus on getting as many “straight text” links as you can, and you will improve your link popularity. Links that are not “straight-text” are valuable only for their click through traffic, and not in the eyes of the search engines.


March 10, 2004

Additional Tips
Another way of finding sites to link to yours is to find sites that accept site submissions. To find such sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for: "add url" "your keywords"

Try variations of these words including quotations and without quotations. Also try replacing, "add url" with one of the following phrases: add site, add link, submit url, submit site, submit link

You can also find site submission pages by searching for the actual page names. Try changing the "add url" search phrase with one of the following webpage names: add-url.html, add-site.html, add-link.html, submit-url.html, submit-site.html, submit-link.html, addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, submiturl.html, submitsite.html, submitlink.html, submit_site.html, submit_link.html, add_url.html, add_site.html, add_link.html, submit_url.html

Another great suggestion for finding high PR links from this thread suggests searching with:
"Your term here" -asp -pdf -cfm -html -htm -php -txt -doc

Spying on Your Competition
After searching your industry for links, you will get a good idea of which sites are getting the highest listings for the phrases that YOU want. A good part of their success is due to their popularity from sites linking to them. Fortunately, there is a way you can discover how your competitors achieved their success by peaking at their backlinks.

In Google, you can check the number of sites that link to any page by using the command link: http:*/www.yoursitehere.com/yourpagehere.htm. Please note, however, that Google will only display the pages that link to a page that are a PageRank 4 or over. The same command can be repeated on the search engine Alltheweb.com to display ALL links to a webpage.

This can be accomplished in the same fashion that was used above to check your own backlinks (using the link:www.yoursite.com command). An even easier way is by using the Google toolbar “Page Info” menu. This menu is on the white letter “I” surrounded by a blue circle. Choose the “backward links” option, and your competitor’s high quality backlinks will be displayed. Now you can go and request links from these same sites!

Organize and Document Your Campaign
Keep your linking campaign organized. Maintain a spreadsheet that lists when, where, and how your link requests were submitted. Some of the best elements to include would be: Date, Description, URL of Link, URL of submission form, Date verified, URL verified, and Notes (For things like subscription price of the link). This will keep you from submitting multiple times (some requests may take months to process), and ticking off website owners.

Keep a word document of the variations on your descriptions. This will save you from having to re-type, and change your descriptions for every submission. The requirements for submission can be very different from site to site. Some sites may allow 250-word descriptions; others may only allow 100 characters. Be sure to get your best key-phrases included in descriptions and in your anchor text if possible. Using alternating verbiage will may well help you to avoid an "over optimization penalty" as well. Don’t only link to your homepage!

Networking with Other Webmasters
Behind every website, there is a webmaster. Find that webmaster and be nice to him or her. One of the best ways to get good quality links is to e-mail webmasters and be polite. Many webmasters are happy to hear a genuine compliment about their site, and will be happy to provide you with a link if it is appropriate to their site. Be polite, and personalize your e-mails. Keep a few drafts of link request e-mails, and customize them to fit the site that you are e-mailing. Find a format that works and run with it! Make friends.

Shoot for a link a day, or a couple links per week, and in no time you will have the link popularity that your site needs. Remember you need quantity AND quality links. Happy Hunting!