Thursday, April 14, 2011

Backlinks

Establishing an effective backlink campaign can really propel your website rankings…if done correctly of course. The main reason that backlinks are looked upon as positive from a search engine is that it gives an engine a relatively good reading on your website’s popularity.

If you think about it from a search engine’s point of view, you can see how they get good information from the amount of backlinks to a website. If website A has 20,000 backlinks from industry specific websites that point directly to it, you can safely assume that website A is important in it’s industry. However, if website B has only 10 links that point directly to it, then you can see how a search engine may not render this site more important than others such as website A. The fact that website A has tons and tons of backlinks that point directly to the website shows that many others on the net deem this website important. If that is the case, the search engine is going to rank the website accordingly. In essence, a search engine will say to itself, “Well, this website seems to have a lot of links, this website thus needs to be displayed at the top of the ranks!”

Here are some things to help you, the website owner establish better backlinks…

1. Get a good blog link – If you were to get a backlink to your website from a major blog, you are putting your website in a good position. Backlinks from “big player” websites is very important. Getting a backlink from a website that is continuously crawled can really raise your relative importance from a search engine. Not only is the amount of links that you establish important, also is the “weight” of the link that you obtain. If your business is selling shoes and you get a link on Zappos, you are greatly enhancing you linking campaign. Zappos is a wonderful online shoe store that is continuously crawled. I am not sure if they even have a blog, but if they did, it would be a positive business move to get a link with them.

Another way to get a link on a blog is to work your link into your entry. In other words, comment on industry specific blogs and leave your link in the comment. It is crucial though that you only leave your link if it is related to the topic on the blog. Don’t just leave your link for the sake of leaving your link on a blog. This can hurt you. Many times when a blogmaster finds people just leaving links for the heck of it, they will in turn badmouth you on other blogs.

2. Trade backlinks with industry specific websites – This sort of piggy backs on the Zappos example from above. Always seek out the main players in your industry. When you contact another website for a link, be polite! I can’t tell you how many link requests I have taken in which the trade request is rude. I throw those out right away.

Consider something like this when you seek to trade a link with an industry specific website:

Dear Webmaster,
I recently came across your website and wanted to commend you on it. The content of your website is very informative and the layout is extremely professional looking! I see that we can both benefit each other by placing each other’s link on our respective “resources” page. This will of course help us both in the way of linking.

If you’d be so kind, please consider placing my attached link on your page. I would very much like to hear back from you on this with a link of your own for me to post as well.

Kind Regards,
John

You see, this letter is very much to the point, but at the same time very polite. No one wants to be told to place a link to your website. Remember, you are asking this webmaster for a favor. Your attitude should reflect that as well.

3. Stay away from link farms – I don’t suggest simply blasting your link out to as many places as possible without taking special attention to your industry. You want to make sure that you link is industry specific. This is important. Search engines are getting more sophisticated by the day. They know the tricks from the past and have fixed them. In the past, one could benefit from just having a ton of links that point to their website irregardless of industry. That practice is not an effective one any longer. Your links must be related to your industry to carry any real weight. In fact, many times your website can be “penalized” in rank when such practices are employed.

4. Create backlinks on your Facebook, Twitter and Ebay pages – Remember from earlier in this blog, it is a great thing to get a link to your website from a high traffic website. Create a Facebook page for your website/business. If you have an Ebay store, work a link into your “About Me” section. Make a Twitter page for your business in which you can easily create a backlink to your main business website. The “About Me” portions of all of the above websites are important. It is a great chance to get in your link as well as some content on what your business is about. The above pages are a wonderful means of free advertising.

5. Submit your website to high PR SEO friendly directories – This practice, if done correctly can have a dramatic effect to your website’s ranking. This effect can also appear quickly. You want to concentrate your submissions on SEO friendly directories. How can you tell if a directory is SEO friendly? Easy, search for the domain on Google. How is the directory’s ranking? That will give you an idea of how SEO friendly they are.

A good rule of thumb is to focus your directory submissions to websites that have at least as good a PR that your site has. PR is your Page Rank. Page Rank is the relative importance that your website is given by a search engine. In essence, it is the score that your website is given by a search engine like Google. Incredibly, there are more than 500 million different variables that go into a PR score! But, the fact remains, the higher your PR, the more important your website is deemed in the eyes of a search engine. The more important websites, those with the highest PR get the top placement on a search engine ranking. There are numerous quality search directories that have PR’s anywhere from 4-6 that I have seen. These are the ones that you want to focus your backlink campaign to. In the initial stages of your backlinking campaign, make sure to just concentrate on the highest of the PR directories that you come across. You don’t want to appear SPAMMY to the search engines by blasting your website out to thousands of directories all at one time. This can trigger red flags with search engine bots and can lead, at times to a downgrade in the PR of your website. So, the moral of the story is to ease into your backlinking campaign at first. In the first few months, consider submitting to about 10 SEO friendly directories. Then, over the next month, or even 2 months, keep an eye out for the results of your submissions. Are you getting added to directories? If not, consider working on your website to make sure that it concentrates on good calls to action and conversions.

When you perform a submission to a high PR search directory, you want to make sure that you have a well written, catchy headline and description. This is the data that most directories will use when they post your link. This is also what will show up on a search engine when your link from that directory is posted. If your meta data is well written, many times you can just copy that information into your submission. Unique, catchy descriptions and headlines can be the determining factor at times for getting some extra clicks. Make sure to explain your business well and strive to initiate a call to action in your description. The more you can aim to entice a click, the more your link on a SEO friendly directory will convert.

Make sure that your keywords are long tailed and as specific as possible when you submit your terms to a SEO friendly directory. The more precise, the more targeted your traffic will be each time. Get in the habit of being as specific as possible on your keywords. Too many believe that they have a chance with overly broad keywords (i.e. real estate). Search engines are extremely saturated with websites. The more specific your keywords, the more targeted your search will be.

6. Sitemap for backlinking?– YES! Did you know that if your XML sitemap is written well enough and clearly leads search engine bots through all of the links on your website, your sitemap itself becomes an authoritative backlink in itself? It is true. This is just another reason to have a sitemap on your website…no matter how big or small the page is. A clear sitemap saves search engine bots tons of time in crawling and can really ensure that all of your links are indexed. A sitemap will also help make sure that your deepest of links are crawled. Very valuable…

As I mentioned, search engines will look at your sitemap as an authoritative backlink to your website. I suggest just plain old fashioned HTML links for your sitemap page. Always, always keep it in the back of your mind that you want to make the job of a search engine bot as easy as possible.

7. Search for, and become active participants in blogs that pertain to your industry and website. This will give you plenty of chances to work in a backlink to your website. Many times on blogs and forums, you have a profile in which you can list your website domain. By being an active participating forum poster, you get opportunities to show your profile and your domain. Seek out forums in which you can answer questions to people’s industry questions. By being an authoritative voice on popular forums you can greatly increase your chances of posting numerous backlinks. Make sure to create a signature that you can use on forums in your response. This is a great way to work in a backlink to your website on high PR blog websites.

8. Headlines and anchor text again?!– Yes, it is that important. Back to submitting to SEO friendly directories. Always make sure that the anchor text that will be posted on a directory is keyword enriched. In most cases, this is the headline of the submission data that you submit. Search engines give a lot of weight to keywords located in the anchor text of any link. This is especially important when it comes to a link from a high PR SEO friendly search engine directory. Make sure to include at least a couple of good, specific keywords in your headline. This will be in most cases the clickable part of your ad in your link.

Lastly, a note on submitting your website to SEO friendly search engine directories. Make sure to concentrate on submitting to human based and edited search engine directories. This is important as these human based directories know how to eliminate websites that will many times just clog up the directory. Most of the time, these human based search directories have a better PR than those that are not. Many times too, the directories that are not human based are link farms. Stay clear of those as they can get your website banned!

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