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3 Factors to Consider in Your Link Building Campaign

So, you have your website up and running, and now are just waiting for all those visitors to come to you with the open wallet. Where are these visitors coming from? While there are many ways to drive the customer to your website, this newsletter will deal with bringing in the “natural” visitors…those that found your site either through a query on one of the search engines or from another site related to yours. Getting these natural visitors means some work for you, even though it is often referred to as “free traffic”.

Chapter 5 of My Traffic Book starts out with a hot tip:

Patiently building links to your site(s) will greatly increase your Search Engine rankings and bring you lots of free visitors. Joining a “link farm” will damage your site’s credibility.

This tip says it all! While having links to your site is extremely important, it is much more important how you go about obtaining these links. Just a few “quality” links to your site will go much further than hundreds of easily obtainable, perhaps scheme related, links from sites that have no purpose than providing those links (link farms).

Let’s explore what the search engines think, and thus what you should also be thinking about, when evaluating how external links to your site score in rating your site against other similar topic sites.

Authority of the linking site

Whatever your niche is, you will find websites within the niche that would be considered to be authority on the topic. These would be the ones with the most “on-topic” incoming links, the sites that many webmasters cite on their own websites. Your goal should be to become an authority site in your niche. This will involve not only searching out the power links to your domain, but also obtaining deep links to pages within your site.

Link Popularity (Page Rank) of the linking site

Regardless of what some so-called SEO experts have said, Page Rank of sites linking to yours does play a significant role in how your site is ranked in the search engines. However, it should not be your major focus when working on your link building campaign, since many links from relevant, less popular sites is still better than just a handful of links from the high PR sites.

Basically, page rank is a measure of the total number of links pointing to a website, modified by the perceived quality of those links. Generally, the higher the PR the referring site has, the more value is added to that link in determining your own PR.

Trust Factor of the linking site

More and more, how much the search engines “trust” a site affects how that site will rank in the searches, and how much value will be attributed to any outgoing links from that site. Search engine algorithms are constantly being upgraded, and it is becoming easier and easier for the search engines to examine such things as link building practices, link giving policies, content building history, and more.

The trust factor goes hand in hand with evaluating the authority status, with many of the same things being looked at. This is the factor that will discount those links you see all the time being offered from what are known as “link farms”.

Keep these three factors in mind when working on your own link building campaign. Get your power links as soon as you can, to compensate for the aging factor, look for links from high PR authority sites. Sprinkle in some non-topical but relevant links from authority sites outside your niche, and try not to let yourself get carried away. A slower, steady link building strategy will do much more for you. After all, your goal should be to become one of those trusted authority sites with high PR that other webmasters will be seeking out!

Recommended Product

Brad Callen has written what I consider my bible on Search Engine Optimization. In The SEO Mindset, Brad lays out a step by step plan to produce a long term increase in natural traffic to your website.

Featured Article

SEO Success: The 10 Commandments of Link Building

Links today are what keywords were several years ago — the hottest topic in SEO. Search engines, particularly Google, use link popularity to help evaluate and rank your website. Link popularity refers to the number, quality and relevance of inbound links from other websites to yours.

Some people waste a lot of time seeking links in the wrong way and from the wrong places. The “10 Commandments of Link Building” will help you avoid such time-wasters and achieve true linking success.

1. Thou shalt recognize the value of links.

For now, and for the foreseeable future, link building and SEO walk hand-in-hand. Linking profiles are one of Google’s top ranking factors, and the “other” engines use them as well. Once upon a time, you could simply write a lot of keyword-rich content and rank well for it. While that may still be the case with MSN / Live Search, it no longer carries you very far with Yahoo or Google. That’s where links come in.

2. Thou shalt begin link-building on thine own website.

“What is this heresy? Link-building starts on my website? Who ever heard of such a thing?” All too often, I see website owners throw up a new site and go out hunting for links before they have a site worth linking to. Link building always starts on your own website.

Think about it for a moment. Aside from directories and paid listings, few people will link to a bare-bones website that offers nothing unique, helpful or interesting. If you start hunting for links before your website has earned its place on the web, you’re going to have a long, hard time of it.

On the other hand, if you build the kind of website that makes others in your industry or niche say, “Wow, that’s really something! I know some folks who would like that,” then your link-building efforts will be a breeze. It all starts with what you put into your website.

3. Thou shalt pursue the right kinds of links.

Not all links are created equal. Sure, you want a lot of links to your website … we all do. But you should always put link quality before link quantity. Jim Boykin, SEO expert and owner of WeBuildPages.com, said it well:

“It’s not always ‘He with the most links’ who wins the game … Really, very often, he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1,000 of the wrong links. I see it all the time.”

What makes for a quality backlink? Generally speaking, the most valuable links for SEO purposes are those that come from older, well-established sites within your topic area.

4. Thou shalt alternate link text.

To gain visibility for more of your key phrases, and to make your linking profile seem more natural to search engine algorithms, it’s a good ideas to mix up your link text. For instance, instead of having a thousand backlinks to my site using the phrase “real estate marketing,” I strive to get a broad mix of link text. I shoot for “real estate marketing” and “Realtor marketing” and “real estate SEO” and … you get the picture.

5. Thou shalt find links everywhere.

Links are everywhere, and they’re what make the web, well … a web. So link opportunities are everywhere, as well. You can gain links by publishing articles online, syndicating press releases, submitting to directories, participating in forums, growing a blog or becoming an authority in your field. You are only limited by your imagination, and imagination is our next commandment.

6. Thou shalt be creative.

Quick story. I was doing some link building for a home buying website once, and I thought I had exhausted my options. I had submitted press releases online, submitted the site to directories, published articles with the big article directories, and even written a few link request letters (which I normally don’t bother with).

Then it dawned on me. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of websites out there looking for the kind of content I could provide, but not knowing where to look. So I began searching phrases like “home buying articles” and making a list of websites that provided this content.

Next, I emailed these sites one by one and invited them to use any of the 100+ articles I had written on the subject. All I asked was that they keep the author’s note with hyperlink. By being proactive with my article publishing, I earned more than 30 new and highly relevant links! When you combine quality content or a unique website with strong imagination, your link opportunities are limitless.

7. Thou shalt not waste time with silly link requests.

The higher your website ranks, the more link-request emails you are going to receive. It’s a law of the Internet. Let me save you some time and energy by saying you can delete 90% of these emails. Why? Because 90% of the time they are from sites looking to “feed” off your good rankings, but offering nothing in exchange.

I have one website that’s ranked very well for its key phrases. It generates a lot of email requests from brand new sites that aren’t even indexed yet, much less ranked well. Is that a fair exchange for me? Hardly. What’s worse, most of these sites have nothing to do with my subject area. This is the 90% you shouldn’t waste time with.

Once in a while, however, you’ll receive an email that’s actually personalized and specific. It will be intelligent, it will be from a site similar to yours, and it will be worth considering. In other words, it will be part of the 10% club.

8. Thou shalt track thine own progress.

If you put a lot of energy into your SEO program, you need to be able to track your progress. There are business reasons for this. But more importantly, there are morale reasons for it. You want to feel good about what you’re doing, right? You want to see some positive results to justify your hard work, don’t you? Of course you do. So keep track of your link-building progress the same way you keep track of your traffic and rankings.

There are a number of tools online that can help you identify links from other websites to yours. Yahoo Site Explorer is my favorite. You can use Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) to quickly and easily find out which websites are linking to yours. You can also export this information into a spreadsheet for further use. Nice, huh?

9. Thou shalt keep the big picture in mind.

Yes, links are a big part of your website’s visibility. But there’s a lot more to SEO than links. In fact, let’s look at the bigger picture and say there’s a lot more to online success than gaining links. If you tend to get carried away with certain tasks, like I do, then schedule your SEO efforts to avoid focusing only one thing. Set aside some time for link-building, article writing, website improvement, product development, etc.

In other words, don’t adopt “SEO tunnel vision” to the point you neglect your website’s primary offering (whether that be products, services, content, or a combination of the three).

10. Thou shalt enjoy aging well.

One of the things I live about SEO is that it gets easier as you go. When you put the right fundamentals in place up front, you’ll be able to increase and/or maintain your visibility with less effort over time. Most search engines — and especially Google — place a lot of emphasis on the age of your domain, your individual web pages, and the links coming into those web pages. Like a good wine, links get better with age.

About the Author
Brandon Cornett is the author of the “Agent’s Guide to Search Engine Visibility,” available for immediate download at ArmingYourFarming.com. Learn to practice real estate search engine optimization the right way. Download your guide today at: http://www.armingyourfarming.com/search

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