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Pittsburgh Internet Consulting’s Link Building PDF File A comprehensive, simple, and FREE link building document Introduction: Link building should be one part of any online marketing campaign. Users can get to your website for the 1st time in one of three ways; they can type it into the address bar after learning about if offline, they can find it in a search engine or they can click on a link from another website. Links are also important because your rankings in all the major search engines are influenced significantly by the number and QUALITY of the links to your site. So two of the three ways users can find your website are directly related to your ability to obtain links pointing TO your website. The purpose of this document is to summarize the basics of link building and link popularity so that any webmaster or site owner can understand and apply this important element to their website. Link Popularity Definitions: Link Popularity = the measure of the number and quality of links from other websites pointing to your site’s home page or internal pages on your site. Links from your site to other sites do not help your link popularity. Link Quality = A link is considered high quality if it sends lots of affordable, targeted visitors to your website. However the definition that is used more often for link quality is the one that applies to your search engine rankings. According to the search engines, link quality is based on the following factors: 1) The link popularity of the site that links to you 2) The text that is included in the hyperlink and the text that surrounds the link 3) Whether or not the website or page that you are listed on is related to your business or keywords 4) How many links are on the page that links to you and where in that list your link appears (top is better) Bad Links = Certain types of links are never beneficial and are a total waste of your efforts. Link farms and link rings will generally send very little traffic and will provide you with virtually zero benefit to your search engine rankings. Link Farm = A site that exists only to allow a webmaster to place a link to their site and will accept just about everyone who takes the time to fill out a form. These are also called Free For All (FFA) link pages. Link Ring = This is a site that allows you to join their ring by placing a snippet of code on your site. If you place the code for the ring on your site, your site’s links will be included in this rotation of links on all the sites in the ring. While this used to be a popular way for niche sites to reach each others customers there are very few web rings that are still of high quality today. PageRank™ = This is Google’s™ proprietary name for their measure of link popularity. Here is the explanation from the Google.com site: http://www.google.com/technology/. Deep Link = A link that goes from the linking site into an internal page on your site several layers down, i.e. not your home page. Link Neighborhood = This is a grouping of the sites which relate to your site through links. It includes the sites that link to you and the sites you link out to. It also takes into account the link neighborhood of each of these sites. A good link neighborhood is one that relates to the theme of your site and also one that does not contain any shady websites. Reciprocal Links or Link Trades = This is when two sites agree to link to each other and both place links on their websites to one another. One way links = This is a link that points to your website but you do not link to in return. Direct Links = This is a link that points from another website directly to your site (Ex: http://www.domain.com) Indirect Links = This is a link that points to your website from another through a through a 3rd party tracking site. These generally do not count towards search engine link popularity. (Ex: http://www.trackingsitehere.com?linkid=yoursite) 3-Way Links = A 3-way link is when a company essentially tries to hide a reciprocal link by using a 3rd party site to facilitate the trade. Site A requests a link from Site B but instead of offering them a link from Site A, they instead offer a link back from Site C. By using this technique both Site A and Site B gain a direct or one-way link. While this technique was very ingenious a few years back, a representative from Google said “These links stand out like a sore thumb”. So I would not recommend this as a major strategy. Site A Site C Site B Themed Links = This is a link that relates to the “theme” or category of your business. Natural Links = Any link that occurs without a submission on the part of the webmaster. Natural links occur when another webmaster links to your website to benefit their sites users or to reward your site for unique content or a useful application. These are also referred to as “organic links” IP Block = A group of IP Addresses which are assigned to a network administrator and grouped by Classes. Class A, B and C describe the number of IP addresses available in the assigned group, with Class C being the smallest and most common. Many web hosting companies request a Class C block for their servers and place each website on a unique IP address within their allocated IP block. One old (spam) technique was to create a large number of websites, which are typically hosted on the same server, or webhosting company, and link them all together. This no longer works because major search engines now look at the IP address of the sites linking to each other and will discount their link popularity if they find those sites having the same IP address, or falling within the same Class C IP block. The Past, Present and Future of the Impact of Links on Search Engine Rankings: The Past: A long time ago, in an internet far, far away, search engines cared nothing about links. They looked only at your pages to determine your rankings. Then Google™ realized that quality sites happened to have a lot of links from other quality sites. By counting these links as “votes” they could figure out which sites were thought to be high quality by other webmasters. It was a great theory and helped Google™ to become the most relevant search engine online. Then they told us they were counting links. As soon as webmasters became aware that links helped their rankings, the value of using links to determine rankings started going down. At the time links on link farms, link rings, and reciprocal links all helped your rankings and webmasters abused all three. The Present: Links are still important to your search engine rankings. But Google™ is making some significant strides towards not allowing low quality links to improve your search rankings. Reciprocal linking as your exclusive link building strategy is dead. At this stage you should only trade links with sites that either benefit your users or that are both closely related to your business and a high quality site. Google™ also claims to be looking at ways to de-value paid links on sites that exist only for the purpose of selling links to other websites. However, in my opinion, these one-way links should still help your rankings on most purchased links except for the most egregious link brokerage sites. MSN®, Yahoo® and Ask Jeeves® also continue to evaluate links to determine your rankings. At this stage reciprocal and other bad linking techniques still help your rankings on other search engines than on Google™. The Future: As I look in my crystal ball things get more and more fuzzy, but I think we can assume a couple of things. First, webmasters will continue to try to fool the engines into thinking that links are higher quality than they are. Second, the search engines will try more and more methods to stop webmasters from gaming the link popularity system. This will lead to one of two ends; either the search engines will stop using link analysis as part of their ranking algorithms or alternatively the search engines will improve their link analysis enough so that only the best quality links help your rankings. Therefore the future of link popularity and link building is simple. Do not waste your time chasing low quality links. Instead develop sound linking strategies where the links themselves are beneficial even if the search engines do not count them. Then you can look at any search engine ranking benefits from your link campaign as a bonus and you will receive the traffic and branding benefits from the links for the long term. The best ways to build HIGH QUALITY links to your website Your “warm” Market: Any linking strategy should start by insuring your site is listed in all the easy places. I refer to this as your warm market. When a sales rep starts at an organization, the 1st thing he is asked to do is to go through his contact list and see if anyone he knows would be interested in their services. Links are the same way. Start by making sure that your website is properly listed on all the sites that you currently do business with. This includes: vendors & suppliers, customers, friends, business associations, trade groups, the chamber of commerce, etc. These links are usually easy to obtain and will stay online for a long period of time. Major Directories And Verticals: Next there are a few key places to be listed on the web that are considered major web directories. Any serious website should insure that they are listed in the following directories. http://dir.yahoo.com - $299/year annual recurring fee http://www.dmoz.org – Free listing, but may take six months to a year or longer to be listed in this volunteer directory http://www.business.com - $199/year per category http://www.joeant.com - $39.99 one time fee http://www.goguides.org - $39.99 one time fee In addition to these five major directories, this area of link building also includes being listed in all of your industry specific verticals. For example, if your business relates to the calibration of equipment, then the portal http://www.ecalibration.com would be a definite place to acquire a link to your website. In addition to a themed link to help your search engine rankings, the traffic from this site would be very targeted to your industry. Most industries have their own verticals that service their market, they can be found easily by searching the web. Develop Unique Content or Applications On Your Site: When your site contains something that is useful for other sites, webmasters will link to it to benefit their users if they become aware of it. By creating interesting content or a useful application, your site begins to accumulate “natural” links. This is when a webmaster finds something on your site they believe is valuable and then places a link to your page from their site just because they want to utilize your site’s information for their users. A great example of this is the SEO website http://www.bruceclay.com. Bruce is a leading expert in the field and is recognized as such from his peers. He has created many unique pages that other SEO company’s link to in order to support the content on their own sites. Two examples are http://www.bruceclay.com/web_ethics.htm and http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm. In the 1st example, Bruce explains the difference between reputable SEO companies and disreputable companies. This has encouraged links from other SEO companies that follow his example of ethical SEO practices. So his site gets links from other reputable companies in his industry and not from the companies that violate these rules of thumb. Next the searchenginerelationshipchart.htm is something that Bruce updates regularly and has become a very useful tool in our industry. So again, many people link to it to give him the credit and to pass this unique and simple tool onto their users. This is just one example. Some other ways to get links using this method would be an industry specific glossary, product reviews, a unique forum or message board, or an application to test a user’s bandwidth. This technique is only useful if the resource you create is truly unique and of high value. If you are recreating something that is already on the web, or generating boring copy that doesn’t add to a user’s web experience, then this will not be effective. If you do generate something unique, then you need to announce your new web content using e-mail, blogs, and message boards to get the word out. Checking Your Competitors Links: Another way to find links is to check your competitor’s links. Then by reviewing the sites that are linking to them, you can find other industry “experts” that may link to you. Start by using the searches below to find a list of sites where your competitors are listed. Google: MSN: Yahoo: link:www.domain.com link:www.domain.com linkdomain:domain.com – site:domain.com Go through each web page one at a time and decide which ones might be willing to link to you. If the site is a directory or review site, they will most likely list your site. If the site is in your competitor’s warm market, they will probably not list your site. While this method can be labor intensive, it can also generate some good themed links with high link popularity. Submit your site to the relevant free directories and consider advertising on some of the affordable portals that seem to be high quality sites. The final page in this packet is an example of a simple spreadsheet you can use to track your link submissions so that you can follow up until you receive a link on the sites you desire. Searching The Web To Find Free Links: By using Google™ or other search engines, you can find sites that may be willing to link to you. When searching for links your search should contain two parts; a “link phrase” and your keywords. The “link phrase” is a phrase that a site would have on their page if they let other sites add links. Some of these phrases are listed here: “add your site” “add your site” “add your site” “add URL” “add a URL” “submit your site” “submit your website” “list your site” “submit URL” “submit a URL” So if you wanted to search for travel websites willing to accept link requests you could search for: “add url” and travel After performing your search browse through the results just like you would if you were checking your competitor’s links. Again, you are looking for sites that have a free submission form, an e-mail link for free submissions, or a reasonable fee for the link. The same spreadsheet shown at the end of this packet can be used to track your submissions. Reciprocal Linking (Link Trades): Trading’s dead, trading’s dead. Let us all rejoice that trading is dead. As I stated earlier in the document Google™ has already began to discount reciprocal linking. So sites that both link to each other will not receive much if any benefit from the link trade according to the search engines. It is assumed that MSN, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves will also move in this direction. There are some situations where link trading can still make some sense for your company. I would only trade links in two cases. First, if you and another company target the same market or keywords and do not compete at all, it makes sense to trade highly visible links with this company to share your traffic with each other. Secondly, link trading can still have some benefit if you keep your reciprocal links extremely focused. In the following example, one of our clients has created a furniture directory. By keeping their trades exclusively focused on furniture only, this reciprocal directory should not harm their rankings and can help them to establish a solid link neighborhood. (Ex: http://www.myofficefurniture.net/htm/furniturelinks.htm) Distribute Press Releases Online: This is a great way to get a few long-term and high quality links. The larger your organization and the more true news you have, the better this strategy is for your company. By using a site such as PRWeb.com to submit online press releases, your releases (with hyperlinks) are distributed on the web. A release on this service cost $119/release at this time. The more newsworthy the releases, the more links you will receive each time you send a press release. For eCommerce and small business websites this has limited application. We suggest that large eCommerce players release one or two press releases per month through this system to support their overall linking strategies. For small businesses we would only recommend using this system when a release is truly newsworthy. For content sites or large corporate sites, we suggest submitting press releases as often as your company issues a traditional press release. When writing a press release for the web there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, write the title of the press release with a specific keyword phrase in mind. The entire release should be focused (optimized) for that keyword phrase or the main point you are trying to convey. This gives the possibility that your press release will achieve good search engine rankings for this phrase and send your site traffic from the release sites. Next, be sure to link to your home page in the conclusion or more info section of the release. Finally, within the content of the press release include 1 to 3 deep links to pages inside your website that relate to your release. Write Articles and Get Published Online: One of the often overlooked ways to generate links to your site is to write articles that relate to your business and get them distributed on the web. Inside these articles you can place one or two links back to your website. Usually one link can be placed in the main copy of the article and one in the signature or conclusion of the article. Once you write an article, you will need to submit this article to industry portals that may consider publishing it to fill out their content. These are going to be the best article submissions, when you locate a site that matches the content of the article and contact them directly. Another way to submit articles is through an article submission site or software. One quality method is articlemarketer.com where you can issue an article at a cost of about $120/year for unlimited submissions. Another quality site is ezinearticles.com. Ultimately the success of your article campaign will depend on the quality of your articles. The better the quality of your articles the more distribution they will receive, the more traffic they will generate and the longer they will remain online. Hire A Link Campaign Expert: Sometimes the best way to achieve any task is to pay an expert to accomplish it for you. The same can be done with link building. Reputable consultants have been doing link building for years and with the proper budget, you can find one that can promote your site effectively. One example of this is Eric Ward from http://www.ericward.com. It is important to remember the following when hiring a link consultant: the consultant should be concerned about the quality of the links not the quantity, the campaign should be measurable, and finally any benefit these links have on your search engine rankings should be “added value” not the primary benefit of the links you are gaining through this campaign. Blogs and Message Board Postings: Search engines still index links in blogs and message board postings and they can drive very good traffic. However, be very careful with using this as a defined strategy. This should be considered a supporting method and not a primary method to increase your link popularity. When posting to a blog or message board first you should be sure to follow the terms and conditions of the board. If they allow you to use a link to your site in the signature, by all means take advantage of that link. But then do not post every five minutes just to get an additional back link. Instead become a responsible user of the message board or blog site and your links will have more value. Plus if you become a user that others respect, they may follow your links to learn more about you. As far as posting links in the middle of your posts, again the rule should be to be responsible. If the link you are adding truly has value to the other users of the page, then add it and others will thank you for it. If you are writing posts just to fit in your advertising, either your posts will be removed or you are posting on a very low quality site. Link Building Resources http://www.google.com/technology/ http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/ http://www.ericward.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_popularity http://forums.seochat.com/link-popularity-43/ ### Pittsburgh Internet Consulting was founded in 2001 and specializes in search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing, website planning, project management and RFP Writing. http://www.pittsburghinternetconsulting.com info@piconsulting.com Ph: (412) 942-0222 Fax: (412) 942-0224 Business Name Here - Link Submission Worksheet Domain domaina.com domainb.com domainc.com sitea.com siteb.com sitec.com websitea.com websiteb.com websitec.com websited.com domaind.com domaine.com sited.com sitee.com website2.com sitef.com Full URL of Link Page http://www.domaina.com/page123.html http://www.domainb.com/page123.html http://www.domainc.com/page123.html http://www.sitea.com/page123.html http://www.siteb.com/page123.html http://www.sitec.com/page123.html http://www.websitea.com/page123.html http://www.websiteb.com/page123.html http://www.websitec.com/page123.html http://www.domaina.com/page123.html http://www.domaina.com/page123.html http://www.domaina.com/page123.html http://www.domaina.com/page123.html http://www.domaina.com/page123.html http://www.domaina.com/page123.html http://www.domaina.com/page123.html Method Used Competitor Review Competitor Review Competitor Review Competitor Review Competitor Review Competitor Review Web Search Web Search Web Search Web Search Web Search Web Search Directory List Directory List Directory List Directory List Search Details competitora.com competitora.com competitora.com Anothercompetitor Anothercompetitor Anothercompetitor Google: "add url" and travel Google: "add url" and travel Google: "add url" and travel Yahoo: "add url" and travel Yahoo: "add url" and travel Yahoo: "add url" and travel http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/ http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/ http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/ http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/ Last Status Submit Listed Pending Dead Linked Pending Dead Pending Pending Pending Pending Linked Linked Dead Pending Pending Linked Pending 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 11/01/05 Notes Submited via online form Site is offline 11/28/05 Verified on 11/28 by Bob Smith Submitted via email@site.com Received e-mail, will not be listed Responsed to inquiry on 11/28 Submitted via address@site.com Submited via online form Submited via online form 11/28/05 Verified on 11/28 by Bob Smith 11/28/05 Verified on 11/28 by Bob Smith Site is offline Submited via online form Submited via online form Verified on 11/28 by Bob Smith Submited via online form Download this document at: http://www.pittsburghinternetconsulting.com/link-building/