Start a Link Campaign

Search engine optimization used to be as easy as stuffing your own site full of keywords.  The search engines looked at your page, decided what it was about based on the keywords, and then it almost seemed like they were ranked based on who could legitimately put the most keywords on their site.

Those days are long gone of course.  The search engine engineers figured out a long time ago that rankings shouldn’t be based solely on what a webmaster says his site is about. 

The solution?  The search engines started looking at “votes” from outside sites.  If another site linked to you, the search engine engineers reasoned, then that’s a bit like a vote of confidence coming from that third party.  Obviously the more “votes” you have, the better your site in the eyes of the search engines …especially if these “votes” (links) came from related and respected sites.

And that’s how the Google page rank was born, more or less.  Your page rank will go up and down depending on how many other quality sites link to you. The higher the page rank of the site linking to you, the more weight that site’s “vote” (link) holds.  That’s why SEO masters are always seeking to get links from quality sites with a high page rank.

Of course even though Google is the one who developed the term page rank (and the toolbar to check your own site’s page rank), other search engines use similar schemes.  That is, when they’re ranking you they take into consideration the number and quality of links you have coming from other sites.

Put it this way: if you have two exactly identical sites, one with incoming links from reputable sites and one without any incoming links, the site with links will rank higher in the search engines. 

In short: if you want to beat out your competitors, you need to pay attention to your linking strategy.  This is what’s called your off-page optimization. 

But while you need to pay attention to this strategy, you also need to fly under the radar.  Google has made it publicly known that they frown on webmasters who attempt to game their search engine by inflating their incoming links. So don’t do anything “illegal” in Google’s eyes (or any other search engine) to get your links.

Now let’s break this linking strategy down…

Anchor Text Considerations

When you’re getting links from outside sources, you must pay attention to how they’re linking to you.  Your best bet is to tell them exactly how you’d like your link to appear. And for SEO purposes, your link’s anchor text – that is, the words that actually create the web link – should be your keywords.

Getting Links from Reputable Sites

The search engines don’t weigh all links equally.  What they’re looking for are links from reputable sites, especially well-established authority sites.  That means you should try to exchange links from sites with a high page rank and lots of good, quality content.  If you can get a link from an .edu or .gov site, all the better.

Whatever you do, don’t seek out links from link farms, FFA sites, scraper sites, sites with nonsense content, or similar.  You want your niche’s authority sites – those with good content – linking to you.

The search engines also want to see that you’re getting links from sites that are related to yours.  For example, your weight loss site shouldn’t have links coming in from an underwater basket weaving site.  Since they’re so unrelated, it might look like you’re trying to game the search engines.

Get One-Way Incoming Links

If you do a straight-up link exchange, the search engines throw up a red flag and might decide the link isn’t worth much because it’s not a true “vote” – instead, you exchanged links to manipulate the search engines.

The solution? Get one-way incoming links instead of doing straight link exchanges.  If you have two related websites (site A and site B), then you can triangulate the links so that both you and your link exchange partner get one-way links.  Just link your Site A to the third-part site, and have the third party site link to your Site B.

Check out linkmetro.com to find other webmasters interested in trading links …or seek them out individually by seeing who controls the search engine traffic in your niche.

Of course the other thing you can do is purchase one-way incoming links.  Many webmasters do this …and some of them have authority sites with high page ranks.  Check out textlinkbrokers.com for webmasters selling links in your niche.

Another way to get one-way incoming links is to get your site submitted to various directories.  If you have a blog, submit it to blog directories. If someone’s running a niche directory, submit your site.  If you have a newsletter or forum, submit your site to newsletter and forum directories.

One good way to get incoming links is to write articles and submit them to article directories.  You can quickly build up hundreds of links by using an article submitter so you don’t have to manually submit your articles.

Yet another way to get incoming links is to create related blogs and sites yourself, and link to your other sites.  You can even do this for free by setting up related free blogs on wordpress.com, blogger.com, livejournal.com and similar.  Or you can spend a few bucks on a domain name, build some content up on a site, and link it back to your growing authority site.

You can also make comments on other people’s sites, such as their blogs and forums, and then use a signature link to link back to your site.  Careful though – some forums and blogs use a “no follow” code in their html, which means the backlink won’t count.