How to link cor­rectly to get tar­geted web traffic

3. Links
4. Social

Links. What are links? How does links help you in search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO)?

Why are links important

It’s a fair ques­tion. Indeed why are links impor­tant? Isn’t it enough just to have good, search engine opti­mized page and key­words pep­pered into the content?

The web of Links

Links are a key part of the web. The proper term for links is hyperlinks.

Those are the under­lined, usu­ally blue-colored text, that links the page to another doc­u­ment or web page.

Ini­tially links are really not that impor­tant for search engines.

Search rank­ings were deter­mined pri­mar­ily by key­word matching.

Then Google came along and changed the whole search engine landscape.

Google, which still does key­word match­ing, added into its search, a  pro­pri­ety PageR­ank algo­rithm and focuses more on inbound links. Inbound links are the links that points to your web­site or page.

The result? Google’s search results were con­sis­tently more rel­e­vant than other search engines.

Today, all major search engines fac­tor inbound links to some degree into their rank­ing of web pages.

How to Increase num­ber of Sites link­ing your to your Pages

There are a cou­ple of ways to increase the num­ber of sites link­ing to your web page. The approach can be com­pletely “white hat” to “black hat” approach of buy­ing links or cre­at­ing spam blogs or splogs.

Here are some of the ways:

1. Cre­at­ing con­tent that peo­ple want to link to,
2. Buzz about it,
3. Request for Links,
4. Link Trad­ing,
5. Pur­chas­ing Links.

1. Cre­at­ing con­tent that peo­ple want to link to

Con­tent is always impor­tant. Not only that, it should give a unique per­spec­tive, edu­cates and its enter­tain­ing. I’ve touched on this in a pre­vi­ous blog post about con­tent.

2. Buzz about it

Gen­er­ate pub­lic­ity about your site. How? By hir­ing a pub­lic rela­tions firm, issue a press release (off or online), send emails to rel­e­vant blogs and forums. Be imag­i­na­tive, do any­thing to cre­ate a buzz about your site.

3. Request for Links

Cat Beg­ging

Yes, beg for links. Put on you most soul­ful look and ask for it. How?

By sim­ply find­ing rel­e­vant blogs and email the webmaster.

In the email, describe your site, tell her why it’s rel­e­vant to her site and ask her to cre­ate a link.

Make sure you include the URL of  the page and sug­gested text to include as the anchor text for the link.

If she said yes, then it’s good for you.

More likely you won’t receive an answer, there’s no harm in ask­ing. Just don’t send an email every hour.

4. Link Trad­ing, and 5. Pur­chas­ing Links

Link trad­ing in Progress

You could trade or pur­chase links. Depend­ing on how you look, it can even be said that’s it’s a “black hat” technique.

If your friend runs a blog, I guess it’s ok to trade links, since both benefit.

It becomes sus­pect, if the link trade is done via a link exchange ser­vice or program.

Most of these ser­vices can pro­vide you with hun­dreds of links.

The prob­lem is, the link­ing site aren’t nec­es­sar­ily high qual­ity sites and most of the time, the sites are not even rel­e­vant to your site topic.

Invari­ably most of the time, the links you get are from link farms.

What’s the implication

Google isn’t stu­pid. It doesn’t sim­ply count the num­ber of links to your site. It also sees if the links are rel­e­vant to your site. Some­times a site that just have a hand­ful of links will rank higher than a site with hun­dreds of links.

Why? That hand­ful of links are high qual­ity links that is rel­e­vant to the topic in the web site and the sites link­ing in has high authority.

If you insists on doing it, then Google can just sim­ply drop you from its search engine result page.

How do you find high-quality sites to get links from?

1. Use Google related oper­a­tor, (related:www.yoursite.com) and con­tact the top 10 related sites.
2. Search web direc­to­ries like Open Direc­tory.

Opti­miz­ing the oft-forgotten link — Inter­nal Links

The inter­nal links between pages on your site are impor­tant too. They help alert the web search spi­ders to var­i­ous pages on your site. It builds the rel­e­vancy of a page to a key­word or phrase and increases the rank­ing of the inter­nal page.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to link every page to every other page. Instead choose care­fully which page you want to link to and its rel­e­vancy to the other page.

Gen­er­at­ing your own inbound link

Do you use Twit­ter, on Face­book or MySpace? If you don’t you should. You can eas­ily gen­er­ate your own inbound link.

Inbound links again

Using an auto­matic sub­mis­sion tool such as Hoot Suite, you can type your mes­sage and include a short­ened URL link to one of your webpages.

Sub­mit it to your Twit­ter, Face­book, MySpace, and your LinkedIn pages.

Not only that, you can sched­ule your post­ings to go out round the clock.

By sched­ul­ing one mes­sage to go out one per hour, you can sub­mit to four dif­fer­ent page and in a day, you would have gen­er­ated 96 inbound links.

And it takes only 15 to 20 min­utes of your time.

Another way is to post tweet from your Word­Press blog. For that you need to use Twit­ter Tools. And you’ll get a nice tweet like this:

News: Tar­geted web traf­fic — What does Baju Kurung got to do with SEO http://bit.ly/dL3Q6S #jmjr

Decem­ber 15, 2010 2:00 pm via Jour­ney­manReplyRetweetFavorite

@GazaliAhmad

Gazali Ahmad

Link build­ing is one of the fun­da­men­tal steps to opti­mize your site. It’s always bet­ter to slowly build up your link list organ­i­cally rather than buy­ing or trad­ing links. Chances are, the links are from a link farm or sim­ply spam blogs.

Tomor­row it’ll be on social media and how to opti­mize your site for social media.

And don’t for­get to sub­scribe below, or Like my Face­book Page or fol­low me on Twit­ter, so that you’ll always be in the loop.

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