Linking Program Basics
A link can be understood as a recommendation from one web site
to another, but you have to be recommended by pertinent web
sites, to be sure you will get the expected results after
implementing a wise linking program.
As a football player cannot give the best advice recommending an
auto-parts provider in Singapore, a web site that sells
discounted plasma TV's won't get any advantage by being linked
from a lawyers' firm site.
The first question we need to ask ourselves when thinking about
creating a links program is "why do we need to do it?" and the
answer is simple as "the more relevant and quality links
pointing to your web site, the faster it will be ranked on
better positions".
Then there are several questions that pop up in our minds
spontaneously like "to whom may I link to", "and who should link
to me?", "how many links can I have?" and others. To solve those
inquiries I've written the following linking basics:
1. We always have to search for themed links. As said at the
introduction, there's no chance to succeed with links coming
from non-related web sites or links farms, moreover, your site
can be banned if it's related or work as a links farm.
2. Having more links than our competitors is not an indication
of success. Search Engines qualify links by their quality and
not by weight.
3. Reciprocal Links vs. One Way Links.
A reciprocal link is easier to get as you exchange links with
other (themed) sites to acquire better popularity, which is a
good deal for both parties... a good but weak deal. Each time
Search Engines algorithms give lower importance to swapped
links. Quality one way links (inbound links) are recognized as
more valuable by Search Engines and give higher relevancy if you
have links pointing to your site instead of exchanged links.
4. Themed and Authority Links
Themed links are those from business related sites and are the
most suitable to link to you or vice versa. A good example of a
themed link is a vacation review site with a link to the web
site of a resort in Aruba.
Authority sites are those with a very high raking (Google Page
Rank 8-10) and because of its importance can send a link to a
web site even if there is no match helping the linked site, as
for example a news site linking to an online MP3 players store.
5. Find the correct web sites
We want to focus our efforts on relevant incoming links, so to
do that while earning time, you can search for those web sites
that are linking to your top positioned competitors for your
main keywords, then study how relevant they really are to your
web site, and depending on what kind of site they are
(informative, directory, business review, newspaper, etc), you
can either submit your information for free or pay a
monthly/yearly fee to get a one way link to your web site into
their pages, depending on their policies.
6. Being consequent with your optimization process, you should
create a good copy for each link to be implemented, including
the desired landing page and the linked text. Directories allow
you to add descriptions but if you are buying a link from a
themed web site you may not be able to describe your site and
simply add the optimized linked text and destiny URL.
7. While selecting a site to place a link (more important if
you are buying it) you have to take into consideration the
quality of the web site, their ranking at the Search Engines (At
Google look the Page Rank parameter) as well as their content,
to be sure it is appropriate for your business.
Other factor that you have to look at is their own inbound links
quantity and quality, identically as previously researched on
your competitors' sites.
8. When acquiring (exchanging or buying links) a deal known as
a "links package", even if they are quality and themed ones,
make sure their IP's are different to maximize the results.
If they have the same IP, Search Engines can count them as a
single source.
9. The less outbound links the site that links to you have, the
most efficiently your site will get improved. When buying, you
can ask how many links are being sold from that specific web
site/page.
Search Engines algorithms won't stop changing their parameters,
but one thing that is clear is that receiving optimized text
links from quality web sites will always help improving our
rankings.