SEO Linking Strategies
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between a
small, barely profitable or visible website and a traffic magnet
website. There are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to
influence the search engines. Some search engines react to
certain strategies better than others. Some even have
conflicting strategies that they react to. To document all of
these things would require a significant number of pages and
research that goes beyond the scope of this article.
However, there are a number of things that can be documented
that will work for most if not all search engines. And let's
face it; there are really only 3 that make a difference between
a successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy. They are the big
three: Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines in any
given month are responsible for over 90% of all internet
searches.
So, what is this article about? It's about what you can do as a
website owner that will influence the search engines using
commonly accepted practices of linking to other websites
(outbound) and getting website links (inbound) back to you.
There are basically 4 strategies that a website owner usually
will employ to increase their website value in the eyes of the
search engine. They are reciprocal linking, one-way linking,
multi-site linking and directory linking. A website owner should
not think that using just a single strategy is the right answer
- sure it will help your SEO but it won't be the Best answer.
The Best answer is to employ all 4 techniques and to do it
naturally.
Each of the four linking strategies has specific descriptions
that can be summed up as: 1. Reciprocal Linking = Site A links
to Site B, Site B links back to Site A 2. One-Way Linking = Site
B links to Site A 3. Multi-Site Linking = Site A links to Site
B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site D, and Site D
links back to Site A. Could be 3..N number of sites involved. 4.
Directory Linking = Site Directory A links to Site A
That seems simple enough but it takes time and effort to perform
all 4 strategies and most website owners aren't willing to spend
the time or don't have the time to spend on it. As a website
owner, SEO needs to be one of the highest priority tasks that
you need to address, just after Order Processing and Fulfillment
and Customer Service. Without free traffic from the search
engines, other traffic generation strategies that usually
require payment must be engaged.
Now doing the 4 strategies above is great, but it gets even
harder because you have to do it in a way that doesn't trigger
the search engines to enforce a penalty upon your website. No
one except the search engine engineers know all of the exact
penalties but we have some good theories for some of them.
The first is the rate at which links are created. There is a
certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's
possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to
the age of the website according to the engine. For example, a
young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000
links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of
traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress
in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind,
especially if you are thinking about buying links.
The second is that having a link to every site that links to you
will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if
all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up
the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach
your sites full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies
will appear more natural to the engines.
The third is having all inbound links to your site on "linking"
pages will make those links less valuable than having a natural
link on a contextually relative page for a percentage of the
inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage,
the better your website will rank. These types of links are
often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange
for because it requires more time and effort for both website
owners.
The fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking
sites. If all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites
then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased
your links and that is not natural to the engines. Some would
argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and
it is. However, you should not expect the search engines to give
those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP
positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a
large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing
number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 -
10).
The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links varied. It
isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have
the same text on the link description. The natural tendency
would be to have a certain percent be the sites name, but after
that it should be a wide variety of description. Your link text
description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so
make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your
preferred link text description on your website.
Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your inbound
links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural
for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all
point back to the home page of your website. It's most natural
for a good high quality link to appear in the text of a page and
have it point internally within your site.
So, when you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of
these things in mind and don't be impatient. Impatience could
incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in the
"sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google
supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in
until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that
they are being manipulated. Many of the search engines use
similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and
manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered.