Building Links For Ranking

Search engines place major importance on external sites linking to yours. Your best results for link popularity is to search the internet for relevant high ranking category websites and see if they have reciprocal link pages. Today's search engines are nothing more than link popularity checkers with keywords as their focus.

Sites get their ranking based on link popularity first than on their optimization. So your must have links to achieve a page rank (PR) then you must optimize the site to be above the other sites with the same page rank. Most sites will never achieve a page rank higher than a PR5 or PR6. So you must be well optimized to beat your competition after you get your key links.

The best links are not reciprocal links, but links you do not return. Incoming links with no return links on sites with similar content are the best quality of links to have. They return the most value. Sites that offer good information, articles, free tools and resources generally have these quality links. This establishes them as an authority site.

Getting Links:

Advertising for Links & Content:
Links you pay for by ads on similar resource sites will build both your Page Rank and your Search Engine Rankings. These are the cream of the crop in today's search engine world. But to cut expenses and be ranked longer without paying, you must find links into you that you do not pay for, and will generally remain online for years to come. This can be the hardest endeavor. You can hire an SEO Company that offers Link Building Services to do this for you. Or find a reason why other webmasters would like to link to you. This can be in the form of a quality web directory on your site, a tools section, a resource center, tutorials on your service, newsletter, information about specific products. The better and more realistic the reason, the better your returns will be.

Quality Reciprocal Links:
Contact the webmaster and ask how to get your site linked from them. A good approach would be to add them to your links pages first. We highly recommend you add them first and then remove it later, If the webmaster realizes that he has added a link that you requested and then has to wait for you to add it again, you are putting a burden on that webmaster. Do it the proper way and ignore requests for links from anyone who has not already added you to their links pages. Be sure to avoid third party companies that claim to place you on a PR 7 if you link to the home page of the webmaster. Their intention is to have you add the link and never return it.

One-Way Links:
Search Engines can tell the difference between reciprocal links and "One-Way" links. One way links help you more than reciprocal links. Getting one-way links is harder than getting a reciprocal links. If you hire an SEO company, make sure they get you one-way links as part of their services. Ideas for one-way links. Give them a reason to link to you. Most one-way links are received by companies hat use "Link Ideas". They find a way to get you to link to themselves without returning the link. This can be done through services, web awards, free software, free tools, and any other method that makes people want to add your link without asking.
 

For instance. If you like this tutorial or any of our tutorials, please add a link to our website like this:
SEO Company
http://www.seoimage.com/.
Offers Search Engine Optimization services, link popularity services, and information and high quality tutorials.

We appreciate you notifying other webmasters about our tutorials. You can even link directly to this tutorial!

What to Avoid:
Avoid linking to websites that have a Google PR 0 (Google Page Rank 0), these numbers can be found in the Google toolbar available on Windows Internet Explorer. (Google does not support other browsers or platforms). These PR 0 websites could be new, in which case they would be safe, or they could have used bad SEO techniques that have cause them to be removed from the Google index in which case they get a permanent PR 0. For Mac users there is the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Mozilla, as well as a Page Rank extension. However, the Mac versions are not accurate and some sites appear as PR 0 even though they have PR.

Avoid companies that email you and ask you to link to their network of websites. Especially when its over 5 websites all on the same exact topic. This could hurt you down the road and connect you with these websites. If these webmasters use poor methods of ranking, they you could be penalized by ranking to them.

Avoid bulk email link requests. These usually look like "Hello we have a website that is in the same category as your website and we would like to exchange links with you..." These companies sell links, and they send an email to every email address that they have on a purchased list asking for a link. The quality of this reciprocal link is usually poor and will more often hurt your website. A good link request would have a link already added to your website and some Google PR.

Avoid Link Schemes, Link Farms and Link Popularity Services that require you add code to your website. Some companies will put the same links on every page of a website and tell you that this is a safe method. You now have duplicate content, duplicate links. These will help you for short periods of time but they could give you a PR 0 in the near future, remember the code is on your pages. If these plans were so good, every SEO would use them.

Be cautious of websites the hide their link pages (on other domains) and/or only offer a link to their link pages from their home page and not the rest of the website. If the link to the links page is only off the home page and not part of the footer than the links could lose value. In some cases these link pages can help you if the home page has a high Google PR. A worse case scenario is when they only link from the home page to the main directory and then they have several categories in the directory, the problem with this is that the PR gets watered down the further you go into a website. This is also bad for the website itself. In this case they have created several lower ranked pages in a directory that all link to their home page on all those pages. This adds too many low ranking pages linked to their home page and hurts their own "Internal Link Popularity". So in effect these link directories hurt their owners ranking.

How to Ask for a Link:
To contact a webmaster for a link (Only after you already added it to your website) send them an email such as be sure to look for any link requirements before linking:

Hi,

I looked at your website and found it very helpful and it is related to my own website. I think your visitors would find this site to be a great resource because we offer...

I would greatly appreciate a link from your site back to mine. I have already added you to my resource link page at:
http://www.My_Company_Links_Page.com/my_keywords.html.

My Company Link is:
Company Name Keyword
http://www.MyCompany.com/
My Company Description is:....

Thank you for your time and consideration. Please feel free to contact me if you have any comments, questions or would like more information about My Company Name.

Sincerely,
Me
My Company
http://www.MyCompany-link.com/

Be courteous and have the link already added to your site so the webmaster knows that he does not have to keep checking to see if you added the link.

Google today only lists incoming links to your website that are PR 4 or higher. These are the links you need to seek out. Anything less than this will not help you for Google Ranking. Some webmasters will also link to the referring link by adding a link to it next to the link to the main page. Another method to help pages that links to you to be found, or be considered a better link, is to use a refer script. Another method is to build a page with all the referrers that your server logs track.

Try to also target the inner pages of your website, where the content is a resource for other sites and get links to those pages. Link popularity plays one of the most important roles in search engine optimization. Without a good link popularity strategy there is no other way that your site will rank highly. Just submitting to search engines is not enough, you need better links than those. We highly recommend you create a good link popularity strategy as this is the one of the most important way to get higher ranking.
 

It is just as important to have links as it is to have good links. Avoid submitting to "free for all links" and links contained from cgi-scripted programs where the link or page url has a ? in the field. Most search engines will miss it. They are getting better at spidering dynamic pages but most simply cannot parse the url. Check the Page Rank in the Google toolbar to see if the site in question is even listed in Google. If it has a PR 0 leave it alone and search for your next link. Never link to free for all link pages, link farms or Page Rank 0 Home Page websites. Search engines will find you guilty if you link to PR 0 (Page Rank Zero No Green in the Google toolbar on the websites homepage) sites, this can hurt your ranking and even ban you from a search engine. Those will not help you as much since most major search engines ignore them.

Spend the extra time to get links that are related to your site. If you do not have the time you should hire an SEO Company that offers Link Popularity services to do it for you. We average 15 to 20 minutes per link and find we usually have to ask more than once. The most important links are on top ranking pages that are ranking in the same keywords that you want to rank with. Yes, that makes you competitive and less likely to get a link from those sites. Well you should note that the reason they rank is because of their content and their incoming links from other sites. You can target their links by searching for incoming links to those sites that do not offer reciprocal links. For example go to Google and type in "link:www.Your_Competition.com" see where the higher ranking links are coming from and try and contact those webmasters. You will find many willing to trade links or even add you without a reciprocal link, although we suggest you return the favor. This is an ongoing process, it literally takes months to track down good keyword relevant sites to link with.

Types of links:
Text links with your keywords in them are the best way to link to your site. So if the title of your site, your meta tags, the body of your page text all have the same keyword as the link text your results will be better. This is the "Google Bomb" effect that when hundreds of pages link to your website with a specific keyword in the link text the ranking is considered to be the best. However you must get these on many sites with both similar and different content from your own. The higher the Page Rank (Green stuff in the Google toolbar) is on site that you trade with ranks, the better the links value is to you. If it is a similar category web site the link is worth much more to you. But remember that the page your link will be on must have value. Avoid Directories on companies websites that have numerous links in a web directory. 90% of those links do not work. Avoid linking to sites that use a Link directory from any of the Link Popularity Programs and Linking Manager styled directories. 90% of those links do not work.

Submission service = more links?:
This topic has been used to be debated by many SEO companies for quite some time. From our experience it is not the submission at all that matters it is the optimization and real links. We believe any submission service IS ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS! Some just submit your website every few months to spiders that have already spidered your website. Submission to Search Engine is almost unnecessary. Think about it. A good search engine wants to find every page of every website to make it the largest search engine. A good search engine wants to have Fresh Up-To-Date content.

Many submission services add you to artificial link pages that are hosted on their own sites. These links are submitted and remain on the page for about 2 days if they ever made it. We went to one of the biggest Submission companies online and looked at where they placed your websites. 20% of the sites didn't even exist. 10% were free for all pages. Most wouldn't help any site. The ones they offer for free are all you would really need.

Try and avoid these submission services like the plague. Remember the better Search Engines want to be considered an asset to the public and will want as many sites indexed as humanely or mechanically possible. They are constantly sending out spiders to find new pages and archive them. Your site is better off not being submitted, but rather being found by reciprocal links. Your site will rank better and higher. All you need is several strategic links to your site and it will get indexed in all the major search engines. Keep in mind that there are certain sites that are better to be listed in than some of the smaller search engines.

Directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ should be submitted to. They have Human Editors and the value of these authority domains is helpful in overall website ranking. This helps get rid of spam and abuse of the mechanical engines. Major search engines place more importance on sites that are listed in these kind of directories and ranks them higher. Dmoz.org (The Open Directory Project) can also generate you more links as hundreds of small search portals use their listings. Unfortunately they are out of date and list old nonexistent sites or much older versions of any given website.

SEO Image LLC recommends you search far and wide for the best links you can find and try and approach the Webmaster to arrange for a reciprocal link. Spend more time worrying about high quality targeted links rather than submissions to as many pages as possible. With a good combination of targeted link popularity, optimized content, title and meta tags, you will be well on your way to reaching the top position on the search engines.