Clicks to Your Website: An In-depth Review of Link Building Methods

To get an idea of how many links you need, look at the top 10 ranking sites on Google and record how many links Yahoo notes for each; Google doesn’t display all the links a site has.  The average link count will give you a good indication of many links you need. The number one rule of link building is to keep them relevant.  Topical relevance is an important part, allowing your inbound links to give your site the most value; if the entire site linking to you is relevant, so much the better. There are many ways to get links and a higher amount of clicks to your website.  Below are just a few: Paid Links Google frowns on paid links, but they do work.  You can find highly reputable and relevant websites offering paid advertising spots.  In many cases, if these links are coded to link directly to your website without passing through any tracking redirects, you’ll see value in both direct traffic and increased link densities and rankings. Articles, Press Releases, Blogs Distributing industry specific articles is a great way to boost both your link counts and clicks to your website.  Be sure to include a link to your landing page somewhere in the article, are at least in your bio.  Try using a key phrase as part of the anchor text for additional value. Press Releases and blogs are also good ways to generate clicks to your website.  The key here, however, is to use low competition, high search keywords, along with good, informative content.  The other part, for any content, is update, update, update! Forum Posts While these are helpful in link building, they come with a warning sign.  Only add a link to your site in your signature if the forum allows it, and you’re a respected member.  If you’re a solid contributor with well written posts, the link may give you some good traffic.  If not, and you post randomly, it may come back as negative marketing. Inbound links play a significant role in successful Google rankings, which, in turn, brings more clicks to your website.  Focusing on relevant links and diversifying where you get the links from, you can build a solid foundation for your search rankings today and into the future. There’s been an argument for a long time between SEO services about whether there should be SEO standards or not.  In depth arguments under this topic include whether or not a set of standards is actually a “best practices” list or an inhibiting factor for SEO. Now Google has published a set of “optimization guidelines”. Is this best practice or SEO inhibition? Consider this: Google is the number one search engine.  The big Kahuna.  If Google says, “This guide will help make your website more ‘crawlable’… these are the basic guidelines for optimizing for our search engine”, should we really be worrying about semantics?  Does it really make a difference if they’re best practices or constricting standards? Better yet, as companies that provide SEO services, aren’t we obligated by our positions to at least look them over?  I mean, if anybody knows what works and what doesn’t for sure, wouldn’t it BE Google? Google Guidelines for Optimization Providers of SEO services may or may not disagree with the guidelines.  After all, SEO is a school of many theories.  However, most, if not all, of these guidelines make sense; to turn away because you don’t want to be “hemmed in” by rules or structure is to turn away from success for your clients: •    Make every page accessible with at least one static text link. Definitely “best practices” for SEO services and web designers.  Just like users, engines don’t like to have to search for informational pages. •    Have information-rich pages that describe your content well. Again, “best practices”. For example, what good is it to have a site with information that isn’t related? •    Use text to display important content instead of images. While you can put text over an image, using an image to display the text cuts down on the effectiveness of the copy your SEO services provide. •    Check your site with a text browser. If you can’t see all of your site because of fancy flash and script, neither can Google. •    Use an XTML Sitemap. For those sites that are too complicated to be crawled, an XTML Sitemap is especially helpful.  If the spiders get lost, they can refer back to the sitemap. •    Don’t try to trick the search engines to improve ranking. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done for a client to a competitor, don’t do it. The guidelines also lay out a list of “don’t-do’s”, including cloaking, automated queries, and pages with irrelevant keywords, among others. This is just a small portion of the list; there are many more tips in the Google guidelines.  So, to all the other SEO services out there I say, forget semantics, unless it’s semantic web, and read the guide.  Whether best practices or SEO standards, the guidelines are there to show us the way. 2008-12-09T14:01:41Z

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clicks-to-your-website-an-in-depth-review-of-link-building-methods

2008-12-09T17:20:24Z

Links are a good way to raise your Google rankings, bringing traffic to your website; how many links you need depends on your key phrase competition (the number of sites using the same key phrase) and the quality of links.

Clicks to Your Website: An In-depth Review of Link Building Methods

2009-02-24T09:47:46Z