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Day 27 - Part II - It’s the Backlinks Stupid!

By Mike Mindel | August 28, 2007

This content has been summarized from Day 27 Training for the Thirty Day Challenge, presented by Rob Somerville.

This is an overview of off-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies for the 2007 Thirty Day Challenge.

Link Building Strategies

This is the first of several videos on link building or backlinks. Why are we talking about this?

So far in stage one of the Thirty Day Challenge we have taught you how to find a low competition, good traffic keyword which is indicative of a market.

In stage two, after selecting that niche keyword, we have shown you how to choose a hosting platform where you can place some keyword optimized content.

In stage three, we’ve taught you some social networking strategies to tell the world that content exists. But more importantly to tell the search engines your content exists so the content gets indexed and you get an initial ranking (mainly in Google).

If you’ve done your stage 1 work properly your initial ranking should be good, preferably on the first page of Google. As a consequence you should receive some traffic from the search engines, particularly Google for that keyword.

Your content will almost certainly be promoting a product, probably an affiliate product unless you have one of your own to sell. The goal is that from that initial traffic you get a sale within an acceptable number of page-views of your money page. The money page is the sales letter that promotes a particular product (your own or somebody else’s).

Acceptable Rate of Conversion Milestone

The milestone at the end of stage 3 that you really need to achieve is that you have an acceptable rate of conversion of sales in relation to the traffic you are getting. I like to think that a decent conversion is a sale every 200 - 300 hundred clicks. Although the traffic you are getting is free, so you might wish to extend that to a sale every 400 - 500 clicks. Until you achieve an acceptable conversion I wouldn’t do too much other than some social networking to get the highest possible initial ranking.

Once you have achieved that milestone you’ve justified that the traffic has a commercial value to you. So now it’s in your best interest to increase the amount of traffic coming to your hosting platform. You get more traffic by getting a higher ranking in the search engines.

How Do You Get a Higher Ranking?

It’s the backlinks - stupid! Backlinks or link building is otherwise known as off-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In order to achieve those backlinks there are a number of strategies we can employ which are considered to be acceptable.

This presentation is a high level overview of those strategies. I’ll do some more specific videos to target those strategies ongoing.

Disclaimer

The Manual Way

We are going to show you the manual way of utilizing these strategies. Very few people use this manual way. Many people use software leverage or outsource the practice of link building to a third party. But in both cases there is a cost involved. I’ll mention software that is free but won’t mention the software which has a cost. In any case it’s good to know the manual process so you know what is happening during software automation.

Authority = Links

Search engines rank web pages based on their perception of the authority of that page in relation to that keyword.

There are a lot of definitions of authority. But I believe that particularly Google sees authority predominately in terms of the quality and quantity of links that point to your website. From websites that also have a quantity and quality of links pointing to them.

If you have a website with a large number of good quality, static, one way backlinks pointing to it, then Google will perceive that that website has authority for the keyword that the website is optimized for. Link building therefore can be considered to be the single most important element to obtaining and maintaining high rankings in the search engines.

There are other factors that might lead to ranking: age of the domain, on-page optimization that we’ve talked about earlier in the Thirty Day Challenge.

Websites that tend to rank highest for a keyword are the websites with the largest number of backlinks. Link building has the biggest effect on ranking. If you’ve got a higher ranking because you have a higher perceived authority then you will receive more traffic as websites on first page of Google, particularly in positions 1 or 2 get the most free search engine traffic for that keyword.

This site gets most of the traffic for ‘link building’ on the net.

Not All Links Are Created Equal

Link quality is equally if not more important than link quantity. Static one-way links are better than reciprocal links. A static one way link is a link from a website that points to you but where you don’t have a link on your website that points to them. A reciprocal link is where you link to a website and they link to you. That doesn’t carry as much weight.

Links from higher PR websites (more authority) are better. That has greater value to you than one from a lower ranked websites.

Links from websites with the same ‘theme’ relevance as the website they link to are better. They will be more valuable and relevant and more authoritative than websites that are completely irrelevant to the theme of your website.

Links that contain the keyword in the anchor text are more valuable and give you more credits than those that are random. Anchor text is the words that people use on their web pages that form a link back to you. Preferably you want those words used in the anchor text to be consistent with the keyword you are optimizing your web content for. For example if I want to give my how to write a story niche some link love, I’ll work it naturally into the paragraph like this.

(Note: Don’t use the exact text several times throughout the page. It will look unnatural and Google will probably reduce the power of the link. You’re creating a simple pattern to spot, it looks unnatural and, as it happens, it is! Use it once one page, and vary the text using singles, plurals, synonyms and similar keywords.)

Links from .edu and .gov domains are better still! If you get a link back to your website from a .edu domain then Google considers your website to have more relevance than a standard .com domain. But they are harder to get. It is possible to get them but they can be quite a challenge.

White Hat Link Building Strategies

Here are a range of strategies you can use to build links:

Look to Your Competitors

Use Yahoo SiteExplorer to identify the back-links pointing to your competitors websites.

Here’s a search on Google with broad match

The first link is blackdog4kids.com/holiday/summer/do/read/howto.html. So I can plug that into Yahoo SiteExplorer to find pages that link to that page

Look at the backlinks to my how to write a story Wordpress blog

As you review those links, you may find websites where it is easy to place a link to your website. Thereby giving you a foundation with which to compete with other websites in your niche.

Here’s one

It’s closed to new answers. But I could easily have written a quality comment and had it selected as the Best Answer. A great backlink for Googlebot to follow.

Unique Identifier

As you go about the process of creating content for the purpose of generating links I highly recommend the use of a ‘unique’ identifier when creating linking content. Some keyword phrase that uniquely identifies you and your copy in relation to everyone else. I’ll show why that is valuable later.

If you’ve got websites that you control, preferably ones which are niche relevant, always take the opportunity of putting links on your websites to the websites that you are trying to get ranked for a particular keyword e.g. How to Write a Story. Now I’ve not gone overboard on this in this post, but you catch my drift.

Google Alerts

That unique identifier that I was talking about works great with Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free service by Google which will notify you by email when they find a website that incorporates a keyword you are interested in.

I use Google Alerts in two ways

Identify Websites With Content in Your Niche

Ed has shown you how to identify blogs and other content sites and subscribe to the rss feed in your newsreader (e.g. Bloglines) so you can find relevant content in your niche.

Google Alerts is broader ranging. It will notify you of any website that Google finds with your keyword on those web pages and then give you a link so you can visit them easily.

Track your Unique Identifier

Let’s take that principle further and create link source content with a unique identifier. We ask Google Alerts to notify us when it finds web pages with that unique identifier. This is great as we now have a way of tracking when Google finds the pages we create links on. Or Google finds content that incorporates that unique identifier. People have picked up that content and put it on to their website. You can visit those pages very quickly and using social networking leverage (SocialPoster or otherwise) to increase the power of that linked page back to your website. This will widen the distribution of that link page within the social networks online.

Always make sure when you create content, either hosted content or linking content that you use social networking strategies to widen the distribution of that content.

Unique Content

By far and away the best link building strategy is to create great ‘unique’ content that people want to link to without you asking or requesting that they do so. If you create great content, other people will think so as well, and they will provide a link on their website to that content. Their readership will be interested as well.

Nobody ever said you need place that content on one web site only! You can create a series of portal websites that link to and are focused towards your main hosting content that is going to be your ranking vehicle in the search engines. Those websites might be other web 2.0 sites, might be blogs, might be forums, or other websites. But as you go about the process of populating those websites with content, always make sure you link back to your main vehicle. You have to differentiate distinct content you create for the purpose of linking from distinct content create for the purposes of hosting and acting as the main ranking vehicle in the search engines.

A Note About Tags

As you go about using those portal options do be mindful of the need to apply the social networking leverage (rss and tags). Make sure you tag your content so that it’s recognized by and you’re given credit in the main tagging engines in Technorati and so forth. People can find your website when they’re interested using particular keywords. That’s what the purpose of tags is for. (Mike’s comment: Notice each of my posts has a bunch of Technorati tags at the bottom for this exact reason).

Not All Content is Text

When you think about creating great content, it’s not just text. Don’t forget media content (audio and video). Sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Scribd have tremendous amounts of human traffic and you can create links back to your main hosting vehicles via content you place on those platforms. Scribd is like YouTube for documents. E.g. if you have created an eBook or summary report in your niche then you can use a service like Scribd to get extra traffic and linkage.

Other People Create Great Content Too!

You’re probably not the only person creating great content. As you visit other people within your niche, it’s perfectly ok to comment their websites and in those comments place a subtle link back to your website. That is perfectly acceptable and also quite natural.

If you’re interested in a particular subject area you won’t look at the content you create but you’ll look at other content online. Those people that created those websites might not be aware of your website. So it’s totally reasonable for you to offer a link back to your website so they can check out your great content.

Opportunities in this area include commenting on blogs, forums, guest books and other web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages etc. Very often there is a place on these services to place a comment giving you an opportunity to link back to your site. Very often the specific pages you comment on will have a good page rank PR4, PR5. Whilst these comments seem innocuous can be a good quality link.

Reciprocal Links

In a perfect world you would only have one way static links to your websites. I.e. links from other websites that point to us but there is no link on our website pointing back to them., Google would prefer you to have that and give you greater ranking credit for those kind of links.

There are strategies for reciprocal links by contacting other webmasters who have websites within your niche focus and requesting that they put a link from their website to you in return for you putting a link on your website to them.

In Google the values of those type of reciprocal links have been reduced but in MSN and Yahoo it still contributes to your overall link quantity and therefore still has a value.

If you’re going to employ this strategy do be careful to request that the webmasters of these websites use your main keyword in the anchor text of the link. You want to maximize the value as far as you possible can.

Articles + Press Releases

We’ve already discussed the use of articles as a hosting platform or ranking vehicle for your keyword. But if you’ve chosen to use another hosting platform like a blog or your own website then the use of articles as a link source is an extremely powerful link building strategy. It gives you tremendous leverage long term because if you write a great article you get a link from the article directory where you submit that article. But also if somebody chooses to take that article and put it on their website ten you will get a link and traffic for that article as well.

Articles and Press Releases are a fantastic way to distribute great content and get maximum leverage for it. As those articles generally tend to be read by human beings you tend to get direct traffic back to your website as well.

Directories / Search Engines

I highly recommend as you go into stage 4 (getting backlinks to your website to get more authority) that you submit your website to a range of directories and search engines.

There are hundreds and thousands of directories you can submit your website too. Over time as you begin to submit your website to these directories you will have a platform of links from these directories which the search engine spiders do visit and give you credit for those links. Directories aren’t a great source for human traffic but you do get credit for those links from the search engine spiders.

If you are using the blog as your hosting platform then you can use RSS directories. That blog has an RSS feed or there are services that allow you to create an rss feed from a normal website. There are a large number of directories setup for those RSS feeds and each one of these is a link as well. A human might not follow that link but the search engine spiders do.

Other Strategies

Some other options include:

Some groups do allow you to make comments and incorporate backlinks. You can search those groups by niche relevance too so if you do create a link then it will be a niche relevant link within those groups.

Things to Avoid

That’s an overview of the main strategies. Here’s the ones to avoid. (No really).

Link Farms

Quite prevalent but not particularly valuable. Link farms are collections of websites where the content on the websites is merely links but nothing else. There’s no value in any of the content. Just a collection of links which hyperlink to every other pages in the group. The quality of a link within a link farm is so low I do recommend you avoid them as far as possible.

Here’s a useful article entitled ‘Warning!! Link Farm Ahead‘ by Kimberly Krause Berg that goes into a bit more detail on this issue.

Niche Irrelevant Websites

Links should be relevant to your niche. If you link from irrelevant websites it’s not going to do you much good. You might even get penalized for it.

Linking From Long Deep URL’s

Try to avoid putting links on pages very deep in the site structure, where the page is several folders than the web page. If you’ve got a very deep link it may be that the search engine spiders don’t index to that level. If the spiders don’t find that page then you won’t be given credit for that link.

Linking From Low Authority Sites

Try to avoid page rank zero or websites that have been banned from Google. These values will do you no good at all. You will get no credit whatsoever.

Linking From Porn or Gambling Sites

Certainly avoid websites with a porn or gambling theme. Those links might cause you to be penalized. It’s not that they have no value, they have a negative value.

Duplicate Content

As you create forum posts and blog comments, try and make sure that content is as unique as it can be. You want links on primary indexed pages rather than going into the supplemental index because the content is considered to be duplicate.

The Traffic Paradox

The purpose of our link building is to improve the perceived authority of our website in relation to our keyword. By having a greater authority the search engines will lead to higher search engine ranking. By having a higher ranking this leads to more traffic. The traffic comes from the search engine, not necessarily from the links.

Some link strategies do have the potential to bring you direct human traffic. This is a bonus. The main reason we’re talking about link building here is to improve your authority and your relevance in relation to the keyword. You can use the strategies to bring you traffic but we’re mainly trying to build links.

There are other traffic strategies which are not related to link building but do have the potential to bring you traffic. But many of those are heading towards grey hat and black hat strategy and several are spammy in their approach so I don’t intend to talk about those in this series of videos. There are other places on line where you will find some more information about those traffic generating strategies.

Natural Link Building

Be very careful in the process of building backlinks, that link acquisition looks natural in the eyes of the search engines. If Google (in particular) were to suddenly find an additional 200 or 500 links pointing to your site over a very short space of time that doesn’t look natural. It doesn’t look as though your website distribution is occurring organically by the sharing of great content by other people online. If Google takes a view that your link building is not natural then they penalize your website by placing you in the sandbox (warning: existence is disputed).

Google Sandbox is a process whereby your website has been indexed but doesn’t appear in the search engine results page for the keyword your content is optimized for. When Google sandboxes you, it’s either done so because it thinks your link building strategies are inappropriate or something has changed in your content which causes it to question the authority of your website in relation to your keyword. You won’t come out of the sandbox until the link network starts to settle down and looks more appropriate to Google’s policies on link building.

Just be cautious. You don’t need to build hundreds of links in on go. Two or three links every other day for a period of time until you have an appropriate amount of backlinks to compete effectively in your niche is all you need.

Don’t SPAM!

You might get a short term benefit but in the long term it will always be negative. Always!

Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising

Last but not least I thought I would offer a document that is a resource for these strategies and definitions of some of the things talked about today. Michelle has a great internet marketing related blog. Michelle put up this document by Luke W. Parker called the ‘Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising‘ which talks a lot about some the strategies presented here. But also talks about list building and other traffic building strategies. I think it’s a great resource you might find useful as you improve your knowledge and understanding of search engine marketing and link building strategies in particular.

-Rob

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Topics: Daily Summaries |

2 Responses to “Day 27 - Part II - It’s the Backlinks Stupid!”

  1. Frida Kahlo Says:
    August 28th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    I know you get this time and time again, so I am in no way original here but… thank you for your thorough summaries; much appreciated.

    -=-=-=-=-=-
    Reality is frickin’ funny.
    TrunkShot.com

  2. Ginger Surfer Says:
    August 28th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    A very nice intro to free link building. When trying to make your link building look natural, I wouldn’t use the same link text (especially not on the same page like you have here). Deliberately use variations on the main targeted phrase. Also make sure that text and code around the link changes (Google is a pattern recognition machine). Watch out for this when submitting to directories and vary your site descriptions.

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