Not All Incoming Links Are Valuable

Linking is touted as one truly fantastic tool to build search engine ranking. In fact, Search engines often do not list websites without relevant links. This means you can optimize your website perfectly and still get overlooked by the search engines. The keyword, however is ‘relevant’ links. It’s what the search engines require. So how do you obtain relevant links?

Step One: Research links already coming into your site.

Find out how many links are coming to your site. Great tools like this one at http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm allow you to search by URL and find out how many links you or your competition has. You can use this information to help you know how many links you need to obtain to place your website above theirs in the search engine results.

To find out who is linking to your competition you can also visit Yahoo. Once there type link:http://www.yourcompetitorswebsiteurl.com Yahoo will list websites linking to your competition. You can use this information to find relevant websites that can also link to you.

Step Two: Build relevant incoming links. Accomplish this a number of ways.

* Create Compelling content on your site, webmasters will naturally link to you because your site will be valuable to them and their visitors.
* Testimonials and review sites often provide links to your website. Contact them with a link request.
* Write articles for other sites. Writing articles is a great method for getting inbound links and most webmasters are happy to give you a link back to your site.
* Write press releases and submit those releases places like www.prweb.com, www.24-7PRessrelease.com, www.i-newswire.com, www.addpr.com, www.free-press-release.com, www.prfree.com, www.prleap.com, and www.emediawire.com Be sure to include your website link at the end of the press release.
* Blogs. While blogs are viral in nature and links are swapped freely, don’t host a blog unless you can contribute to it regularly and provide valuable content.
* Beware of reciprocal links. Some reciprocal links are good, just don’t go overboard. You’ll want to mix up your linking tactics so it looks natural to the search engines.
* Beware also of link farms. Many search engines consider link farming a form of spam and have procedures to banish sites that participate in link farming.

It’s important to mix up your linking efforts in order to have the best effect with the search engines. At the same time it is vital the links coming into your site come from relevant websites. If you own a pet business links from a furniture store just don’t make sense. Link exchanges, link farms and reciprocal linking from non-relevant websites will hurt your results. It’s just not worth it.