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www.searchengineposition.com
So, Why isn’t it that simple to collect good links?
Because although you may be able to get a bunch of sites to link to you on the term “widgets” you don’t know how qualified they are to give you that reference. You see, while you are building your link popularity (the term used to describe link building) the search engines are also checking out your referrer’s link popularity. If they are a site with little or no links pointing to them as an authority on what they do, then their link is worth less to you.
Now it’s starting to get difficult…
Not only do you have to find links to point to your site, you have to find reputable sites and convince them to link to you. Further, if the site is in an unrelated industry, it’s link back to you isn’t going to be as “effective” as one that comes from another site with high link popularity AND in a similar industry as you.
Here’s an example. Say you sell boats accessories online, and you are related to a webmaster at Microsoft. Even though Microsoft is more well known than “Joe’s boat shop”, the link from Joe’s will be worth more in the end if he has good link popularity on his own, than the one from Microsoft, because Joe’s is in a related industry.
And you thought search engines were dumb. (Okay maybe you didn’t). My point is that as you can see it takes a lot of work to get good, qualified links back to your site. It can take hours to find one or two really good links back to your site, or to convince other site owners to do the same.
So, how do you find these links? There are some tools out there that can help you.
I would suggest first getting and installing the google toolbar (get it here). This is as good a place as any to start. The toolbar already “qualifies” sites for you by giving you the “PageRank” of a site. Essentially what the Google PageRank does is qualify sites by the number of good quality links the site has, and assigns a number based on this qualification. The higher the PageRank number the more qualified Google feels the site is for a particular search term. Here’s the catch. You can not rely solely on the Google “PageRank”. As you will see, there are sites that may have a higher listing than your site, but with a lower PageRank. I only suggest this as a starting point. There are many other factors influencing rank such as quality of the site, relevance to the search term, sites that use flash and so on.
Next, do a search on your key phrases to see who’s ranking in the top five to ten spots. This is your biggest competition. You will want to have at least as many good quality links as these sites, in order to boost your visibility in the search engines.
Let’s move ahead. Now you have qualified all your competitors’ links, determined the best ones to approach to put a link to your site, and have even had many of them put links on back to you. Now what?
First would be to ensure that the pages with links to your site are indexed in all the major engines. You will have to manually search to ensure this. If so you are fine, as the next time a search engine spider visits that page, the changes will be noted. If not, make sure you keep track of these pages and submit them to the engines which don’t show them as being indexed.
Finally, you wait. Once you’ve submitted your links from link building it can take six months or longer before you see the results of your work. You can always go to the link checking sites to see if your links have gone up, or watch your own PageRank on the Google toolbar, as it should start to rise as Google indexes the new pages.
Keep in mind that once these links are indexed you will want to go back and repeat the process – analyze your competitors links, pick out qualified links that you can submit your site to, and submit, see if they are already indexed, and submit if not.
I also want to emphasize that this is only one strategy you must employ to help increase your rankings in the search engines. You should always monitor how you are doing in relation to your competition and analyze why you went up or down in relation to the other sites. Also, refreshing the content and/or adding properly optimized pages to your site is very helpful as this gives the search engine spiders more content to index which will help the engines better qualify your site.
Review your visitor logs, if you have them, to see which pages people are visiting and try to determine why? See which pages are not being visited, and make sure you are not generating 404 (page not found) errors.
And, most important, keep searching out good quality links for your site. For more on link building, read our article here on the bowtie theory. It explains how the world wide web is related and how linking sites affect one another.
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