Building effective back links
Although it is clear that most (if not all) our website have already been Search Engine Optimised (SEO), however, there are still a few more things which would help to increase search engine exposure. One of the most important would be building quality inbound links from relevant website of our niche market. This is one (if not the only) defining between our competitors and our websites.
This document aims to outline how we can build effective quality back links with minimal resources and effort as well as effectively limiting unnecessary outbound links.
Building Quality Inbound Links
There are a number of different ways to obtain quality inbound links, however many have been deemed as “spam” or “Black Hat” methods which usually results in a temporary Google site ban. As our website has a high dependency on Google, we must be very careful as to what method we employ to obtain these links and the following are a few ways to do this.
Directory Links
Although making a website completely SEO with all appropriate tags and positioning in place helps with Google page rank and SES, ultimately, the defining point between you and your competitor would be in bound links.
When it comes to inbound links, one must be very careful as to where the links come from as Google stresses a lot about the quality of the link. In reference of quality, Google determines this by the page rank of that specific page where the link resides. Having a high page rank means that a page is “ranked” highly by the general public and hence must be a quality page.
Having a high page rank link may be good, but there is another point, which must be taken into consideration during link exchange, and that is the number of links on that specific page. The number of out going links on the page that you wish to have your link on greatly affects how much your link actually weighs.
If you can imagine a bucket full of water (e.g a highly ranked page), you start poking holes into it (e.g out bound links) and the water within the bucket starts flowing out into other buckets. The more holes you have the less water comes out of each into other buckets. However, if you only have one hole in that bucket, you will get a lot more water from that bucket and would be a lot more worth while to poke a hole there.
With that being said, the following lists of directories are ones that have been hand picked to represent directories with the highest page rank and the most optimal number of links. It also has the most relevant topics in reference to the website which we would need to add.
• Gimpsy Directory – Free submission has been suspended, paid submission available
• GoGuides – Free submission not available, payment of $39.99USD one time needed
• JoeAnt – Free submission not available, payment of $39.99USD one time needed
• Microsoft directory – Free submission not available, payment of $49USD needed / year
• Best of the web – Free submission not available, payment of $49.95/year or $149.95 once
• Skaffe – Free submission not available, payment of $44.99 once
• Yahoo Directory – Payment of $299 / year
• Librarian’s Internet Index – Free submission
• Business.com – paid $199/year
• ProLink directories – Free submission
• CannyLink – Payment of $19.95 once
• Jayde – Free submission
• V7n directories – Payment of $79.95 once
Obtaining .Edu and .Gov Links
These would be considered “Authority” links as Educational and Governmental links has a higher image of weighting in the eyes of a user. It also would be guaranteed to be a quality link as the ability to spam educational and governmental websites would be near impossible.
These types of links would need to be narrowed down to a very specific niche market. For example, FatCow.com.au should be listed in the “Agricultural and rural resources” page and not just in “Australian directories”.
Getting a link back from an edu or gov site would need to be thoroughly discussed and the site being discussed may also need to highly relevant to that educational or governmental department. However, after a deal has been struck up, the benefits would far out weigh the time spent.
Paid off site links
There are a lot of websites, which sell advertising space to other websites of similar/relevant topics. However, it is best to purchase these links from a site, which is not actually actively selling links. This guarantees that all links on that site are of interest as well as of quality and relevancy, not to mention higher link weighting (due to limited links being on their pages).
This type of links requires a certain amount of time and negotiations with relevant webmasters and may also cost a relatively large sum of money for good quality sites.
Press release links
Commonly know as article links and relatively difficult to obtain. This type of links requires an article (of a relevant topic to your website) to be written and then sent to article websites such as PR.com and PRWeb.com. However, to actually be listed by them, the article must be of decent quality and have an informative and objective topic.
The article topics can be News relating to the website’s niche market or of a relevant topic. It should usually not be self-promotional, however if a PR (public relationship) company is hired, then it can be treated as a “positive” review of the website. Positive reviews of websites bring in a good amount of traffic as well as page rank depending on where these reviews are posted.
Word of warning
Although having a lot of inbound links ultimately increases the page rank of a website, it can also cause a website to lose its value if not done properly. The following are a few things to watch out for when building quality links and must always be avoided where possible or there may be a chance of being banned by Google or other major search engines.
Link Spaming
This is the term used to describe SEO specialists who go over board with building links. If the use of an automated program to build links is employed, there is a high chance that the website being promoted will be banned. It is rather simple for search engines to figure it out as automated programs help publish links to hundreds of site which is not humanly possible.
However, if no automated program is being used, then once must take care as to how many links are being submitted to directories. To be safe, it is best to submit links to 2-5 directories per month spread through the month.
Irrelevant links
To submit links to relevant websites or directories would only confuse search engines as to what your site is actually about. To avoid this, only submit to relevant websites.
There are no easy to build links, and only doing one of the above will not be enough to increase Google page rank. Adding to this, page rank does not rise overnight and may take months before any change would occur (however newer websites gets a boost on rankings). However, link building is the foundation of search engine optimisation for Google and will be for the foreseeable future and would be worth it to start earlier by building a strong foundation as aged links are worth a lot more than new links.