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The SEO Super Hero: Link Development
by Daniel Cedar
Link
Development takes a major role in having your web site rank well in the
search engines. Many web masters as well as SEO companies overlook how
important it is to have a good link development campaign going for
their web site. This article consists of 3 major topics; What is Link
Development, Finding Link Partners and getting the max. potential from
each one of your links, and Proving the power of Link Development which
are meant to give you the basics of running a good campaign that will
boost your rankings in search engines.
What is Link Development?
Link Development, also known as Link Popularity, is a term used to
describe getting other web sites to link to your web site. Remember the
popular kids in high school? Well lets just say that in most cases
popular kids got noticed way more, they usually were social chair or
prom queens and kings, top athletes and the list goes on. The point is,
the popular kids got noticed while the not so popular kids didn't. This
is the same concept that search engines go on. If you are popular, then
you get noticed and how search engines decide whether you are popular
or not is by how many web sites link to you and how popular those sites
are.
Hopefully that isn't a painful analogy that brings up memories of your
high school days. So now that we know what Link Development is, lets
talk about how we start a link development campaign.
Finding Link Partners!
There are two types of link partners to go after, one is a one way
link. This is a directory, forum, or web site that links to your web
site without you having to link back to their web site. You can buy
links now from web sites like: www.textlinkbrokers.com, but I am not to
sure how the search engines feel about buying your popularity. The
second type of link is a reciprocal link, which means that if you put a
link on your web page pointing to them, then they will put a link on
your web page pointing to you, the perfect "You scratch my back and
I'll scratch yours".
So now how do we find one way links? Well first off, the easiest way is
through the search engines. If you are doing link development for a
real estate site, google: real estate directory. There are plenty of
directories out there that allow you to add your site for free. Next
you will want to look up real estate and find forums, so that you can
find posts that relate to you and add a reply giving some useful
information while providing a link to your web site. Please do not spam
your link on forums, only place a link when it makes sense to. For
example if you are a Real Estate agent in Vancouver BC, Canada and you
come across a post saying, Where can I find real estate listings in
Vancouver. Then add a nice reply and your link at the bottom. Finally,
never forget about your friends and family, explain to them that by
having a one way link form their web site to yours it will help you
boost your search engine rankings.
It seems that reciprocal links do not have as much weight on the search
engines as one way links, but are much easier to get. The reason they
are easier to get is because you are helping the other web site get
better rankings while they do the same for you. So there are a few
general rules you should follow while doing reciprocal link
development, first, try not to exchange with your competition as you
will just make it harder for you to come up before your competition.
Second, only exchange links with relevant sites. By relevant we mean
that the site you are linking from and to should relate to your web
site, an example of this would be if you are a real estate agent, you
would want to link to mortgage brokers sites or home renovation sites
not children's video game sites, however if the site is in your
locality you can link to them and mention in the link that they are a
local business/web site. Finally, always be honest and truthful when
sharing links, do not put up a link and then take it down a week later,
if you agree to sharing links, stick to your guns.
Finding reciprocal link partners is actually easier than you think. One
of the best things to do is find out who is linking to your competition
and ask them if they would also like to trade links. To do this, in
google type: link:www.competitionswebsite.com. This will bring up a
list of all the web sites that have linked to that site, then just find
the web masters e-mail and send him/her a polite e-mail asking if they
would like to exchange links. Do this for every major competitors web
site and you will have links coming at you left and right. Another
great resource is a free web site called sitesell. What this site does
is lets you enter your information into their database, including your
e-mail, web site and what keywords best describe your site, then it
finds you people with the same keywords and sends them an e-mail asking
if they would like to exchange links. I have received hundreds of links
this way. I suggest you sign your self up right away at: http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/.
Now that you know how to find link partners lets look at what your
links should look like. Now this is only what I do and it seems to work
very well, some may disagree and I can understand not everyone wants to
exchange links this way. Personally I think Google has become to smart
to just accept links that follow this general concept: Anchor Text -
Description of link. How I exchange links is within a paragraph. For
example:
Real Estate in Vancouver is a booming industry. With the 2010 winter
olympics happening in Vancouver people are very interested in Vancouver Real Estate. Joel Carcone is an experienced realtor ready to help you make the right investment in Vancouver.
By having it in a small paragraph that gives the web site that is
linking to you more text that is relevant to your site, it is going to
make the link weigh more when the search engines count it as a vote.
Lots of software out there will not let you do this and require a
strict: link - Description, formation. Do not skip over these, they
just won't count for as much.
Finally, Google ranks sites based on their algorithm and gives them a
rank between 0 and 10. The higher the PR the more important Google
believes the web site is, thus giving more weight to sites that link to
you with a high PR.
The Power Of Link Development!
Link Development should have a Cape and a big "S" on its spandex suit
as it has so much power it is unbelievable. The following examples are
not intended to offend rather show you that link development can make a
huge difference without even having the site optimised for the keyword.
To prove the power of link development we are going to use president
Bush as an example. If you look up the following words in google,
George Bush's White house Biography are the first to show up. I urge
you to try this, read over the biography and notice that the words
"failure", "worst president", and "worst president ever" do not show up
in the biography at all, but if you look those same words up in google,
you will see that his biography comes up first for all 3 of those
words. Now this is an extreme case and is known as googlebombing, but
this does show the true power of link development.
If Link Development can make a site that is totally unoptimized for
those keywords come up first in a search that has about 213,000,000
sites competing for the word failure, imagine what a good link
development campaign could do for your site that is optimised and ready
to be found on the internet.
If you are thinking of getting SEO done to your web site, look into
companies that do Link Development as this is a powerful way to gain
rankings for your web site as shown with the example in "The Power of
Link Development". Make sure that when asking about link campaigns that
SEO companies follow an ethical approach to Link development, you would
not want to wake up one morning to find your site dropped off the
rankings because of unethical link development practices.
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