Pillar #7 – Link Building________________________________________________________________________
There are a variety of right and wrong ways to build links to your website.
Building up good quality, relevant links has to be an integral part of any search engine optimization strategy.
However, bear this in mind – link building is about quality, relevant links and not about the number of links. While I believe it to be a little easier to ‘game’ Yahoo or MSN search with simply generating a large volume of links that point to your website, this is a short-term game. Although it didn’t in the past, Google certainly now prefers quality over quantity – and that isn’t going to change in the future.
The consistent approach works bestYou need to view your link building strategy as an ongoing project. Attempting to get 1,000 links to your site this week and then thinking ‘that’s my link building done!’ will have little or no impact.
When developing your link building strategy you need to think about how links would evolve to a web page naturally, and do your best to try to mimic the evolvement of links in a similar manner.
You have to remember that Google and other major search engines have now been going for more that 10 years, and in that time they’ve continually improved the manner in which their software works. Good search engines do this for 2 reasons. Firstly, to continually improve the user experience and try to stay ahead of the competition. Secondly, to try and stay one step ahead of those who try to game the search engine results with underhand (often called ‘black hat’) search engine optimization tricks.
Because of this, the focus on search engines have been to try and study how links evolve naturally, and try and determine link building patterns which don’t appear to be very natural at all.
The lesson from this with regards to link building is not to try to do things that have no chance of happening naturally. That way your link building techniques have a better chance of flying underneath the search engine radar.
Link building methods discussed in this chapterPillar #7 (this chapter) discusses 5 ways in which you can build links to your website:
1) Free Directories – where to find relevant directories that offer you free website listings
2) How to establish who is linking to your competitors’ websites and how to get the same web pages to link you your site.
3) How to acquire links from respected institutions and why these links are often a lot more valuable in the eyes of a search engine.
4) How top acquire links by giving testimonials to other people’s products.
5) How to search Google and other search engines to find other relevant web pages that may consider linking to you.
Free Directories
There are 2 main sorts of free directories that are worthwhile focusing on to build your inbound links:
- Industry specific directories
- Local specific directories
1) Industry specific directories
There is a useful website called Directory Critic, which is actually a directory of directories (Figure 7.1). Use this resource to search for directories within a niche that is most relevant for your business type.
Figure 7.1 – Directory Critic
Directory Critic is the directory of directories
Relevant industry-specific directory link building is a useful and worthwhile place to start. Search engines regularly crawl directories, and these directory links will start to educate search engines about your website topic.
The more relevant the links are, the better the quality of the link. This is because if search engines are able to make a reasonable assumption about your website topic, your site will be more likely to rank more highly for that topic in search engine results pages.
Where else to find industry specific website directoriesAnother incredibly easy method of discovering new directories suitable for your industry is to search Google for a keyword phrase that describes your industry, and adding the word ‘directory’ at the end. Let’s consider an example of this using our old fictitious favourite, Freddie Faldo the golf shop owner.
Searching for a golf directoryAfter searching for ‘golf directory’ in Google, one of the first websites I found was a website called Your Golf Directory (Figure 7.2). To get his golf equipment shop listed within this directory, Freddie should simply navigate to the category called ‘golf equipment and accessories’ - and then complete a form with a little information about his website before submitting his details.
There are often a number of options when submitting your link for possible inclusion in the directory. If paid links aren’t too expensive, and for that you receive a more prominent position on a relevant, valuable website and a comparably rapid review time, then it may be worthwhile just going for the paid review option. You’re just going to have to judge whether or not you think that this is of value.
Five to ten years ago, one of the easiest methods of ‘gaming’ the search engines was to swap links with as many websites as you possibly could – no matter whether the content on either website had anything in common at all! Exchanging links is generally referred to as reciprocal linking.
Reciprocal links worked so well because it was much easier to persuade other webmasters to link to your site if you were prepared to link to their site.Figure 7.2 – Your Golf Directory
Searching for the correct category on Your Golf Directory
However, because search engines gave a reciprocal link the same amount of weighting as a one-way link, this actively encouraged reciprocal linking as a form of search engine optimization.
Other websites quickly evolved which functioned as a meeting place for people who were interested in trading links. As a result, this actively encouraged webmasters to try to short-cut their way to the top of Google search results. As a result, in order to try to continue to deliver the best possible search results to their users, Google decided that it needed to radically change its search engine ranking algorithm. And the first stage in this significant algorithm change was the reduction in value of reciprocal links – and the reduction in value of links from website deemed to be not from the same industry sector.
Choosing to link for the right reasonsIf a website chooses to link to your home page, or another page on your site because they find it to be a valuable resource for their own visitors then that’s the right reason for wanting to link to a web page.
The secret is to try and replicate that linking ideology and style in future links that point to your site. That’s in addition to trying to replicate the style of sites and locations of links on those sites that point to your web pages – replicate the natural building of links and you can’t go too far long!
Don’t think it’s always a bad idea to exchange linksYou shouldn’t think that it’s always a bad idea to exchange links. As long as if you have links from lots of other sources, it’s quite acceptable to have one or two link exchange pages on your site that feature relevant link partners. As a rule of thumb, as long as if less than quarter of your links are from link exchanges, and hand-on-heart you could say that each link which you include on your own site could be a useful resource for visitors, then this volume and quality of reciprocal links should only have a positive effect.
By participating in a minimal amount of industry-relevant link exchanges, it demonstrates to Google that you are an independent authority within your industry, because you are comfortable linking out to other websites in the same industry sector and spreading some ‘link love’.
Another example of an industry-specific directoryFigure 7.3 is another example of searching for an industry-related directory, using the case study of Jane Jobs' sales executive recruitment company.
Having searched Google for ‘sales recruitment directory’, one of the first search engine results I encountered was a website called SalesWork, which contains a list of useful links of where to find sales work.
Figure 7.3 – Sales Work Website
The free link exchange form on the SalesWork website
Remember, whatever your business is, search for your industry sector keyword and the word ‘directory’ in Google or another search engine, and you will hopefully find at least 10 good, relevant directories that you can get decent one-way links from to your site. For these types of links you need a combination between quality and quantity – so be selective – but not too selective.
Optimizing your link text (title) and descriptionAnother thing to bear in mind when you are submitting your site to various directories is to try to ensure that you vary the title text and the description of your submission details.
Because you’re submitting your own website for prospective inclusion in a directory, the chances are that if the directory owner decides to include your website in their listings, they’ll choose to use your suggested title and description instead of bothering to write one for themselves.
This gives you a fantastic opportunity to influence your off-site search engine optimization (i.e. controlling the links and text in the links from other sites witch point to your site).
To maximize the search engine optimization impact from your directory submissions you should use a mixture of different keyword phrases within your title and description choices.
This is because if you just used the same title and description in all of your directory submissions, search engines could easily assume that it’s you that’s been doing the submitting. However, if you mix things up a bit, it may well be perceived by the search engines as being the directory owners choosing to link to you.
Search engines have lots of different ways of deciding whether or not it looks as if you’ve been building links yourself, or other sites have chosen to link to you. One easy method that they use is to analyze the text within the links that point to your pages – if most websites use exactly the same phrase then that may be perceived as representing unnatural link building. Another rule I go by is to never have more than 50% of my text links to any one page linking using the same keyword phrase.
Comparing DirectoriesThere are 3 main methods which you should use whenever you need to analyze the potential effectiveness of getting listed in a directory.
- Manual review for relevance and suitability
- Google Page Rank
- Alexa Rank
As already briefly covered, you need to try to ensure that your website is being featured in the right neighborhoods. That’s on sites which already feature a reasonable quantity of subject matter in your chosen field, and don’t display material that you aren’t comfortable having your business associated with.
- Google Page RankGoogle Page Rank is a method of ranking individual web pages between 0 and 10, 10 being the highest score and 0 being the lowest. It is an approximation, according to Google, of their perceived value of a page. It is not a very accurate method of measuring, but it does give you an indication of the potential value of having a link to your site on the page.
One of the easiest ways to determine the Page Rank of an individual web page is to download the Google Toolbar. (Simply search for ‘Google toolbar’ in any search engine). The Google Toolbar is a small software program which adds on additional functionality to the top of your website browser – there is a version for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
As part of the toolbar you will be able to view the Page Rank of each web page you visit via a small green line representing the Page Rank score. The length of the green line indicates the quantity of Page Rank that the web page has been awarded by Google.
However, bear in mind, Page Rank is only updated about every three months. This therefore means that Page Rank isn’t an accurate present-day representation of what Google currently feels about the page, but it provides a reasonable starting point for analysis.
It’s also important to remember that just because a web page doesn’t have any Page Rank; it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t bother trying to get your website listed on that page. It could be a very popular site that gets lots of visitors, and there may be some technical reason why Google isn’t choosing to give the web page in question any Page Rank. That’s why you still need to use your gut instinct – along with one other method of rating the value of a website – Alexa Rank.
- Alexa RankUnlike Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank gives you a rating score for the popularity of a website as a whole. It can also give you a reasonable estimate of how popular a website is in a particular country.
Alexa ranks the top several million websites, and it will give you an approximate traffic ranking value for your website. If it is number one this means it is the best website in the world!
To show you how it compares websites against each other, Figure 7.4 is an Alexa Rank graph showing a ranking comparison between the Google.com, Yahoo.com, and MSN.com websites over a five-year period.
The great thing about Alexa is that you can view how much websites have increased in popularity (or decreased in popularity) over a period of time. This will allow you to make more of an informed decision on whether or not it may be valuable to approach a website, and ask the owner to link to your site. Alexa has is limits though. When a website has a ranking of much lower than 200,000, Alexa struggles to produce a graph to represent the popularity of that website over time.
Figure 7.4 – Alexa.com
Alexa graphs comparing traffic of Google, Yahoo and MSNHaving covered major directories in pillar #5, and industry directories over the few previous pages, local directories are the final type of directories to which you need to submit your website.
Figure 7.5 – Google Local Directory
Google Local Directory – one of the most important local directories
If you are a business with a physical address then there are 2 local directories I would class as being very important to try and get your website listed in – Google Local and Yahoo! Local.
You can also search Directory Critic (as previously discussed) to find different local directories. As well as having industry-specific directory categories, Directory Critic has a section for country-specific regional directories. And once again, in a similar manner to what was suggested to find more industry-specific directories, you can easily find additional local-specific directories by searching for them in Google.
Google Local DirectoryYou can add your business to the Google Local directory (Figure 7.5). To do this, you will need to create a free Google account. Having done so, you will be able to fill in your business name, description and your address. Google then sends you a physical postcard to your business address with a pin code. You need to log back into your Google account and enter this PIN code to make your listing live.
Figure 7.6 – The Yahoo! Local Directory
The Yahoo! Local Directory is important local directory
Getting your business listed in Google Local will only become more important in the future as being featured will also mean that you will be able to appear in associated services like Google Maps. It could be argued that local mobile search is the next Internet frontier, and getting your business listed in all the big online local directories now will give you a head-start in the next stage of local directory evolvement.
Yahoo! Local DirectoryYahoo! Local (Figure 7.6) works in a similar way to Google Local – and when your business is listed on this directory it should appear in Yahoo! Maps.
Don’t forget Directory Critic – and the 2 reasons why you’re building links
Remember not to forget the Directory Critic website when you’re searching for local-specific directories. These types of links should be able to offer you 2 main benefits. Firstly, the search engine optimization benefits, and secondly, the visitors who click on the links through to your website.
More Local DirectoriesAs with industry directories, you can find other local directories using search engines. Below (Figure 7.7) shows the Google search results when you search for “Glasgow directory”.
Figure 7.7 – Google Search results
Searching for local directories in Google
Glasgow, of course is just an example. You can conduct a similar search for any other city in the world. This search will help you find specific directories that are often run by local people on a non-profit basis who are simply interested in providing great information about their local area.
Links from these types of sites can be extremely valuable for a number of reasons. For instance, in addition to the benefits of helping to educate search engines about the locality of your business, these directories often have categoryspecific sections which will be better for your SEO.
Figure 7.8 below shows the categories found on the Glasgow Trading website. Remember, when you’re reviewing local directories which may be appropriate for your business, make sure that you take time to browse and find the most appropriate category for inclusion in.
Figure 7.8 – Glasgow Trading
Selection the most appropriate category on Glasgow Trading
Reviewing the categories on the Glasgow Trading website, you can see that once you click on ‘Professional Services’, there are plenty of options to choose from including ‘Accountancy’, ‘Advertising’, ‘Architects’ etc.
To submit your website to a great, relevant local directory like this, it’s often just the case of navigating your way to the most relevant category, and them looking for a ‘submit’ button.
You will then be presented with an online form which requests the title and description of your website. Because it’s a local directory, it may also ask you for your business address and telephone number – and perhaps a password so that you can return to the site in the future to edit your business information. (See figure 9 for completing a submission form on Glasgow Trading)
Figure 7.9 – Glasgow Trading
Completing a website submission form on Glasgow Trading
Remember to bear search engines in mind when you’re submitting your website to local directories. As well as selection the optimum category for your business, it’s important to remember to try to include a relevant keyword phrase in your submission title and description.
Figure 7.10 – Glasgow Trading
An example of a company listing on Glasgow Trading
Another thing to bear in mind is that if you’re planning of trying to get listed in lots of local directories, it may be a prudent idea to replicate your submission strategy that you have with other directories by rotating your titles and descriptions.
Figure 7.10 shows you why it’s worthwhile spending some time to come up with a quality, lengthy description for your business prior to submission to local directories. As well as giving each directory submission having their own web page (with a unique URL), the web page also contains a link that visitors can click to see a location map of the business.
Although this particular local directory example doesn’t actually give you a keyword rich link back you your website, it does pass on ‘link juice’. You can tell this because if you view the source code of the listing, the link HTML doesn’t use a ‘nofollow’ attribute.
Competitor backlinksAnother important part of a successful link building campaign is to be able to analyze the links that are pointing to your competitors; (backlinks) determine which ones are most valuable and come up with a strategy to try to encourage these web pages to link to your site too. Let’s take a look at our fictitious example Freddy Faldo, and how he would analyze which websites to target using the keyword phrase ‘golf equipment’.
Using the previously mentioned Google Toolbar, after having loaded one of his competitor’s home pages, Freddie would begin by selecting the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the PageRank icon. Then clicking on ‘backward links’, he would be able to view a list of several other respected websites which link to his chosen competitor (Figure 7.11).
Figure 7.11 – The Golf Shop Online
Searching for competitor backlinks using Google toolbarDon’t just rely on Google to analyze your competitor’s backlinks
It’s important to note that Google chooses not to display all the links (according to their data) which link to your competitor’s home page. In fact, Google may only display around five percent of the links that they know about. So you shouldn’t just rely on Google when you’re analyzing your competitor’s backlinks!
However, the good news is that Yahoo is a lot more willing to divulge its link count information, so collating the Yahoo and Google results together means that you will be able to get a good feel for who’s linking to your competitors.
You’re better off downloading all this research onto a spreadsheet – or it may be a good idea to use semi-automated search engine optimization software like SEO Elite to carry out this task, as suggested at
http://www.13pillars.com/resources/pillar7.
This SEO software – or the added time investment to create your own spreadsheet will help to make sure that you don’t miss out on as many link building opportunities as you otherwise would do.
Analyzing the number of links pointing to a competitor’s website using YahooTo analyze the number of links pointing to a competitor’s website using the Yahoo search engine, all you have to do is visit
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/, and then type in linkdomain: and then the full URL of your competitor’s home page – for example this search would look something like linkdomain:http://www.competitorsdomain.com.
Once you’ve selected a number of competitors, and downloaded all of their backlinks according to both Google and Yahoo onto your spreadsheet, you need to sort them in order of value. This is generally done by using a combination of Google PageRank and Alexa Rank.
(This is probably the point where you choose to definitely select some semiautomated time-saving SEO software instead of doing all of this manually!)
So, you’ve solved half of the puzzle – you’ve discovered which websites are linking to your competitors, and that’s the main reason why your competitors are ranking so well. The next half of the puzzle though is to work out a strategy that is most likely to get you competitor’s link partners to want to link to you too.
One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when they’re trying to encourage other websites to link to them, is they send out generic emails saying something like:
“Hi, I really like your site and wondered if you might be interested in swapping links?”
Webmasters receive emails like the above one far too often. And because there isn’t one degree of personalization – or indication that the message sender has even looked at the recipient’s website, the chances are extremely small that the message will be treated with any serious consideration.
Alternatively, if you took just a little time to visit each web page on which you wanted to get your business listed, decided how exactly how your competitor’s links came to be and educated yourself on the business model of the website in question, then you would be phenomenally more likely to obtain a link back to your website.
This is because your new email to the website on which you would like to get listed would look something like:
“Hi David,
I’d like to compliment you on the set of useful resources that you are listing at
http://www.buildyourownbusiness.biz/cat/index/36/Entrepreneur-Articles.php