Building Links To Your Website

All webmasters should make adding new original content to their sites and building more and more links from other quality websites a part of their monthly maintenance. All of the major search engines use incoming links as a significant ranking factor. Adding content enhances a site's search engine ranking potential in several different ways, including adding quality internal links. Google's ranking system pays particular attention to the quality of incoming links. Their scheme is based on a formula called "PageRank" which was developed by the company founders while they were students at Stanford University in California. Links are the foundation of the World Wide Web, and so links are simply and undeniably the fundamental basis for all users finding your website directly, or indirectly through search engines. Unless you have at least one high quality link from a well-ranked webpage, your site will not be listed in the major search engines.

While we all ideally prefer to obtain unsolicited links originating on similarly-themed websites simply because other website owners think their readers would like to see our content, directory websites are also an excellent source of links and user traffic. Start by registering your website at The Open Directory Project at http://dmoz.org. The Open Directory Project is a non-profit website operated by America Online. Unlike a search engine, The Open Directory Project is edited by humans who evaluate each website for worthiness. They can be maddeningly slow to accept or reject your entry, but a listing there is of significant benefit because they allow other websites to republish their directory (ie. a practice that is sometimes referred to as "mirroring"). These mirrors do not provide the enormous link benefits that they did in years gone by, but its native link "oomph" is still worth seeking. The rule with The Open Directory Project is to submit and forget. Re-submitting puts your submission back at the end of the line, so don't make that mistake. This is a long-term investment of three minutes of your time. Noted Google engineer Matt Cutts offers some help on his blog for Getting Links that offers some sage advice for improving your site so that it attracts links naturally.

An article on building links I read recently had one of the best pieces of advice I'd ever seen. The advice was "publish everything." Don't hold back useful content that you've created. Share it with the world by publishing it on your website. Doing so will make your site more attractive to users and will naturally help attract links from other webmasters. It's so simple and so undeniably effective that it bowled me over. Like most web designers and programmers, I have a bag of tricks that I've developed over the years that I have hesitated to publish because I was reluctant to give away my hard work. But I came to the realization that I had more to gain by sharing than by hoarding. So I started to add more and more to my Tools and Scripts for Webmasters, and it's paid off with a slow but steady rise in natural links to my site.

There are thousands of other directories out there as well, just waiting for you to ask for a listing. Go find them. They'll often require an exchange of links, but this is a small price to pay. Try searching on your favorite search engine for your main keywords and the word "directory." If you don't find anything right away, check out the lists of directory sites in The Open Directory Project. These are not always powerful links either, but they all help build a web of themed links that define your site as being related to your primary topic(s). More and more, the search engines are looking for linguistic clues to the relevance of the content of sites to specific keyword searches that are not constrained by simply examining link text (which is an important topic we'll get to later). For many websites, their target audience is based on location - a specific state, city, or neighborhood. For them, listing in local directories can be invaluable as not simply a quality on-theme link, but for the simple ability of these directories to provide traffic from that target audience.

The well-known practice of reciprocal links is still one of the simplest methods for new webmasters to obtain links. When you're just starting out, you have to prime the pump, so to speak, and link exchanges are simple and effective in getting your site off the ground floor. The search engines are becoming more and more resistant to the effects of these links, but they do still have a place in your search engine marketing aresenal. The key is to keep the number of link exchanges small and to exchange links with other quality websites whose main topic is related to yours. Google's Guidelines prohibit "excessive link exchanges". What's excessive? If you have to construct a directory to break down your links by category, that's excessive. If you have a tool on your site that exchanges links automatically, that's excessive. If you have a dozen or so links that you've exchanged with related sites, you're almost certainly within the guidelines.

As I mentioned before, the search engines are starting to look beyond simply counting the raw numbers of links to include the relevance of the sites in question. Naturally, this means you must have already prepared a page on your own website where you can post the other parties' links in return. Search for your most important keywords and compile a list of the websites you find. Visit each website on the list so you can evaluate it as a possible link partner and then locate the contact information for the website's webmaster. Then contact the webmasters of those websites you like and invite them to exchange links. When I'm helping a new website get established in the major search engines like Google, I usually start their link exchange campaign by contacting the websites listed in the 15th or 20th rankings because I know they'll likely be hungrier for links than the websites that are already near the top. If you're reluctant to contact direct competitors, try close offshoots. I'm working with a friend who sculpts neon lights into works of art, so I'm contacting sites dealing with home/office room decor. I was once helping another site that sells two specific lines of scrapbooking supplies, so I'll check out hobby and art crafts sites for linking leads. And so it goes.

Once you spot a candidate, check their website for a links page. There should be a link to it on the site's main page. If they don't have one up and running, you'll not only have to convince them to exchange links, but also create a new page for it. If there is an existing links page, check it out carefully. A page with too many existing links will help a new website get into search engines' index, but the ranking benefits of such links will be minimal. This is especially true of sites that are obviously using an automated link exchange system. If you see a site that has a link directory with dozens of neat categories and thousands of link partners, it's doubtful that their link will not help you much, if at all.

Be sure to check out the linking method by viewing the HTML source of the page where your potential link partner post their links to other websites. In the eyes of search engines, not all links are created equal. Some sites route their outgoing links through a redirect script. That is, the HREF attribute in the <A>nchor tag link will point to a URL similar to:

http://www.theirsite.com/cgi-bin/some_script.cgi?yoursite.com

instead of simply:

http://www.yoursite.com

The only benefit such a link will be is to allow a live visitor to that page eventually reach your website. It may not be of any benefit in terms of search engines because the link doesn't point directly to your website. It's pointing to theirs. Any link to your site has value in its potential for sending visitors to your site, but in such a case you simply have to be aware that the trade is grossly uneven and make your decision in that light. This principle applies to both standard websites and directory websites.

If you find a good site that's related to yours that doesn't have a link exchange page, contact the webmaster anyway and suggest that he link to your site in an appropriate spot just because it might be useful to his users. Be open to doing the same when other webmasters contact you. Linking to good sites is just good practice because it makes your site that much more valuable to your own users.

Be very careful about joinging programs that are designed to obtain links for your website "automatically." Many of these programs violate the search engine's guidelines or Terms of Service and you are putting your website's search engine ranking in jeopardy by participating in them. I recently examined the website of one such scheme, just to see how they stacked up. The first thing I check is the Google PageRank score of the website's main page. In this case it was 0, which is a clear warning sign that Google doesn't like this scheme. Then I checked to see if the other major search engines were using this site's internal pages to pick up links. I was actually astounded to find that none of the major search engines had any pages from this website in their index whatsoever. That would have been enough to make me stay far away from this website. But it led me to another site that offered a directory of websites interested in setting up one-to-one, webmaster-to-webmaster link exchanges and there's nothing wrong with that when done in moderation and when limited to related websites.

You can make this dreary process easier by creating a boilerplate message that you can copy and paste into your EMail program when you send out link exchange invitations to other webmasters. Do yourself a favor: spell-check AND grammar-check it. It doesn't have to be dry and humorless, but make it clear that you're serious about the business of running a website. And even though you're working with a boilerplate message, its always a good idea to customize it for each recipient webmaster to say why you would especially value a link from their particular website and how the link exchange would benefit both of you. And be sure to keep the subject of your EMail something that isn't likely to be mistakenly deleted as Link SPAM, which are mass mailings sent out by SEO companies to mindlessly garner links. I use the simple subject "Invitation To Exchange Links With My (topic) Site". Anything that sounds hyped or overly cute is unlikely to ever be read in these days of never-ending torrents of EMail SPAM.

As I said at the beginning, obtaining links should be considered required routine maintenance. Websites close all the time for a variety of reasons, and their links die with them, so you need to keep your supply of links fresh and growing. Its a good idea to periodically check how many websites are linking to yours, and to be sure your link partners are continuing to fulfill their agreements. I use Yahoo! Site Explorer to check links of sites I don't own because they don't filter the results as much as Google does. Both Google and Yahoo! use the same command to check links. Just enter the command word "link:" followed by the URL for the page whose links you are checking (including the "http://"). To check the links of your own site, you can use Yahoo! or you can use the Google Webmaster Tools console.