Online Equalizer - Internet Marketing Book

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Part 1e - SEO: Link Building for Visibility

Inbound links are exactly what they sound like. They are links coming in from other websites to your website. If I placed a link on my website that went to your website, you would be gaining an inbound link from me to you. These are also known as "backlinks."

Inbound links can help with search engine ranking. Thus, they are a hot topic in Internet marketing circles. Most search engines, and Google in particular, use "link popularity" as one of several criteria to evaluate and rank your website. Link popularity refers to the number, quality and relevance of inbound hyperlinks from other websites to yours.

What Kind of Links Do I Want?

The best links are those from relevant websites. Also, links from older, well-established websites are usually more valuable than links from newer websites. So if you put these two things together, that means links from older websites within your topic / niche area will contribute a lot toward your long-term search engine rankings.

Direct Traffic vs. Search Engine Benefit

I'll go a step further and say that the best links are those that give you direct traffic in addition to search engine boost.

For example, I often publish articles onto Internet marketing websites such as ISEDB.com. Each of my articles on this website features a link to my website where you can learn more about the author. Because ISEDB.com is a high-traffic / high-visibility website, I gain direct traffic from those links ... in addition to the search engine benefits from having those inbound links.

This is the essence of "quid pro quo" online. I bring value to this website by providing quality articles, and they bring value to me by way of exposure and visibility. This example could translate to your situation, regardless of business you are in.

(On a side note, we will talk more about publishing articles online in a later chapter.)

How and Where Do I Get Links?

Okay, so it's important to acquire links from other websites over time. Now we get to the $10,000 question. "How do I acquire links to my website from other sites?" Don't worry. By the time you finish this book (and this chapter in particular), you will have enough link-building techniques and opportunities to last you for years!

As a full-time SEO / search engine marketing professional, I can tell you this is where I spend much of my time. When I first start working with a client's website, I spend a lot of time researching the audience, reviewing the website, building a list of key phrases, adding content as needed, etc. But I usually finish this task list in a week or two.

After my initial onsite efforts, I focus my attention on building a strong linking profile for the client's website. This goes on for weeks, months or years in some cases. If you're serious about the long-term visibility of your website (and you should be), then you are never really done with link-building and networking.

The Value of This Book

As far as link building goes, the real value of this book does not come from my explanation of its importance. If you've been reading up on search engine visibility in some way, you've no doubt heard that inbound links are important for long-lasting search engine success. You would've learned this sooner or later, with or without my help.

But here's one of the many ways this book brings the value. I've spent the last several years building websites, promoting websites, writing content for websites, and yes ... acquiring links for websites. I do it for my clients, and I do it for myself. And in all that time around websites, I've learned a thing or two about link-building. More specifically, I've learned how to build a strong linking profile efficiently and affordably.

And I am going to share with you everything I know about the process.

Link Building, One Hour a Day

Like most business owners, you're probably busy with a hundred details on any given day, from paperwork to customer service. But at the same time, you know the importance of having a website that people can easily find (otherwise you wouldn't have bought this book). Sure, you'd love to spend hours on your SEO program and rise to the top of the search engine rankings, but you just don't have the time.

I'm here to tell you that if you set aside an hour a day for SEO — or even 30 minutes — you can do just fine. In the beginning of your SEO program, you should focus on researching your key phrases, improving your title elements, writing new content for your website, etc. But once you get through all of that preliminary work, SEO is more of an ongoing maintenance project. The following instructions will help you make the most of your one hour per day (or however much time you can spend on SEO).

Effective Link Building Strategies

Let's start by looking at some of the link-building strategies covered in this book. We will then examine each strategy in greater detail, and I'll give you a list of resources and opportunities to put you on the path to success.

We will cover the following link-building strategies:

Up Goes Brandon, Onto the Soapbox...

You will hear me make the following statement repeatedly throughout this book, but with good reason. Here's the "secret" to link building. If you make your website truly unique, helpful and interesting, your link-building efforts will be a breeze.

In fact, if your website is exceptional in some way, you won't even have to be proactive about acquiring links ... it will happen automatically. Webmasters love to find great resources online, and they will turn around and share those resources with their own readers in a minute.

They do this by linking to the source!

Link Strategy #1 - Articles

Later in this book, I've included a fairly extensive guide to publishing articles online. So I won't go into it much here, except to say it's a great tactic for increasing your online exposure and search engine visibility ... and your direct traffic!

The keys to "article marketing" are the following:

Does Article Publishing Work?

After writing hundreds of articles and submitting them through numerous channels, I can tell you without a doubt that article publishing works. It's a great link-building strategy because it's based on a fair exchange. You allow publishers to reprint your articles on their websites in exchange for keeping the hyperlink to your site.

Here's a personal success story. Educating first-time home buyers is a passion of mine. So a couple years ago I built a website called HomeBuyingInstitute.com. Today this website gets hundreds of visitors each day, and it ranks very well for its key phrases. At last count, it had more than 3,000 incoming links from other websites. Most of this is the direct result of article marketing, because I've never promoted the site in any other way.

One day, I was surprised to find that I had a new link from the Canadian edition of Lycos.com. The link was a direct result of my article publishing efforts. The editor found one of my home buying articles at EzineArticles.com, liked the piece, and published it on Lycos with keyword-rich hyperlink intact. You can't pay for that kind of link.

* Don't worry ... there's a lot more on this subject in a later chapter.

Link Strategy #2 - Press Releases

Did you know you can submit a press release online (with keyword-rich links to your website) for only $80? It's true, and it's a tactic I use about once a month for publicity, direct exposure, and yes ... SEO benefits.

I use and recommend PRweb.com. You can submit a release for publication online, and they'll allow you a link to your website. With an upgrade of at least $80, you can hyperlink some of the key phrases within the body of your release. Remember, links to your website with key phrases in them will help your search engine visibility even more than regular links (with the web address alone).

When posting a release, pay close attention to the notes in the right column of the submission form. That's where they tell you the rules for headlines, summaries, body, etc. It's also where they tell you their unique linking formula. It goes like this:

They also have a rule about spreading your links out. Here it is verbatim: "To avoid having your release placed on editorial hold please limit your links to 1 link per 100 words of body text. This policy is in place to protect the link value of the links that you include in your release and the value of links within the PRWeb Network."

Value of a Press Release with Hyperlinks

We talked about the value of inbound links from other websites to yours. We also talked about how links with keywords in them outweigh links with only the web address. Well, when you publish a strong (newsworthy) release through PRweb.com, it will be distributed all over the web to news sites, blogs, RSS feeds, etc. If you have links in the release, all of those websites are suddenly pointing to yours with keyword-rich hyperlinks!

* There's more on this subject in a later chapter.

Link Strategy #3 - Link Exchange

I won't go into too much detail about link exchanges, for two reasons. First, there's not much to it from a technical standpoint. Site 'A' links to Site 'B' in exchange for a reciprocal link back from Site 'B' ... that's about all there is to it.

The second reason I'll limit my coverage of link exchanges is that they have greatly declined in value over the years. If you link to spammy websites, link farms, and other "bad neighborhoods," you can actually hurt your search engine rankings. In addition, Google has begun to demote the value (ranking) of websites that get most of their inbound links via reciprocal link exchanges. This kind over-reliance on reciprocal links is easy to spot for a computer system as sophisticated as Google.

So if you do participate in such exchanges, I recommend sticking to one-on-one link exchanges with trusted resources. Avoid linking to websites you don't know or trust. With that said, here are some ways to choose websites worthy of a link exchange.

  1. Choose websites that are related to your topic.
  2. Don't link to websites with links to online casinos, pharmacy websites, etc. These are hallmarks of the link farms and other shady websites.
  3. Find out how the website links to others. Is it a direct link to the website's address (good), or is it some kind of redirect with special coding attached (worthless).
  4. Does the website look trustworthy and professional? Or does it look like it was thrown online overnight?

You should also be aware that the higher your website ranks, the more link requests you will get. Several of my websites rank well in the search engines, and as a result I get about a dozen link-request emails per week. About 99% of them go into the trash because they are, (A) from irrelevant websites, (B) poorly written, and (C) obviously part of a huge email blast with a weak attempt at personalization.

Want to see one? I have no problem violating this person's "privacy" by sharing the email, because she has no problem cluttering up my inbox. Spelling errors, bad punctuation and weird grammar have been left intact:

"I have just visited your site and it is nice and I wonder if we could exchange links with each other? Link exchange with similar websites like us would promote both websites...I believe my website will have a very good pageview soon.I'm sorry for that if you are not interested in this request.You can give us a mail to: sellerkey@gmail.com,so you will not recieve this request again. With your permissiion,I will post your link on my website,and I hope you post a link to my site as well."

Somebody's two-year-old has gotten loose on the Internet! :-)

Link Strategy #4 - Building Tools & Resources

At the beginning of this lesson on link building for SEO purposes, I hopped up on my soapbox and made the following speech:

Here's the "secret" to link building. If you make your website truly unique, helpful and interesting, your link-building efforts will be a breeze. In fact, if your website is exceptional in some way, you won't even have to be proactive about acquiring links ... it will happen automatically. Webmasters love to find great resources online, and they will turn around and share those resources with their own readers in a minute. They do this by linking to the source!

With web directories and paid listings aside, few people will link to a "bare bones" website that offers nothing unique, helpful or interesting. If you start hunting for links before your website has earned its place on the web, you're going to have a long, hard slog ahead of you.

On the other hand, if you build the kind of website that makes other in your industry or niche say, "Wow, that's really something! I know some folks who would like that," then your link-building efforts will be a breeze. Your goal, then, is to create the kind of website that eventually "snowballs" by acquiring unsolicited links.

Unsolicited links happen when people stumble across your website, find it extremely helpful, and link to it as a recommended resource (or just to say: "Hey, here's something interesting"). Your direct competitors probably won't do this, but people in non-competitive roles will.

A great way to do this is to create an industry-leading article, tutorial or guide. For example, let's say we are a manufacturer of purple widgets (you gotta love those widgets!). We might create a very thorough, highly informative article entitled "101 Ways a Purple Widget Can Save You Time and Money." Search engine experts are great at this tactic, because they know how many links it can generate.

Here's one of my own examples.

On my home buying website, I created an in-depth tutorial on the home buying process — "101 Steps to a Smoother Home Buying Process." (You can Google that title if you want to see the finished product.) Sure, it took me several days to create, but it was worth it. This tutorial now gets linked to from all over the web, without me having to do much other than creating the tutorial.

Best of all, this process of link acquisition will continue indefinitely. Other webmasters find the tutorial, and if they're impressed by it, they will link to it from their own websites. More links = better rankings. Better rankings = more traffic. More traffic = more links. It's an endless snowball effect. So was it worth my time to create such a tutorial? Absolutely. It would be worth your time too, and your business will be more profitable as a result.

Here are some types of resources that do well in this role:

And here's the typical process I go through, both for myself and for clients:

  1. Spend time building the resource. This is the most important step.
  2. Spend a little more time on the resource ... make it exceptional.
  3. Start promoting the resource (press releases, industry blogs, article marketing).
  4. Create links to the resource through web directories*, article publishing, etc.
  5. Let the resource take it from there. If it's truly exceptional, it will attract links.

Remember, the more "link worthy" your website is, the easier it will be to acquire inbound links. It's worth the effort up front, because it means you can forget about your link-building efforts later on down the road. They will be happening automatically! And over time, your website's search engine rankings and traffic levels will skyrocket.

* I mentioned web directories in the five steps listed above. They are the next lesson.

Link Strategy #5 - Web Directories

To recap, the practice of seeking and acquiring inbound links is known as link building, and it's the quickest way to get your website found by search engines in the first place. You don't need a "submission service" to submit your website to the search engines — just get a few inbound links and the search engines will find your website in a matter of days.

The web directories listed in this section will serve this initial SEO purpose, and they'll also contribute to your long-term search engine success.

Importance of Link Text

Link text refers to the words found within the actual hyperlink. For example, if I have a sentence on my website that ways "Learn more about purple widgets" ... then "purple widgets" is my link text. Those are the words within my hyperlink.

When it comes to inbound links from other websites, link text is important. Keyword-rich hyperlinks (like the "purple widget" hyperlink above) can improve your search engine ranking for the phrase contained within the hyperlink.

Mix Up Your Link Text

I just explained the importance of link text as it applies to inbound links from other websites. With that in mind, you should vary your link text so you have a wide variety of relevant phrases / links pointing to your website.

This will help you in two ways: (1) to gain visibility for more of your key phrases, and (2) to make your linking profile appear more natural to search engine algorithms.

For instance, I publish a website related to direct mail marketing and postcard marketing. Instead of having a thousand inbound links to my direct mail website using the phrase "direct mail marketing," I strive to get a broad mix of link text. I shoot for "postcard marketing" ... "direct mail postcards" ... "direct marketing" ... you get the picture. It appears more natural to search engines, and it helps me rank for a broader range of key phrases.

Using Web Directories to Acquire Links

Web directories are a great way to build up your linking profile with inbound links from high-quality (and sometimes relevant) websites. Thus, directories play a role in search engine visibility. But like anything else online, web directories range in quality from top-of-the-line to waste of time. So what are web directories, and how do they help with SEO? Let's take a closer look.

What's a Web Directory?

Web directories are not search engines, though many people confuse the two. But directories can help your search engine ranking, so it's important to understand what they are and how the work.

A web directory is basically a big catalog of websites that's edited and managed by people. With a search engine, automated web crawlers find websites and add them to the search engine's database. With a directory, human editors will screen websites for quality and relevance, and then add them to the proper category of the directory. This "human intervention" is what makes a directory different from a search engine.

Yahoo is partly a search engine, and partly a web directory. If you go to dir.yahoo.com, you'll be looking at the directory side of Yahoo. You'll also notice a common feature of directories — the category system. Directories use a system of categories and sub-categories to group websites, and to help people find them effectively.

Directories Can Improve Search Engine Ranking

An obvious benefit of having your website listed in a directory is that people can find your site when they search that directory. With some of the high-traffic, industry-specific directories, this can translate to significant increases in web traffic for your business website.

But certain web directories can also help you rank well in the major search engines like Google. How? Because Google, for instance, considers certain directory inclusions as part of its ranking process.

In other words, if a website is listed in a reputable directory like Yahoo, or Microsoft's Small Business Directory, then that website can score more "points" with a search engine like Google.

When you think about it, it's perfectly logical. Being included in a reputable directory is a vote of confidence in your website. It means a human editor — not a robotic crawler — has reviewed the website before adding it to the directory. This tells the search engine that the website has some degree of quality, legitimacy and relevance.

In her book Search Engine Visibility, search engine expert Shari Thurow states: "The quickest way to achieve an initial, effective popularity component is to have your site listed in what search engines consider reliable resources: the major directories."

Web Directories - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Of course with all this being said, you still have to consider the quality of the web directory. An older, well-established and high-ranking directory will provide more SEO benefit (and possibly even direct traffic) than a brand new directory that hasn't built up any trust or traffic yet.

But you don't have to worry about differentiating between quality directories and money-wasters, because I'm going to do that for you. Later on in this section, you will find a list of web directories that are worth the time and money for submission.

Many of the directories that are worth being listed in will require a submission / review fee, ranging from $9 on the low end and $299 on the high end (namely Yahoo). In most cases, these fees are nominal when you consider the lasting benefits you get in the form of search engine visibility and website traffic.

I won't be recommending any directories that charge $300 for a single listing, the way Yahoo does. In my opinion, most small business websites can get by without such an expensive listing. Instead, I will be recommending a larger number of less-expensive directories that will still provide you with plenty of value from an SEO and traffic standpoint. Combine these with the other link-building strategies I've outlined (such as article marketing, press releases, resource building, etc.), and you're off to the races!

How to Submit to Directories

Before I give you the list of directories for this step, I'd like to offer a few submission tips. All web directories have their own set of submission guidelines, so you should always read those guidelines before submitting your website for review.

In almost all cases, your website will be accepted into the directory if you meet the following basic criteria:

  1. The website functions properly, with no broken links.
  2. The website is complete, with no parts "under construction."
  3. The website contains mostly original content (more content than ads).
  4. The website does not contain offensive material.
  5. You have submitted the website to the appropriate category of the directory.
  6. You have followed all other submission guidelines posted.

If you meet the criteria listed above, your website will likely be accepted into 100% of the directories where you submit it.

SEO Continued >> SEO Reality Check

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