SEO 101 – #5 – Off-Page SEO – Inbound Links

In this video you’ll learn how to locate sites that might be willing to link to you – which determines to a large degree where you rank within a search engine.

Transcript

Inbound links are critically important and determine to a great extent where you rank in the search engines.  The more inbound links you have, the more authoritative they are, where they’re linking to on your site as well as how long they’ve been linking to you all play an important role in how the search engines view your website.

Ideally the links that you want to have pointing to your site will:

  • Be authoritative.  An authoritative link comes from a site that holds some kind of authority in the search engines eyes.  For example, if Amazon.com linked to a page on your site, this would be considered an authoritative link.  Virtually any website that you hold in high esteem, has been around for a good length of time and that people overall would “trust” is an authoritative link.  Again, the Google toolbar can help you determine if a website is authoritative.  The higher the PageRank, the more the likelihood that Google believes that site to hold some authority in its industry.
  • Link to an interior page on your site. The ideal situation is to have other sites link to an interior page on your site, not just your home page.  These are referred to as “deep links” and are considered an important part of where you rank in the search engines.
  • The links coming to your site all contain variations of anchor text. If you remember, anchor text is the clickable portion of a link.  When people link to you freely, they’ll use a variety of ways to do so which won’t always fall under the proper “optimized” way of linking.  Sometimes people will link to you using:
    • Your Website Address (e.g. http://www.YourSite.com )
    • “Click here”
    • “For more information visit this link”
    • The name of your website (e.g. Leo’s Law Services)
    • And so on.
    • The bottom line is, people link to you in all different ways, not always with the most ideal anchor text (which would be the title of your page containing your keywords) and this is exactly what you want to happen.
  • Links from various website addresses. The more distinct sites you have linking to your own site the better.  This tells the search engines that a wide variety of people find the content you have to offer interesting, valuable and worthy of linking to.

Obviously you can’t control these factors but you can lend a helping hand by finding out who is linking to your top competitors.

You can start your own link-building campaign by simply taking a look at who is currently linking to your competitors and then attempting to get links from those same locations yourself.

One of the best ways to find out who is linking to the top competitors for a keyword you’re considering   is to use a free tool provided by Yahoo.

But the first we need to do is find out who your top competitors are for one of your keywords.  And for this purpose, we’ll use Google.  Just visit Google and enter in one of the keywords you’d like to use on your website and then click on the site listed in the first position.  Simply copy that website address and then visit Yahoo’s tool located at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.

Once there, paste in the website address you just copied.  Click the “inlinks” button, and then choose “except from this domain” from the drop-down list.

What Yahoo gives you is the first 1,000 websites that are linking to the website you’re researching.   Simply click on any of the links to visit the site linking to your competition and see if they have a way for you to add your own link to their site.  If not, the next best thing to do is see if there is a way to contact them by locating a “contact us” link and then use that form or email address to contact the site owner to see if they’d be willing to link to you.

Most of the sites will link to you if you give them a valid reason for doing so.  For example, because you offer services that would be helpful to their site visitors.

You can continue to do this with the rest of the sites on the list at Yahoo and by continuing to visit Google, entering in one of your keywords, finding the top competitors for that keyword and then repeating the process.  This will give you a good head start on getting links coming into your site.

If you currently participate in forums or message boards online be sure that your website address is contained within your signature.  Whenever you make a post on these message boards, this will typically generate a link back to your website.

Locate blogs on topics you know and leave useful and helpful comments.  Most blogs require you to fill in your name and your website address before commenting. This will usually get you a link back to your site as well.

To find blogs or message boards that you’d like to comment on or participate in, you can again use Google and do a search for “your topic” (in quotes) + “message board” (again in quotes) or “your topic” + blog.

Next, let’s take a look at some linking strategies that might send up a red flag to the search engines and make the search engines take a second look at your linking strategies resulting in potential penalties.

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