This article is designed to help with one of the most critical parts of internet marketing: generating website traffic. It covers techniques that will allow you to understand the powerful options available to you with successful link building to drive free traffic to your website from interested visitors.
Let’s start with the backlinks
These are links from other websites directed to your website. One of the ways that Google and other search engines learn to love your website is by how many other website owners find your site worth linking to.
The key is not the number of backlinks from other websites, but the quality of the backlinks. To get quality backlinks, the sites linking to yours must be relevant. It’s all a game of relevance, and it’s essential to the success of your website and marketing efforts.
Search engines calculate keyword relevance based on the percentage of related content found at each end of the link. If the content is unrelated, it will not be considered important and will lose page rank or be totally ignored by the army of Google spiders.
There are several ways to achieve this balancing act and stay out of SEO trouble while doing it.
Rule: Stay away from Google’s “bad neighborhoods.”
Backlinks are great ways to drive visitors to your website, and another great way to attract attention with the resulting free traffic is with reciprocal link exchanges.
Again, those links should be quality links from other sites, with similar content or focus to yours. Always check the buddy-links and avoid ones with too many pages full of unrelated links and links to “bad neighborhoods”.
Google will downgrade or ignore a site because of the bad company it has or the bad neighborhood it’s in, and if your site links to it, it may get downgraded, downranked, or worse; completely ignored by robots.
What makes a “bad neighborhood”?
There are some sites that use unorthodox methodologies to generate traffic for a reason. These sites should always be avoided as they will definitely bring you pain.
Always avoid sites that you think may be using any kind of tricks intended to trick search engines in order to improve rankings.
A good content test is to ask the question: “Does this help my users?” or “Is this being done for search engines only?”
Rule: Stay Vigilant
Do your research well and be constantly on the lookout to make sure you don’t get attached to a bad neighborhood. Inbound links cannot be controlled, however Google will make you suffer for linking to the bad guys.
There are free tools available to discover harmful sites for your link building efforts. Just go to you-know-who and search with the term “bad neighborhood” (in quotes) and you’ll find them.
There are certain industries that are notorious for having bad neighborhoods. Two of the major offenders in this arena are the adult and pharmaceutical industries. Unless your business is in some aspect of those two industries, you would do well to avoid them altogether.
While it’s good to have inbound links, quality outbound links to other high-quality or authority sites will definitely help your rankings considerably.
Remember that for those outbound links to matter, they must be within the subject field of your site. Consider these things when trying to get decent traffic and Page Rank for your websites.
It is vital for you to keep a good track of the sites that are linked to you. If all the links are outbound from your site and not reciprocated with a link back, the sites on the other end of your outbound links will get the traffic and page rank, leaving you as an unimportant website.
If you want to find several valuable resources for checking your reciprocal links, just search for that term and you’ll find some great tools available.
Another important factor that contributes to the success of your internet marketing is the content of your backlink anchor text (what the link actually says on your site) and how you use, or don’t use, relevant keywords for your site.
A good example: “Click here” is totally generic and doesn’t really relate to your website. However, the phrase “For a great way to make money online, visit our site”, uses your key phrase, “make money online” in the hyperlinked anchor text. Search engines love this.
To generate quality links for your sites, you need to know your audience and who you want to attract. Target your audience and focus your link building efforts on sites within that audience.
When looking for link possibilities, build your site directory with themes that complement your site. They don’t have to be identical to yours, but they should be related in content.
For example, if your site is about collecting vintage fishing lures, a site that provides tips on vintage fishing lure pricing and upkeep would be a valuable link, and most keywords would be pretty much the same.
A very beneficial way to find website possibilities for reciprocal links is through search engines to find the best sites with the same keywords you use. Use multiple engines and search using your own site’s keywords. The sites that appear in the top spots (after the highlighted paid spaces) are websites that are considered important and have been ranked accordingly. Visit those sites and contact the webmasters for a link.
You’ll find that the most competitive sites will decline, but don’t take it personally. But some will also accept, especially when you offer them a link. When that happens, you’ve just added a quality link to increase your value with search engines.
be cautious
Sometimes you will receive offers for a link exchange with sites that will tell you that they have put one of your links on their page and that they want you to reciprocate. Be sure to check that out. If they get a link from you and don’t have one back to your site on your links page, they are just harvesting your traffic, no return.
Make sure they also have a link on their home page to your linking pages, and if they don’t, decline the invite. Google does not crawl the linked page, and that link would be of no value to you..
Rule: Don’t link to pages with a zero page rank.
That link will not help your page rank, and it could be linking to a bad neighborhood or website that has been banned. Avoid linking to sites that have multiple link pages filled with links of all kinds, another characteristic of a bad neighborhood.
Create a links page
Create a links page on your website that gives other webmasters permission to link to yours. Make it very easy for them to do it. Make everything they’ll need easy to find and at their fingertips.
Offer several options for links and make sure there is a good amount of space between them so that it is easy to see where one ends and another begins. Also make sure there is a link on the home page to the links page.
Provide the HTML code for your link so they can simply copy and paste it into their link page. And before you post the code on your link page for webmasters to access, make sure the URL is correct.
Double check everything! How would you feel if you posted the wrong link to your own website? I’ve done it before, and believe me; its not cute.
Make sure your keywords are in the link HTML code. These give your link an extra punch. Search engines pick up the keywords of people searching for those phrases, which makes your link more important to spiders.
Some Webmasters prefer graphical links. Little colorful banners or buttons hyperlinking to your site are great for grabbing attention and making your links stand out from the crowd.
Be absolutely sure to add the HTML “Alt” tag to your graphic link, as search engine spiders do not recognize graphics. They only read tags, so the information located will allow the spider to index it.
Don’t overdo the graphics; be in good taste; a colorful button or a small sign is all it takes. Also put a description with each link on your links page. It looks much more professional this way and your page will look less like a link farm to spiders.
Indexing spiders check the value and legitimacy of your links and if you have links going to unwanted places, search engines will slap you in the face with their “bird of a feather philosophy”.
Again, make sure you have a link to your link pages on your home page and any other pages you have on your website so your visitors and search engines can easily find you.
Contact
Ok, now that we have an attractive links page, let’s examine how to request links on other webmasters’ pages.
Before making or attempting any contact, use your own keywords and search for other sites with good page rank and similar content that don’t directly compete with your page. Visit the page and consider how a link to your page would be a welcome resource for visitors to that page.
A webmaster is much more likely to be interested in having your link when they discover that you have taken the time to visit their page and discovered the benefits that your link would add to their site.
If you can, when initiating contact, use the telephone. A personal call to another Webmaster is more likely to get consideration than an unexpected email. Introduce yourself and tell them that you have visited their site and what you liked and found interesting and that you would be interested in establishing a link exchange.
If it’s impossible to call, write a well-written, respectful email and mention a few things about the site that you liked and how your link could improve your visitor’s experience. This is much better than simply asking for a link without showing the mutual benefits that exchanging links would bring, and it shows them that you have taken the time to visit their site.
By now, you should have some good techniques for successful link building that will generate a stream of converting traffic and spread the word about your website across the web, at no cost.
For newcomers, I hope this article has been helpful in guiding you to success in one of the many free methods available to drive quality traffic to your website.
