11. Strategies for getting lots of links

This is the hard work now. You have to earn your links. In this chapter I will describe numerous ways of getting links to your web page or website. A reminder is that you should identify which page/pages on your website that you want the links to come back to. Do this very early on.

Do not forget that quality links are what you are seeking and you must avoid the link farm and FFA (free for all) link pages.

11.1 DO IT YOURSELF LINKS

When you set up your website ensure that you have good interlinking and navigational arrangements. It is generally a good idea to be able to reach any web page within your site within 2 clicks of the home page and less if possible.

Later you will learn that some (generally more important pages) pages are best limited in terms of outgoing links but not at the expense of sensible site navigation bearing your visitors needs in mind.

Google tends to find over a period of time all links on a website but note that if a page cannot be reached by a link then that page can never be found and indexed by Google.

A site map is an excellent way of ensuring that Google can see all pages. It can even be useful to a visitor. My approach however is to use it solely as a means of ensuring every page on my site can be found by Googles spider.

One of the many great virtues of Front Page is that it can easily add automatically any new page to the site map without your personal intervention.

A website with many pages can create a very large number of links to chosen pages on the site. This fact introduces the potential dilemma of short pages versus long pages. By splitting one long page into 2 short pages you can achieve a number of advantages in addition to the extra link. An advantage would be an opportunity to optimize the second page for a different keyword. A second advantage could be that an important section could be seen at the top of a new short page rather than lower down on a long page surfers have a habit of ignoring the lower portions of a web page unless they are compelled by page design factors to click down lower.

11.2 MORE WEBSITES FOR YOURSELF

So long as the reason for creating more websites is because you have lots of good content that would be better handled on separate websites then this is an excellent way of getting link backs. You are in total control, you know what the important pages are and design appropriately.

Of course more websites costs more money and need more maintenance.

Let me warn you again of the spamming approach used by some marketers.

It is conceivable that hundreds of websites and web pages could be developed and hosted at low cost using free hosting services. The web pages could consist of virtually nothing worthwhile but a link system that would provide more important websites with link popularity.

The general term for this approach is called doorway page design. The whole intent behind doorway pages has generally been to dupe the search engines and for this reason Google and others do not like doorway pages the classical definition is that a doorway page would have a link out but no link in. It would be submitted to a search engine to get indexed. This is also another reason for search engines limiting the number of submissions that can be made each day from the same IP address.

From what we have discussed you will appreciate how easy it is for Google to identify such a page.

Many web marketers argue that all doorways pages are not bad and this is true but the temptation is too great for many. My advice is do not even think about doorway pages without very special and justifiable reasons.

A similar approach to doorway pages is repetition of the web page i.e. mirror pages. Exact copies are posted to different urls thereby artificially creating link networks. This is also perceived to be a spam technique and should be avoided.

I mentioned free hosting services. The search engines know all the ip addresses of all hosting services including the free ones which are used for abusing SERPs. It is possible that submissions from these sources are penalized in some way.

Returning relevant and quality results is the objective of all leading engines. For good reason they take a hard line on spam which can do untold damage to their reputation and ongoing ability to compete.

11.3 OPEN DIRECTORY LINK

Unlike Yahoo you do not have to pay to get a review at the ODP. You just have to be patient and hope the human editor will one day take a look at your submitted site. These editors are volunteers.

It appears that it is getting more and more difficult to get ODP listings based upon comments in the SEO world. Perhaps this is the result of the explosive growth in web pages.

CREATE YOUR OWN LINK DIRECTORY

Become your own Yahoo and ODP on a small scale.

A link directory managed by yourself is an excellent way of creating links. For example by having a specialized directory from which there are many outbound links to similar sites. You could use this system for asking other sites to link back to you not necessarily to the directory but rather to your chosen important page.

This system has been badly abused over the last 18 months or so using automated tools. So be careful and make sure your directory is really useful to humans and not an attempt to spam search engines.

CUSTOMERS AND SUPPLIERS

You should ask customers and suppliers to link to your site. Since you know each other this is generally an easier opportunity than asking perfect strangers. In addition the links would tend to be about similar or related topics.

FREE WORK, FREE OFFER FOR A LINK

Offering to do something for free that will benefit the website from which you want the link can work wonders. As an alternative perhaps you have a valuable piece of work you might be prepared to share free of charge in return for a link.

LOOK FOR DIRECTORIES

On the net there are thousands of directories and most of these are looking to get link partners. Just search on Google for your particular choice and get going. You might for example type the phrase directory water gardening to find those directories specializing in water gardening. More and more directories like this are now charging for entry because they have learned the true value of links to websites wanting to achieve high rankings.

LOOK FOR WILLING PARTNERS:

Try this kind of search on Google:

Your interest is say gold discoveries then type the query add url + gold discoveries and Google will happily return a list of SERPs matching this query i.e. sites inviting you to add your url to their web. See below there are 306 matching queries for you to explore.

Instead of add url try submit your site, add page, add your site and so on. Be creative and remember use of inverted commas for greater relevancy in searching as below:

NEWSLETTER CREATION

By publishing a newsletter or even just articles for submission to other newsletters is a means of collecting links. In return for the article ask for a link back as payment.

Creating your own newsletter allows you to build up more and more pages and content for your own websites to create even more link opportunities.

AWARDS

You have probably noticed that many sites have a proliferation of awards not all of which are meaningful. This is a way of generating reciprocal links. I will give you an award and link from my awards site in return for a link from yours.

RECIPROCAL LINKS IN GENERAL

Spend time finding web pages that you would like to be linked to. This would include all top SERPs for example for your chosen keywords and especially if they have high PageRank. Identify these sites and write to the owner/webmaster requesting a reciprocal link. Be prepared to offer a link from your own site in return. This is called reciprocal linking.

NO LIMIT

Your ingenuity is the only limit in the task of finding and getting links. Remember the link command in Google will give you immediate access to all the sites linking to your competitor. If they were prepared to link to the competitor then why not you too? The query term is:

link:www.yoursite.com

Seeking and getting links is hard work and not short term but it is a job that needs continual and dedicated attention. The sooner you start the better.