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How to Link In the first part I looked at Link Exchange
generally. Now I’ll take you through the fun part of actually
obtaining useful relevant backlinks. If you are convinced about
the benefits of linking, the question in your mind must be -
“Yes, but how do I go about obtaining incoming or backlinks?”.
There are various ways you can go about this, depending on
whether you are seeking pure backlinks - the best kind; or
whether you are prepared to settle for reciprocal links – the
most common; or whether you want to do someone a favor and give
them free publicity by unilaterally placing an outbound link on
your site without one in return – the easiest to do – just to
it.

One Way Backlinks

A backlink can only be obtained if there is website that carries
your link without one in return. This happens when your site is
linked in an article, directory, by request, or cited as an
authority or resource site by another due to its superior
content.

Content

When a website has fresh, unique, informative and interesting
content, when it is a recognized resource in as given area,
other sites will naturally link to it if only to raise the
profile of their own. For you as the webmaster, there is the
double bonus of not having to communicate with the linking site.
In practice, the context in which your link is carried would in
all likelihood be complimentary to you further raising your
profile.

The search engines in order to improve the relevance of their
SERPs are constantly on the lookout for such sites. Websites
that achieve consistently high search positions do so because of
the content aspect of their sites.

Articles

Writing and syndicating articles is probably the most effective
way to obtain one way inbound links. In recent months this has
become all the rage as blogging has taken on force of its own.
The idea behind all this frenzied literary activity is not a new
enlightenment, but the opportunity for people like you to
plaster their website links in as many places as possible. One
guy claimed to have had an article he wrote carried by 17000
websites, ezines, article directories etc. This would have
greatly boosted his “link popularity”, organic targeted traffic,
and overall business prospects – assume just 1% of the visitors
and readers of all those websites and ezines clicked on his link
– lots of traffic!

Directories

These days there are lots and lots of website directories on
every theme imaginable. While they vary in the way they operate,
they all have the effect of creating one way incoming links to
your site, which as we have seen is both a source of direct
organic traffic as well as a boon to your search engine defined
link popularity.

The more significant the directory the more beneficial the link
from them will be. A basic objective for seasoned webmasters is
to get their sites indexed by and included in the DMOZ, and
Yahoo! directories. These are the two major online website
directories, and inclusion in either would be of greater benefit
than inclusion in many of the smaller ones.

Request

These days, most webmasters will only consider a reciprocal link
exchange. However, there are still a few webmasters who would
consider a one way outbound link if they considered it
beneficial to their own visitors, depending on the nature of
their website. These will typically be personalized sites,
intranets, or non- directory information sources.

Peruse such sites carefully to assess fit, and if satisfied that
the website complements your own, contact the webmaster as
politely as possible and request that they carry your link as
well. Invite them to visit your site to make their own
assessment, and do not be put off if they request a reciprocal
link in return. However you will get the occasional webmaster
who will not object to a one way link. Give it a shot – what’s
to lose?

Reciprocal Links

As the term suggests, reciprocal links are a mutual exchange of
links with another website. They constitute the vast majority of
links found on the internet, and are established by mutual
arrangement.

So how do I get websites to link with me?

Identifying Link Partners

The first thing is to identify websites that would make suitable
link partners. These are sites that complement your own, and
therefore have a similar visitor profile to the type you are
looking for. For instance a website selling health food might
link up with a website about physical fitness. Be creative about
your choices; set up a spread sheet to keep track of your
approaches.

Visit the top 10 or 20 sites ranked in Google and Yahoo! for
your keywords and do some research on their link partners. You
will find not only do they have several link partners, but
partners that are quality sites for their content, linking
strategy, aesthetic appeal and so on. These are the sites you
should target for a link exchange request.

Note : The major search engines are reducing the number of links
they’ll show for each site, to cut down on search engine
spamming. You may thus find a specialized tool is necessary. A
good one for his purpose would be SEO
Elite which is a complete reciprocal links exchange
management tool.

Assess the sites you short-list for their relevance and
complementarities to your own. Ensure that they are quality
sites (if they are link partners of the top ten sites in your
niche they generally will be, but take nothing for granted).

Assess them for:

Linking Website - this is the specific website linking to the
rival websites in your niche that you are benchmarking. In order
to find all of the websites that link to them you can do a
couple of things. The most common way is to go to Google and
enter this search criteria: link:www.targetedwebsite.com. Once
you do this Google will return a large list of websites that
link to targetedwebsite.com. As noted above, you’ll get a larger
list by going to Yahoo! and entering link:http://
targetedwebsite.com.

Note: that for Yahoo you must include http://

Anchor Text used - is the actual text used within the link
linking to the specified website. For example, the anchor text
in the following link would be “health food”. Health food
website

Page Rank -is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage linking
to targetedwebsite.com. In order to see the Google Page Rank,
you’ll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free
from: http://toolbar.google.com

Link Popularity -is the number of links that are pointing to
each of the webpages pointing to targetedwebsite.com. The more
the merrier. You can find their Google link popularity by
entering this search command into Google:
link:www.targetedwebsite.com then counting the total number of
results that are shown OR you could go to a website like
www.linkpopularity.com to find each link partners link
popularity much more quickly.

Page Title - is the title of the page that is linking to
targetedwebsite.com. Does it contain the main keyword(s) for
your niche? If so, you should note the url (web address) of
those pages. You’ll want to approach those websites and try to
get them to link to your website.

* Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in
the page title is extremely powerful and is something many
people often overlook.

Number of Outbound Links – is the number of links located on the
webpage linking to targetedwebsite.com. The fewer links there
are located on the page, the more a link from them would
increase your ranking.

Once we’ve collected all of the information, we now can see
targetedwebsite.com’s linking strategy. We’ll need to calculate
the percentage of websites that contain the main
keywords/phrases in the page title, the percentage of websites
that contain the main keywords in the actual anchor text linking
to targetedwebsite.com.

You’ll have to do this for the top 10-20 websites in your
keyword niche in order to properly establish the most beneficial
websites to seek link exchanges with.

The most beneficial sites will be those that:

Allow you to specify the anchor text that will be used in their
link to your website.

Websites with a PR OF 4 or more – don’t get too hung up on page
rank though.

Websites that will preferably carry your link in a relevant
page. Failing that, a website that has a well-organized links
page with a visible and hopefully prominent link in the
navigation bar, so that visitors can find it easily.

Should the website use a special links page, then ensure that it
carries no more than 30 links, otherwise the PR benefit from
that links page will be so diluted as make it worthless. Also,
there’ll be too many links competing with yours to get any
significant traffic boost.

Making Your Link Request

Now that you have established the websites you want to link
with, you need go out and actually ask them. How you do this
will determine whether your linking campaign will be effective
or not; it would be a great pity to do all the work above only
to mess it up with a shoddy links exchange request.

Firstly, websites that are worth linking to receive hundreds of
link requests. In order to get your request any attention,
prepare well so that it stands out from the crowd. You want to
show the webmaster that you have taken the time to peruse his
website and that your links exchange request is well considered.
You need to convince him/her that your website would make a good
fit with their own, that it is interesting and his/her own
visitors would find it useful and beneficial. You also want to
make it as easy as possible for them to link up with your site.

When you write the links exchange request letter, personalize it
by using the webmaster’s first name if you can find it on
his/her site, make sure you have specified the website’s name,
and note and comply with any instructions the website may have
for exchanging links e.g. a web-based form, a code to cut and
paste on to your site and so on. Failing to do so would not just
be irritating; it shows that you have not really browsed the
site.

Be creative and bold with your email subject header. Being timid
and using a generic subject header like “Link Request” will
probably see your email deleted unread. Explicitly state which
page you’d like your link carried on and why. Oftentimes,
interestingly, you’ll get your links request approved without a
corresponding links exchanged. Some webmasters will consider
either that it may not make sense for them to have their link on
your site, or that your site is a valuable enough addition to
their site without a link in return. Most time though a
reciprocal exchange will result.

Do not balk at approaching your competitors. Since no two
business entities are identical, it is possible for competing
websites to carry each others links and still benefit from the
total traffic carried by all. Imagine sites that sell unique and
therefore hard to find gift items. While obvious competitors, if
a browser fails to find what they’re looking for on one site,
they may find it on the other, and vice-versa.

Page Rank

A word about Page Rank. PR is a measure of a website’s
significance derived and used by certain search engines chiefly
Google. While a positive indicator, you should not get too hung
up on it when identifying link partners. PR is gained and lost
often (every 3 months or so) so current PR is no indicator of
future trends. Further, PR is largely an indicator of link
popularity, is obscure in its derivation, and does not tell you
how suitable a website is as a link partner. Use it as an
indicative measure rather than a deciding factor.

Google PR increases as your link popularity does. Do not worry
that your own new website will have a low PR. This will
invariably increase with more links. More important for the new
website is building links with quality websites many of which
will have low PR anyway, but websites that have the type of
traffic your site needs.

Summary

The process of building links with other websites is
time-consuming at the best of times, and if done correctly can
get quite tedious. However, since it requires communication with
other webmasters, it has the potential to be engaging and
absorbing. Approach it confidently if you are satisfied with
your own site, remembering that even a link that brings you just
5 visitors a day will add up to over 8000 over 5 years.

Every backlink is worth taking time over, and just like your
website itself, is never really finished – they will require
tweaking every so often.

Enjoy

Don’t be fooled into believing that all backlinks are created
equal because their not! Why, you may ask? It’s no secret that
many webmasters trade links left, and right, for the benefit of
a higher ranking in the search results, but search engines have
caught on to this technique, and are very aware that this is
major threat to the relevance of the search results.

Search engines such as Google have took steps in an effort to
prevent this from becoming major problem by placing more
importance on one way backlinks. So, how do you get one way
backlinks to your web site? Well, there are number of ways to go
about this, but the most effective techniques are listed below.

1) Having a useful, and valuable web site, especially if your
web site is free, (Such as providing articles, tools, games, and
software.) will cause other web sites to link to your web site.
Why? Because by linking to useful, and unique web sites offer
value to their own web site’s visitors, and therefor increases
their own value. This one can take while to really pay off
because like all new web sites, you won’t get much traffic.

2) Getting listed in directories, especially related ones, won’t
only bring you tons of traffic, but will also improve your
search engine ranking. The two most important directories to get
listed in are the ODP (Otherwise known DMOZ), and Yahoo’s
directory. You can also find directories that are related to
your web site by searching with your favorite search engine with
your keyword, and adding at the end resource or directory.

3) Writing articles, and submitting them to Ezines, and article
directories, which are than picked up by webmasters looking to
add content to their own web site, which will get you tons of
one way backlinks. You can also find web sites that are related
to yours, and ask them to publish your articles. When writing
these articles make sure they are related to your web site, so
that the link will appear more relevant to your web site’s theme
to the search engines.

4) Write a unique testimonial for products, or services, and put
a link to your URL in it. Many webmasters will accept the deal
because this will cause more visitors to buy their products, or
services. If they decide to publish your testimonial you’ll get
a free backlink to your web site. Before you write the
testimonial make sure you understand the product.

5) Participate in forums that are related to your web site’s
subject, which also allow you to link to your web site in the
signature, make sure to read the rules first though. They will
send you visitors that are interested in your web site, and will
provide a related backlink to your web site.

6) Anytime you first start a web site, add a new product or
service to your web site write a press release about it. Submit
your press releases to news sites such as PRWeb. Make sure that
the press release is attention grabbing, and unique, this will
make other webmasters add the press release to their web site.

Most webmasters are reluctant to link out from their home pages,
so getting home page links pointing to your own website can be
difficult. But there is a simple and effective way to get tons
of home page links.

All you have to do is find websites that are relatively new and
offer the webmasters a good link from two or three internal,
well-established pages on your site in exchange for a home page
link on theirs.

This is a true win-win situation because your linking partner
gets two or three high quality inbound links to help establish
his/her new site while you get a home page link on a site that
will become established in its own right in a relatively short
period of time.

Some of your linking partners will move your home page link to
an internal page after their site becomes established, in which
case you can drop all but one of your links to the other site.
It’s still win-win because:

1 - You still have a quality inbound link in exchange for yours.

2 - During the time it takes for the other site to grow and
build a solid rankings foundation in the search engines, you’re
taking advantage of the anchor text boost and traffic from the
home page link!

Over the past few articles I’ve brought you different tactics
you can use to help build quality links to your site.

And while I am going to continue to bring you even more of these
tactics I thought it would be good to step back and take a big
picture look at why link building is important.

Further, I wanted to look at other things you should be
considering when you are doing your link building: Namely
managing your online reputation.

As the web evolves, reputation management becomes even more
critical to your online business. This is because many people
will form their opinion of your or your business based on the
sites found around you.

An upset former customer can do a whole lot more damage to your
reputation online that you may suspect. If they are a popular
blogger, for example, and are able to call on their network of
sites to help promote their negative view of you, it can have a
detrimental impact on your search rankings.

This is because they can use a tactic called link bombing to
rank higher than you for your name or the name of your company.
What do you mean links can be bad? Just like how you need to
build links to improve your link popularity and ultimately
search engine rankings, links from other sites can work against
you. Let me give you a practical example:

If you do a search on Google for “miserable failure” or
“failure” you will see that President George Bush’s White House
bio is ranked number one. This is an example of many thousands
of sites linking to the site’s bio page, with the anchor text
“miserable failure” and “failure” in them. Google then counts
these links as votes for the site for that phrase. Since the
site receives the most votes it ranks the highest.

But this is just one example of using links to negatively
influence search rankings. There is another where personal sites
and blogs have used similar linking strategies to outrank
corporate websites for negative terms.

I once talked to an attorney who was ranked #2 for his own name
behind a blog site which went on about how terrible an attorney
he was and how you shouldn’t hire him.

The blog site took advantage of the system by requesting links
on the attorneys name from other bloggers, thus moving it ahead
of the attorney’s own site.

It is this type of tactic which can be used against you because
in this case, short of legal action, the attorney would have to
build even more links to his site for his name than the negative
blog.

In the mean time, however, the blogger continues receiving links
as other sites which link to him now request the same links. It
becomes a snowball effect. One link leads to three, which leads
to ten, then a hundred, then 500 then 1,000 and so on.

That is the real power of blogging - the ability to quickly
build links back to your site on virtually any phrase you chose
to target.

And since bloggers have that much pull, they can (and in many
cases do) use that ability against you.

But it doesn’t have to be just bloggers that do that. Any site
that has the pull can post a derogatory page about you and flood
the web with backlinks, through submissions to thousands of
directories and other sites which don’t check for quality and
will accept automated submissions.

And the kicker of this is, by the time you realize it has
happened to you, it’s almost too late.

That’s because those links were submitted months ago and have
passed Google’s aging policy. The only way you can combat this
is to build a similar number of positive links and wait the same
time until Google approves the links and adds them to your link
inventory.

As you can imagine that can take some time so in the meantime
your site suffers because of these negative tactics which were
begun months ago.

So how you do combat negative links?

There is no real way to combat them. Once they are there they
pretty much exist forever. The only real strategy is to ensure
that you continue to build high quality relevant links to your
site. Thus, you are essentially taking preventative action
against those who may not have your best interests at heart.

That means using the tactics I’ve described in some of the
recent articles, and continuing to monitor your link popularity.

It also doesn’t hurt to subscribe to services like Google
Alerts. I use this to monitor a variety of keywords both in the
news and in the organic rankings.

You could create an alert for your name and receive emails
whenever there is a mention of your name - either through the
news, or when a site begins to move in the organic rankings.

Then you can monitor a few sites to ensure that nothing
magically appears ahead of you that is negative in nature.

And if you do find a negative site that appears on Google’s
radar, at least you can take a somewhat proactive stance and
begin building positive links at an increased rate, to keep them
down in the rankings, and solidifying your position.

Summary

I don’t want to scare you with this. It’s not something that is
rampant on the web. In fact, the average person has no idea how
to “trash” you online, other than perhaps posting a negative
comment on your website (if you allow commenting).

All I wanted to do with this article was to let you know that
such individuals do exist. And they do have the power to
supplant your positive online image with a negative review of
you even if it is untrue.

But if you follow the rules of good link building you can help
prevent such attacks from happening to you.