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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.19 -
Building External Links
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
No doubt about it, link building is the hardest part of SEO. Not because
it is difficult, just time consuming. You now almost know how to do everything
regarding SEO, except one last very important point, and that’s link building.
In order for you to build backlinks for your site, you first need to find link
partners and there are a few ways that this may be accomplished.
1. Corporate "Spying"
The best way is to start trying to get links from the websites linking to your
competition. After all, if they are willing to link to them, they just may
want to link exchange with you. This is also a good way to find new
directories that you might not have discovered.
Ideally, you are using
SEO Elite and
you can directly focus your work on the best links matching your SEO needs.
If not, another method is to look at the search engines
backlinks results:
• Type “link:competitor.com” in Google or use their
PageRank and backlink checker from their own tool;
....Just click on backward links and this will show;
• or just type “linkdomain:competitor.com” in Yahoo.
It‘s definitely not as neat or refined as what you get with
SEO Elite, but
it’s better than nothing.
Article Directories
Article directories can be used in 2 different manners:
• Getting one way links back through writing articles and submitting them.
• Finding link partners by looking at who uses the articles in the directories.
Keep in mind that the backlinks you get from article marketing tend to have a
low SEO value, so their purpose should be more oriented towards deep inking of
your pages than actually ranking high for a search term. Nonetheless, where
article marketing lacks in quality, it makes up in quantity. Not the best trade,
but better than nothing.
The leverage obtained there for the amount of work required is extremely
attractive. Each article published will be reproduced and build backlinks for
you over and over for the rest of your life without you having anything to do
with it.
Link Exchange
This is probably the most popular way (and the easiest) to acquire backlinks.
You basically agree to link towards another person site, where in exchange, that
person will link back to your from your site so that you’ll both benefit from
it.
Please note that Google has been seriously catching up with this kind of link
building technique bet it 2 ways linking or 3 ways linking and have severely
devalued those links. Nonetheless, they still can help you in your backlink
quest.
Different methods of doing link exchange include:
• Link directory exchange.
• Article Exchange
• Direct Link Excchange.
Joining a link exchange network can facilitate your search of link partners. A
link exchange network is composed of webmasters willing to do link exchange,
such as www.linkmetro.com
Search Engine Queries
Going for broke, in the last resort, use search engine queries to find link
partners. Since most of the people trading links or willing to do link exchange
tend to have a link page themselves, the easiest way is to do a search in
Google:
• "submit link" returns 4,010,000 results.
• “add URL” returns 310,000,000 results! Lots of goodies here!
There are lots of different combinations of search terms to find potential
linking partners, but the most common keywords
to use to find websites that are most proactive in accepting link exchanges are
using these terms;
Suggest Link, Suggest Your Link, Suggest Site, Suggest
Your Site, Add URL, Add Your URL. To refine your search even more, I recommend
that you also type in your strongest keyword, so that you’ll find links pages
that are relevant to your keyword. For example, "Suggest Link Pest
Control" etc., if your website was about pest control or "Add URL Mortgage
Refinancing" if your website is about mortgage refinancing.
*Tip Its a great strategy to incorporate some of
these terms into your content, so that YOU will be found by people looking for
link partners. See my mortgage site's Google search results below;
Developing your own Link Exchange Page
Make it crystal clear to your visitors what you will accept and will not
accept in terms of link exchanges. I will only accept an exchange if they
have followed ALL my instructions. See my mortgage website's link page
here;
http://www.mortgagehq.com.au/suggest-site/add-url.html
Exercise
Now that you know how many links you need, it’s time for you to use the method
best fitting you to find the appropriate link partners for your link building
campaign!
Build your links naturally, and don’t engage into link scheme promising you
10,000 links overnight or such, as this would raise a red flag towards your site
and possibly lead to a penalty from Google!
Give yourself a target and stick to it, like building 10 links each day or
submitting one article per week for
example.
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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