Top 3 SEO Linking Strategies
July 31st, 2008
Top 3 Google SEO Linking Strategies
By Michael Small (c) 2008
Times have changed. Just a couple short years ago, about
60% to 70% of your website ranking success depended on
links. Now up to 85% of your page’s search engine rank on
Google relates to how it is linked. More specifically, the
quality and number of inbound links.
Google looks at everything from the “authority level” of
the linked sites to their “PageRank” and even the IP class
they use (Internet Protocol designation.) While we don’t
have hours to get into every little detail, I have provided
three simple surefire ways to get hundreds of top rate
inbound links to any page on your site you wish. And this
is the absolute fastest way to get on top of Google and
stay there for the long haul. So, here we go…
Google SEO Linking Strategy One: Hire a Blog Reviewer.
Hiring a professional blogger can be a quick way to getting
the links you want. Here’s how it works… You are
basically hiring a blog reviewer to chat up your Website.
You set the tone of what is said and even give them
acceptable working parameters to meet, such as the blog’s
traffic rating, type of blog and overall popularity.
You can hire independent people from services like
eLance.com, Guru.com or RentaCoder.com or you can use a
service that specializes in blog reviewers for hire, like
http://www.PayPerPost.com. Personally, I like PayPerPost
because it’s their specialty and this is their “posties”
livlihood, so they tend to do a great job. It’s extremely
reliable and great for social networking but considerably
slower and ultimately more expensive than the following
methods if your goal is simply link building.
Google SEO Linking Strategy Two: Write Articles on Your
Website’s Topic.
Providing useful article content to readers of newsletters
and article directories is one of the fastest and most
reliable ways to get high quality inbound links. But even
more important to some is that if you share your expertise
the right way, you will likely become a recognized expert
in your field in no time.
People have filled entire books on the subject of article
marketing so let me just hit the highlights here. This will
be enough to get you started and help your name become
trusted by both publishers and readers alike. Just remember
these six simple guidelines…
1.) The article has to accomplish two things. First, it has
to be 100% legitimate and not contain any inflated facts or
sales pitches. And second it absolutely must present real
value to the reader and the publisher. Don’t ever write an
article just for your own sake. A solely self serving
article will be immediately transparent to the publisher
and to most readers. Most people understand you want
something in return for sharing your knowledge and are very
happy to oblige a mutually beneficial arrangement, such as
a great article for a link back in your bio.
2.) Obey the rules of where you are submitting your work.
This is extremely important! Don’t waste an editor or
publisher’s time. Be sure to select the best, and most
descriptive category possible for your submission.
3.) You can (and in my opinion, should) write in a casual,
conversational style but be careful to spell check the
article and review it for clarity before submitting it.
Once you have written something, especially something with
your name attached to it, it will be a representation of
you.
4.) Make the article the appropriate length for what you
have to say. Don’t drone on or cut it too short. Most
article directories have guidelines about how long they
like to see submissions. The same goes for newsletters. If
you can’t find this info for the directory you like,
sticking between 500 and 1,000 words is usually a safe bet
and usually up to 1,250 is OK. If you have more to say,
consider splitting it into multiple articles that deal with
one specific topic each.
5.) Be brief in your bio section. If your article is well
written and contains similar words to the keywords you want
to be found for, 350 characters (or about 40 words) should
be more than enough to tell a little about yourself, your
services with one or two relevant keywords properly placed.
Just be sure to use those keywords as anchor text when
linking to the page that covers that keyword’s topic on
your site. Many directories will let you have two links in
the bio section and all allow at least one.
6.) And I saved the big one for last. Provide unique
content to each article directory. Nobody wants to post
duplicate content so carefully reword at least one third of
the article so it is unique. This will help both the
publisher and the quality of your resulting inbound links.
Big Tip: Writing dozens or even hundreds of article
variations to eliminate duplicate content can take a great
deal of time. Then manually submitting them to hundreds of
directories takes even longer. A nice solution is using an
article distribution service that allows you to enter
slight variations to specific sections of your article and
then combines them in unique ways to provide unique content
for the search engines and readers. I am NOT talking about
a system that creates robotic substitutions based on
replacing similar words from a thesaurus. That produces
junk. I’m talking about a system that allows you to submit
your own text with alternate sentences or even whole
paragraphs. This works amazingly well and can easily create
over one thousand article variations based on about twenty
extra minutes of your time when you submit your article.
And of course, write as many variations of your bio as you
can too.
One system that does a great job is available at
http://www.SubmitYourArticle.us. They even review the
article to ensure it is a good candidate for publication,
which gives you advice from a professional editor for free.
They do it to help protect their own reputation as well but
the benefits to you are immeasurable.
Google SEO Linking Strategy Three: Use a Three Way Linking
System.
Google has discounted the use of straight reciprocal links
to the point that many people feel they are not worth the
time and effort to obtain. I still use them sparingly, but I
avoid reciprocal linking systems like the plague. Google
hates them and they are so easy to detect that you might as
well put a banner on your site saying “Hey Google, I use a
link farm!”
Three way linking, however, is another story. Reciprocal
linking is very easy to detect, but 3 way links are
altogether different. It works like this… Site 1 links to
Site 2 and then Site 2 links to Site 3. And finally Site 3
links to Site 1, or even to another site in the chain. In
short; every link is a true and verifiable one way inbound
link.
If you are part of a group of similar sites, this is well
worth doing. But if you need to build links quickly or
don’t have the time to set this up yourself, you can use a
service like 3 Way Linker (http://www.3WayLinker.com). It’s
the ideal “set it and forget it” option and gives you full
control over important aspects of linking.
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Mike Small is an SEO specialist who founded and manages the
SEO blog, http://SEOpartner.com . With hundreds of relevant
postings SEO Partner focuses on the areas most important to
obtaining top search engine ranking, such as link building.
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