Introduction to Your Link Love Strategy

Today I received this great article from Alison Rothwell in her SEO newsletter and she has given me permission to share it with you. Like many others Alison left her 9 – 5 job to make money online but after setting up her website she realized that she wasn’t getting any traffic so not selling anything.

She then set out to find out everything she could about running an online business and making money on the internet and in just 6 months got her site to be Number One in Google for her key phrase. She got so excited that she built another website and that one reached Number One in the search engines as well!

Alison knows a thing or two about SEO and has a knack of explaining things in non techie terms. Here is her article about link building .

You may already know that search engines place a lot of weight on the links that point to your various webpages. They assess a few things in evaluating those links:

Quantity: Generally speaking, the more links you have, the more authoritative your site will seem, giving you more weight in the search engines.

Quality: But in addition to quantity, quality is crucial. Search engine bots are smart little peeps and they know when people try to game the system for links.To be an authority site, the more links you have from other authority sites, the better.

Text Matters: Search engines look at the text that appears in the links that come to your website. For example if links to your site say coolest website in the world, search engines will tend to believe it. Of course, this linking needs to be natural. If every link pointing to your site says coolest website in the world, this will look suspect.

A word of caution: Not all links, even if they are quality, count toward your search engine rankings. For example, search engines know that people comment on blogs and forums for the purpose of building links, so they may not give these much weight — but that shouldn’t keep you from using these methods. In addition, some authority sites use a “no follow” link which means that search engines won’t count the links at all…but they can still drive traffic, build your reputation and more.

Link building serves many purposes, gets your website seen and drive traffic…plus the most important of all…links breed links, so go build them!

What Not to Do with Link Building

Before we get started with the Link Love Masterclass, let’s put some ground rules in place. Whenever you embark on any link building, keep these ideas in mind:

Don’t go requesting reciprocal links from every website on the planet. This might have helped several years ago, but you can be penalized for it today.  If you do engage in reciprocal links, make sure they are with related sites and make the links natural within your site. In other words, don’t just make a “Links Page” and list links. Add your partner’s link to relevant content pages or wherever it just “makes sense” to do so.

Don’t engage in comment spam. In most cases it’s a complete waste of time, because filters do a good job of catching spam comments.  It’s also a good way to make bloggers angry with you. Only add your link in the space provided for your link and don’t add links within the body of your comment, unless it’s very relevant and you know it’s acceptable to the blogger.

Don’t submit every page of your site to social news sites.  We’re talking about sites like digg.com, reddit.com, etc. You’ll just end up getting ignored, and you’ll probably be banned too. A better idea is to encourage others to submit you instead.

Resist the urge to submit to every directory you run across.  There are only a few that are worth your time.  Directories that post sites without reviewing them are usually considered link farms, and their links are penalized in the search engines.

Show Restraint and Be Relevant. Avoid posting links to your site in forum posts unless they are extremely relevant to the subject at hand and is allowed. That’s what your signature is for.

Don’t bother with webrings and other dated link building techniques.  Concentrate on creating good content and promoting it, and links will come.

Alison Rothwell, online marketing expert, is founder of the SEO Training Club, the proven step-by-step solution to your internet marketing problems. To receive her weekly online marketing ezine to help get higher search engine rankings to increase your online sales, visit SEO Training Club