Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Blog Homepage : Category - 1. Link Building Basics

Link popularity is meant to be the system which tells the search engines how important your site is.  In fact Google has built itself around that theory.  They have even created a ranking algorithm to measure such link popularity and it even influences the rankings your site achieves.  Their algorithm is called PageRank.

But Google is not the only engines to use link popularity.  Therefore all sites need to have some way to build links to themselves to help influence algorithms like PageRank so the site can rank competitively.  This article provides some tips to quickly and easily build your link popularity as well as some longer term tactics you can use.

Step one – the Google Toolbar

I know, I know you’ve probably already heard from someone to uninstall the Google toolbar but I’m here to tell you that you need to use it.

This is because while it is true that PageRank has less of an influence on rankings than it once did, it can still help you find those links Google considers quality links.  So using it to find those higher PageRank relevant links is still important.  Plus you can be assured that if Google considers certain links important the other engines will as well.

A note about the toolbar though, it isn’t updated too often by Google.  While they do update it “periodically” the value you see will likely not be current and could actually be higher or lower than the value.

Plus, the toolbar is on a scale of 0 to 10, whereas Google really measures on a much finer scale.  In other words, a 5 on the toolbar may actually translate into 5,000 in Google terms, but no one outside of Google knows this for sure.

What I’m saying is, don’t rely solely on the toolbar, but it is safe to use as an indicator.

Step two – “primary” directory submissions

There was a time when both the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (also known as the ODP) were much more influential than they are now.  But that’s not to say that they don’t hold any influence today.  In fact, you will find that many categories within these directories do have a high PageRank value even today.

Therefore the first place I always try to submit to is the ODP.  Granted this can be a somewhat time consuming process: finding the right category to submit to, ensuring it has a decent PageRank and so on but its definitely worth it.  So here are some tips for submitting to the ODP.

1)Follow their rules. That means ensuring you have found the right category to submit to, and have all the boxes filled out correctly.
2)Sometimes you can submit to more than one category but initially find the one category that best suits your site and submit it there.  If your site is relevant try a higher level category if at all possible to ensure your site inherits as much of the link popularity from the category as it can.
3)Only submit to any category once.  This is because you will likely find your listing takes a long time to be reviewed and submitted. But be patient, these are volunteer editors and if you anger them you will likely NEVER get an ODP listing.

Along with the ODP its worth spending the 300 bucks on a Yahoo! Directory listing.  Again, be sure that the link popularity you can earn from the category will be worth it.  In other words, using your toolbar, try to find a matching category that has a higher PageRank.  Don’t submit to anything less than PR3.  Ideally for both the Yahoo! And ODP directories you want to be on a page with PR 5 or higher.  You can be on a PR 4 page if there are less than 50 links on that page.

A good place to start your directory submissions is to look at the categories your competitors are listed in by searching for their sites.  Also, look at the number of sites listed there as well as the PageRank of that page.  If there are hundreds of sites in that category and it’s only a PR5 page, then there probably isn’t much point in submitting there.  That’s because each of the sites get a share of that PageRank value.  It’s better for your site, in terms of link popularity, to find a page with less competitors even if the PageRank is slightly lower.

For example, that site with 100 competitors and a PageRank 5 will only earn you 5% of that value, we’ll call that 0.05.  However if your site is listed on a PageRank 4 page with only 20 other sites you would actually inherit more PageRank – about 4 times the PageRank inheritance as you would have received from the higher PageRank page that has more sites listed.

I feel at this time that I should reiterate that while I refer to PageRank a lot here I’m really referring to link popularity in general.  I use the term PageRank because we can easily measure it using the Google Toolbar and, even if the values are dated, we can still get a pretty good idea of the value of certain pages.  Therefore when I say that the PageRank inheritance is better from a lower PageRank site with less links, I’m really saying that your site will inherit more link popularity from this page because the other engines also likely rate it highly.

Step 3 - Other paid listings to consider

There are other paid directories which should also be considered depending on your business.  The first is Business.com.  If you are a B2B type business, then a Business.com listing is probably a wise investment.  It is a paid listing as well, but in many cases you can earn back your fees within a few referrals from the site.

I know of a web design company who receives most of its referrals from regular search engines however when I spoke to them I found that they also received about 8% of their total referrals from Business.com.  However when you start talking conversions, the numbers change drastically.  That’s because their conversion rate for regular organic referrals dropped to almost nothing, while the Business.com listing converted over 50% of the time.

In other words, that paid listing was bringing them more sales then all their free search engine listings.

Yet another paid directory to consider is Looksmart.  While it too is not a huge competitor to the likes of Google or Yahoo! it does get its share of traffic, and the site will also be considered in terms of total link popularity.

Step four – other “secondary” directories

Sometimes a simple search on Google for a keyword plus “directory” can yield dozens of decent link directory sites to submit to.

Or, if you come across a directory elsewhere a “related:domain.com” query in Google can return similar directories to which you can submit your site to.

Also, the ODP mentioned above has a list of directories which can be found here.

Step five – competitors links

Another quick and easy way to build links is to look at who your competitors are getting links from.  The quickest way to do this is to go to Google and type in “link:domain.com” without quotes, changing “domain” to your competitors domain name.

What you will see here is a sample of the links Google considers important.  You can also do the same query at MSN, and a similar query at Yahoo! (but instead of link, you will use linkdomain with Yahoo!).

This is usually one of the first places I start “free” link building for my clients.  I look at who is linking to competitors.  I launch these queries on the engines listed and gather a big list – usually a few hundred – and begin going through them one by one to find those sites I think I could get a link from that are relevant.

This can be a very time consuming and laborious process, however it is one that can be fruitful.  For example, the last time I did this I was able to get 6 PageRank 6 links in a short period of time.  Each site only had a few links per page (less than 20) so that in the end my client earned a significant share of the link popularity from these pages.

Step six – keyword link building

Once you have exhausted all your competitors links (warning, this will likely take months to get through) you can move onto keyword link building.

This is where you launch a query like “keyword/keyphrase add url” and “keyword/keyphrase submit link” and a host of other queries which will generate sites which will accept link requests for a given phrase.

In other words, a search for “widgets submit link” should return a list of sites about widgets which will allow you to submit your site to their links page.

Granted this isn’t the most elegant way to build links, however it can be an effective way to build large quantities of links from somewhat related sites.  Even if the PageRank value on some of these pages isn’t that great, it can grow over time, so that link on their PageRank 4 page could actually improve over time, which will have a positive influence on your link popularity.

You can find more of these types of queries at the WebMasterWorld Forums on this page.

Step seven – local link building

Finally, and probably the most time consuming, is building links at the local level.  That means, finding sites whose businesses are geographically close to yours and requesting links.

For example, if yours is a plumbing website, you could request links from your local Chamber of Commerce, perhaps the local TV and radio stations, and even the few local directories which likely do exist.

Again, you will use the same criteria to shortlist these sites (PageRank and the number of links already found on the page) but in the end I wouldn’t count too much on these types of links.  Mostly because the number of geographically local sites in many areas is quite small, and many of these sites don’t usually have a high PageRank to start.

In the end

As you can see, there are many different ways to build links to improve your link popularity.  Some are quick (like free directory submissions), some can be costly (like Yahoo! And Business.com submissions) and some will be just plain time consuming (almost every other form of link building found in this article).

The important think to remember is that link building is a requirement to a successful online marketing campaign.

It doesn’t matter how good looking or informative your site is.  If it doesn’t have the link popularity to compete it won’t rank well. It is as simple as that.