Linking Strategies To Get More Links

Why do I need links - a recap

It has been widely known for a long time that your position in the search results pages is determined by many, many factors.

Within Google it is around 100 factors.

One of the main factors is how many sites link into yours.

This is akin to popularity in that it is assumed that the more sites that link (or vote) for your website then your website must be the right site for that particular search term.

The recent Google patent

Recently a patent Google filed about 18 months ago was made public and this showed the SEO world exactly what Google was looking for when it counted links in its algorithm to rank website pages. It consisted of many things but the most important are:

• Links become more important with age. This means that the more time a link stays linking to your site the more it is counted as a factor in ranking your site. There are some advertising networks online now that rotate links so that a link to your site today will not be there tomorrow. These will have less and less weight.
  
  
• Link text should not all be the same. Previous thinking suggested that if you wanted a page on your site to rank for "blue widgets" all you had to do was to point hundreds of link with the link text "blue widgets" towards that page. Now, this still holds true, but if ALL your links are the same, then you will be penalised. This means you need to mix up the text that is in the links pointing to your site.
  
  
• Freshness. It has also been shown that having a fresh and updated page will likely both improve rankings marginally but also get pages linking from that page indexed. So ensure you update your most important pages on a regular basis.

Building More Links

There are a couple of ways you can build your links quicker (although these should not replace sheer hard work of gaining links from other webmasters).

Then of course there is SEO Elite which will show you links into your competitors' sites so you can contact that site and ask for your link. If they have placed your competitors they will likely place yours.

Summary of Linking Tips

It is still the case you need links to rank well in all search engines. If you can get them by hard work and/ or using the above methods you should also bear in mind to:

• Build links slowly
• Mix up your anchor text
• Have links on pages that have the same theme as your own site (ie: a link on a pets site to a business site will have much less value)

Good luck. Learn more in our small business forum