First, Why Are Links So Important to Your Online Success?
Here are two quick reasons:
1. They are “Spider Food”!
Links are essential in order to get your new sites spidered by the search engines
and get your sites indexed so that they can begin to rank for your target search
terms.
After all, you can have the greatest product in the world but if nobody can find
it or even knows anything about it, you aren’t going to make any sales!
2. They Help Your Pages Build Relevancy!
Links are a major way search engines determine how relevant your web pages
are for search terms. By building links from relevant websites, you are helping
ensure your site gets spidered and indexed by the search engines and ranked
accordingly.
Building relevant links to your web pages is the number one thing you can do to
improve your search engine rankings.
You see, obtaining high search engine rankings is fast becoming not just about
having as many links to your site as possible, but having as many quality,
relevant links to your site as possible.
To further explain this concept, we should take a close look at …
The Google Patent
Why is the U.S. Google Patent one of the single most important documents
published in the past decade?
Here’s why: This paper reveals a great deal of information on how to rank in
Google and gives us some idea of the direction Google is trying to go and what
they are going to be looking for in the future.
What we know about Google is that they rely heavily on inbound links to help
rank websites for given search terms. The good thing is that through the Google
Patent they have now explained how it all works!
Google has long been known to look at the number, quality and anchor text as
factors in weighing the value of a link. But it has now come to light that Google
also considers historical factors in their computations.
This explains the theory of the “Google sandbox” or what can also be described
as the aging of a new website before it will begin to rank in the index. This
countdown begins the minute links to a brand new site are discovered.
Google apparently records:
• When the link is first discovered
• If that link changes over time
• And the speed at which a site gains links
Why is this new information important? Because it’s now clear that obtaining
too many links too fast can cause your site to be shoved in the sandbox and
possibly be de-indexed by Google.
Let’s now take a closer look at how to avoid setting off any alarms when
building links.
Setting Off Alarms
As you have probably noticed, it’s becoming harder and harder to build enough
links to your websites to make a difference in the search engines. There is
continually more competition and Google is continually improving their spam
filters to penalize your link building efforts.
To succeed today, you must grow your links steadily and slowly to keep from
“setting off any alarms.” You must also be mindful of where you are obtaining
your links from and if those sites are “relevant.”
If you go out and obtain thousands of links to a brand new site you are almost
guaranteed to get your site shoved in the sandbox and possibly ignored.
Your goal now, when building links, should be to make that link growth appear
as natural as possible.
In the following sections, I will share 5 insider strategies that you can use to
help ensure your sites’ link growth appears natural and to prevent your
websites from “setting off any alarms.” Then after I reveal these tips I will
show you the technique I use that will allow you to fulfill everyone of these 5
requirements to appearing as natural as possible.
Appearing Natural Tip #1: Find Relevant Links
The first thing you must do when you begin your quest to build links to your
website is find relevant websites that will link to you.
How I classify a relevant link is this: the page where your link will appear either
mentions your keyword or a synonym to that keyword.
As of right now, it does not appear that Google, Yahoo and MSN are using
relevancy in their ranking algorithms but, trust me, they soon will.
So why not start preparing for the coming changes now? Then when the changes
are made, you will be ahead of everyone else – and your rankings will show it!
Here are some more reasons to start building relevant links now:
1. You may actually receive traffic from those links if they are related to
the theme of the site they are on.
2. In the future, these links will be viewed by the search engines as more
valuable and will make your web pages appear more relevant for your
target search terms.
Appearing Natural Tip #2: Anchor Text Variety
Non Natural Anchor Text
The anchor text is the readable portion of the text that is usually underlined
and in blue. Here is the html:
<a href=”http://www.golfclubs.com”>Golf Clubs</a>
The portion that says “Golf Clubs” is the anchor text. This is important because
this anchor text is how the search engines determine relevance for search
terms. So if I want to rank for “Golf Clubs,” I would need to obtain some links
with this in the anchor text.
Now this is where some people get carried away and shoot themselves in the
foot.
You see, many people go out and get 1,000 links all with the exact same anchor
text. The problem is that this would not occur naturally. If you were to analyze
the backlinks for some of your competitors, I am sure you would find that their
backlink anchor text is not 100% pure.
They might have “click here” or “www.golfclubs.com”, etc. It looks very
suspicious to the search engines if your anchor text is all exactly the same.
Natural Anchor Text Linking
In order to appear natural you need to ensure you build links using a variety of
anchor text. Don’t be afraid to junk up your anchor text a bit. You may find it
actually helps you in your rankings ☺
I would recommend you use your top target keywords as anchor text using
some variations with other keyword phrases. Also, throw in some “click here”
and some “www.mydomain.com” … this will ensure your links look natural.
In fact, you should come up with a list of anchor text variations that you can
rotate through for each of your site’s pages. This will ensure your link portfolio
looks as natural as possible to the search engines.
Appearing Natural Tip #3: Deep Linking
Non Natural Inbound Linking (100% of the links go to the home page)
This is an important tip and could be the difference between success and
failure of your newly launched site(s).
Deep links are links to internal pages of your website. Most people will
aggressively build links only to their homepage … but this is definitely not the
most natural looking linking profile.
Instead, I would recommend you split you inbound links between your home
page and your internal pages.
You should still have about 50% or so of the links point to the homepage, but
spread the other links out across your other pages.
Natural Inbound Linking
This has a couple of benefits.
• This will result in your site getting deeply spidered which in turn will
cause the search engines to find and index more pages faster.
• You will also start to notice that your internal pages will begin to rank
better for their target keywords.
• I believe if you do this on newly launched sites you can keep yourself out
of the “Google sandbox.”
Appearing Natural Tip #4: Unique IP Addresses
Non Natural Linking from single IP address
Every website is assigned to an IP address. An IP address can also be thought of
as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number for a computer or
other network device on the Internet.
Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or
telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific server or a website.
Here is an example IP Address:
123.456.789.000
A Block: 123
B Block: 456
C Block: 789
D Block: 000
Natural Linking from various IP Addresses
When building your links you want to ensure you get links from a variety of IP
sources, this will ensure you have the most natural looking backlink portfolio.
This may sound like a simple tip, but getting site wide links from a high PR
website is not a good idea for this reason. You may get 1,000’s of links, but
they are all from the same IP and will in short order hurt your rankings instead
of improve them. This of course is mostly in Google, MSN may still give you
some love.
Appearing Natural Tip #5: Link Building Velocity
One of the things that I learned from reading the Google Patent is that Google
pays attention to the speed at which you aquire your links.
This is why it is highly recommended that you build your links slowly and at a
consistent velocity, or speed. The reason to do this is because a site that is
naturally popular will consistently gain new links just from people wanting to
share what they have found.
In order to duplicate this, we must resist what can be a very strong urge to
acquire as many links as we can as fast as we can.
I have personally found that building 10-20 quality links per day is a good
number in the beginning. Then I eventually ramp this up as time goes by.
You may be asking yourself “How in the world do you build 10-20 links
consistently?” “How do you find the time, and the energy, to do that everyday
for all of your sites?”
Well, the short answer is: I have automated the process 100%, please keep
reading to learn more about my simple solution and how you can begin using it
too!
