Step One: Why Would a Webmaster Want to Link to You?
There are typically three basic reasons:
1. You have great content or are a resource that would be of benefit to their visitors. Solid content is what drives visitors, increases conversions and ultimately, assists in your link campaigns.
2. If they link to you, you will link to them. Reciprocal linking is still a good foundation of any link building. Be sure you request links the correct way: Forge a relationship with the website owner without the use of SPAM emails.
3. You pay them to post a text link to your site. Paid links should be looked at as advertising. Buy links from quality, high PageRank and well-indexed sites or directories with targeted anchor text to the pages that are earning you the most revenue. What this will do is drive your rankings higher, bring in more traffic and more revenue.
Search engine spokespeople like Matt Cutts will tell you buying links can get you banned or penalized; while the link may be discounted, I’ve never seen a site banned throughout my testing by buying links.
Step Two: Keyword Research and Anchor Text. All the major search engines index anchor text and Google gives high priority to the text listed here. Google gives high priority to the page the link is pointing towards.
Deciding what you will use as your anchor text is more involved than pulling a keyword off your list and slapping it down in the code. You don’t want to go after generic keywords, that are on the wrong end of the buying cycle.
How do you know which are on the right keywords which are at the end of the buying cycle? PPC testing.
Why? Let’s say your keyword gets 100 clicks per day and you pay £2.00/per click. Your conversion ratio is 3% equaling 3 sales per day.
For those sales, you earn £70.00 each. Revenue is £210.00 but you spent $200.00, leaving you with a profit of $10.00. Not an effective PPC campaign, but if you use SEO, you make the full £210.00/day.
Once you are done with your test, here’s what to do:
Step 1: Analyze and rank the keywords by sales (total revenue).
Step 2: Match the Cost Per Click to every converting keyword phrase.
Step 3: Rank them in categories:
A: best keywords are £4.00+ per click (Note: Start at the top and work your way down.)
B: good keywords are £1.50 – £3.99 per click
C: above average keywords are £0.90 – £1.49 per click
D: average keywords are £0.50 – £0.89 per click
E: below average keywords are £0.49 or below per click (just pay)
The high converting, high cost keywords are ones that you will want to optimize for and use as your anchor text in your linking campaign.
Notice I said keywords, plural. Meaning you will want to have multiple so you can vary your anchor text.
Step Three: Analyze the Top Ten in Google. Complete a search for the top keyword phrase on your list and review the top ten organic sites. Click on them and complete a quick review of the site. How did they get a top ranking? Use my Keyword Competition Tool for an overview of what you need to do to get into the top ten organic results.
The more stacked the three columns are, the harder it will be to compete and dethrone those above you.
Step Four: Find Potential Link Partners. This section will discuss the different ways to find potential partners for one-way links, reciprocal links and paid links. They will all be slightly different. Regardless of what type of links you work to gain to your site, here are some general guidelines I suggest you follow:
Target Pages with 25 or Less External Links – Remember, PageRank is distributed amongst all of the outgoing links on a given page. The more links, the less PR distributed per link. Targeting pages with 25 external links will allow for the page to grow.
The Page Must be Indexed by Google – It doesn’t have to have PageRank yet, but it must exist in the index. This should go without saying, but no link popularity or reputation can be passed if the page (including directory pages) where your link appears is not found in the Google index. Check the cache, it must be within the last three weeks.
Vary your Anchor Text and Focus on Sub-Pages – Doing these will help you avoid the -5 penalty, which seems to affect pages with their anchor text “too tight”. For directories, vary your Title and Description.
Avoid Disreputable Sites - No gambling, prescriptions, sex, hate, SPAM, link farm, etc. sites; unless, of course, your site matches one of those.
Ignore all “SPAM” Reciprocal Linking Requests – They will only give you garbage links. You will know SPAM messages, because they sound canned and impersonal.
One-Way Links – This is where one site A will link to site B without Site B linking back. Use Site Explorer in Yahoo! to review each competitor’s site in the organic top ten.
Search in Yahoo!: link:http://www.some-site.com
If you want to automate the process use SEO Elite. SEO Elite gives you the PageRank, Alexa Ranking, the anchor text being used to link to your competitor and the stats of the link, in particular if it is “nofollowed” (not shown in the snapshot below) all at one time.
Either way, Yahoo! or SEO Elite, you will review a list of websites.
Schedule to contact those who don’t nofollow their links and have a decent PageRank, fresh cache date and Alexa rating first.
Another way to get a one-way link is to create link bait. Be sure to be ethical and honest in the information you submit to others, as you want to be linked to for the right reasons, not to be “called out.” If they are not willing to give you a one-way link, try requesting a reciprocal link or sponsoring a link on their page.
