Pick a topic related to one of the main topics on your site.
Write a 400-700 word article. Remember that quality counts. Your articles need to be interesting and informative, so when a Webmaster reads it they are impressed enough to link to it.
Include a resource box that encourages the viewer to visit your site and include links to internal pages they may find useful.
Submit to the article directories. I suggest you find the ones with the highest traffic volume and PageRank and begin with those.
Other Hidden Gems – Other areas you may not have thought of that can bring valuable links:
Sponsor or Advertise on Blogs
Charity Groups
“Dot Orgs” carry a lot of weight, seek them out with search:
keyword sponsors site:.org
Local Job Fairs. Volunteer to speak at the local college or business school. You will get on their site (.edu) and their Webmasters are generally lazy and won’t take the link down. So the result is a permanent link on an .edu site for an hour of your time.
Step Seven: Make the Most of What You Have. Analyze your backlinks to ensure you are making the most of what you already have.
To accomplish this, I use SEO Elite and run a report using both Yahoo! and Google.
Once you have the results back, find the articles that reference you and make a note of them. Then complete a link/marketing campaign to increase their authority and possibly their PageRank.
Also, link to directories you have submitted to and who currently list you. Don’t like to the home page of the directory, link to the page where your listing appears.
In doing the above, you help to boost the PageRank of the article or directory page as well as your PR.
Step Eight: Manage Your Links Page Effectively. It isn’t enough to just get a link, it has to be in the right place to be seen by a visitor and be counted properly by Google. Footer and sidebar links are not as good as content links.
I don’t recommend you have a “Links Page”. If you choose to, don’t create a long list of links on a page and call it “links” or “recommended links”. Few Webmasters are going to want to have to share link space and PageRank with 100’s of other irrelevant links. Also, visitors often ignore these pages and I have seen evidence in my testing that search engines are beginning to identify and discount these pages.
Get links that are permanent as the longer the link is “alive” the more link juice it will pass. Paid links are nothing more than a short-term boost.
Step Nine: Complete a Link Audit Once a Quarter. At least once a quarter you must do a full audit of your incoming links and outgoing links to ensure they still meet your standards or you may face lower revenue. Here are the areas you want to analyze:
How many incoming links does the page currently have?
Are you providing a link back to that site?
Where on the page does the link exist?
What anchor text is being used for the incoming link?
What is the PageRank of the page providing the incoming link?
What is the traffic estimation of the incoming link site?
Does the site meet your quality guidelines?
Are a large percentage of your link partners coming from a similar block of IPs?
Is there Link Rot (404 or broken links) that you need to clear up?
Are you still referencing the information that you intend to?
Here is what you do:
Search for “Xenu” in Google. (It should be the first site listed.)
Click the link to go to the site and download to install the program.
Run a complete internal and external link check.
View the report for each page.
Fix all the dead links (both internal and external).
If you had ten or more internal pages with problems, rerun your Google XML Sitemap.
That’s it. It should take you about 1-2 hours to run the report and fix the main broken links.
Step Ten: Optimize Your Internal Links. Internal linking the right way is essential to maximizing the power or your site. Here’s how:
1) Verify the keyword converts via PPC. This was discussed at the start of this guide.
2) Search Google for your current organic ranking. Write down your current ranking. You may also want to run it through my Keyword Competition Tool to check on the allinanchor competition.
3) Ask Google which pages on your site are relevant for the keyword you are optimizing for.
site:domain.com keyword
You are looking for “relevant pages” and not “exact pages.” This is generally helpful when your site contains less than 500 pages.
The first page listed in the results is the page you should be optimizing and it should be a sub page of your site. Don’t use HTML site maps or any other page that a customer will not convert from. We’re after buyers here and improving our sales funnel.
Step Four: Place your targeted keyword phrase as anchor text on the relevant pages listed by Google and links to the page you are optimizing. Make sure this is done within the BODY of the page – not anywhere else.
Another Use: Let’s say you have a Webmaster who wants to exchange links with you. Do the search for their site with the keyword you want to target and Google will tell you what pages are the best to have your site linked on.
And there you have it. With this quick guide, you should be able to see results rather quickly.
