Search engines are fickle creatures. They keep changing their appetite.
Once upon a time all you had to do was to stuff your metatags with keywords and generate 1000 doorway pages to your site and you’d climb to the top of the rankings for your keyword. Those days are lone gone. At the moment, linking seems to be the key.
It’s quite straightforward. If you have lots of other sites linking to your site, then the search engines are likely to see your site as being a serious piece of work. If no one else is interested in you, the search engines are not likely to take you seriously either.
It makes sense. When you go to be assessed by a potential employer, roughly the same standards apply. It is essential to present yourself well and know what you’re on about, but it’s generally your references that carry the most weight – what other people think of you. Likewise in the online world, it’s what other people think of you that most counts towards the weight the search engines give your site, and their opinion is best judged by their links to you.
Of course, as is the case with your resume, not just any reference will do. A link from a link farm is likely to be about as valuable to you online as a testimonial from your own three-year-old son would be to your employent prospects. To cut to the chase, there are three things you need to look for in getting inbound links:
- They are best if they come from highly ranked sites (ranking)
- The linking text needs to be relevant (relevance)
- With those two factors in mind, the more the merrier (number)
You’re probably going to have trouble getting high PR (ie. Google Page Rank) sites to link to you if you’re just starting out, but you’ll be better off having 100 PR3 sites linking to you than one PR6 site anyway. If you can’t get high PR, go for high numbers. Over time, hopefully you’ll get both.
But always look for opportunities where you can choose your linking text. That is, if you’re promoting a site on clay pigeon shooting, you want something like this:
- visit a site on clay pigeon shooting
rather than this
- to visit a site on clay pigeon shooting, click here.
OK. Enough theory. How do you make it happen?
Well, the most straightforward way to start linking is to contact other people you know with their own site and ask them whether they’ll link to your site if you link to theirs. This is the essence of a linking strategy, but you’re far better off if you can use a good reciprocal linking script.
Why would you want a reciprocal linking script?
- It creates attractive pre-formatted pages for your links.
- You get more people linking to you, as it invites every visitor to your site to set up a link.
- It automates the whole process of linking for you
Sounds great, eh? Well, the good news is that I’ve got a reciprocal linking script for you, and if you don’t mind having my logo embedded in it, you can have it right now at no cost. Click here to go to the download page.
OK. But that’s not all folks!
What I’ve also got for you today is a video on how to use my linking script with a linking cooperative called Linkmetro. There are a number of these linking co-operatives around and I’m not suggesting that this one is the best. It’s just one that has been working well for me lately, and it’s free to join and works seamlessly with my linking script, so see what you think:
click here to see my linking video
(this will open a new window)
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker,
martial arts master, pro boxer,
author, father of four.
www.FatherDave.org
