Search Optimization SEO

Link Building for SEO, Part 2: Where to Get Them

In the previous article, we talked about some fundamental factors to be aware of when building links for your site. Here we now focus on where you may be able to obtain these links.

Some of the main sources of links are as follows:

 

Directory Submission

 

 

Link directories are sites that contain pages of categorized links. Two of the main directories are the Yahoo directory and dmoz, however there are thousands of other directories. Directories can either be paid, free or requiring a reciprocal link. Typically, the strongest directories are paid directories. When submitting to a paid directory it is important to consider the PR of both the directory and the page your link will appear on. An important point to be aware of is that although the first page of links for your category may have a good PR, there may already be several pages of links in that category, with the pages after the first having no page rank. It is also useful to consider the traffic the directory receives (you can get a basic picture of this through its Alexa rank). Yahoo is an example of a paid directory that costs $300 a year for review. Other paid directories may be as cheap as a $10 one-off fee, upwards.  dmoz is an example of a free directory however, as with other free directories, review time can become a serious issue with these directories. 

 

Article Submission

 

Another technique to gain back links is to submit quality articles related to your site to article directories. Article directories are sites that will publish you article and allow other web sites to also publish your article. Probably the most effective article directory is EzineArticles.com, however once again there are thousands of these article directories. As with free directories there are services that will submit you article to hundreds of article directories as well as services that will write the article for you. At the bottom of the article you include an Author bio, which is a sentence or two where you can include links to your site. Most of the article directories allow 3 links back to your site, so you can target different pages of your site at the same time. One of the benefits here is that you can choose the anchor text you want for your link. One issue to be aware of is that if you are submitting your article to multiple article directories, the search engines will detect this as duplicate content, and may not give full weight to all the links you accumulate. I do not believe this is a problem though as a wide syndication here increases the chances your article will be found and syndicated to other web sites.

 

Social Bookmark Sites

 

There are a number of sites such as delicious and stumbleupon that allow users to bookmark pages through a toolbar or their web site. Another example of a popular site that may fall into this category is a site known as digg. With each person that bookmarks your site, a link to your site will appear in their bookmark list. The main problem with this approach for SEO is that many social bookmark sites use the rel=”nofollow” tag on their links, thus telling the search engines not to count these links in the ranking process. For the right type of site though, these social bookmark sites can generate a large amount of traffic themselves.

 

Blog Posts

 

Another method of generating links is to post articles with links back to your site in relevant blogs. The key here is to find successful blogs relating to your niche and offer them an article. If you provide a quality article that the blog owner would like for their audience they may publish your article with links back to your site. This, similar to article submission, is essentially an example of trading content for links. The key here is to provide real quality in the content, so it is worthwhile for the publisher. You may also be able to establish a relationship with other successful sites relating to your niche that are not article directories or blogs to provide them with content that contains links back to your site.

 

Link Exchange

 

The method here is typically to exchange links with sites where you link to them and they link back to you. Many believe the search engines do not regard link exchanges as positively as some other link generation methods, and may discount the links generated through this method. As such, some webmasters have engaged in what is called 3-way linking, where you link to their site A and in exchange they have their site B link back to you.

 

Link Bait

 

The key here is to write an article, or post photos, or something that a lot of webmasters may like. If this is successful, this may result in achieving a lot of traffic, for example from social bookmark sites or digg, which will result in a certain number of people linking to your site from their blogs. If done successfully, this method can achieve a lot of links to your noteworthy page.

 

Related Sites

 

Finally, you can contact sites related to yours to request a link. In the web as it stands today, a lot of webmasters of successful sites may want something in return for this link. As detailed above, an example of this may be to provide the website with useful content.

 

So here are a few methods to obtain links, there are many other methods and it is important to keep up to date with current trends in link building. A great way to do this is to become an active member of some of the more established webmaster forums.