Links can be what hold us together, or tear us apart. Great links on a website will get you noticed by other websites. Bad links on sites will get you dinged by the search engines and drive down traffic to your site.
So how do you know what is good and what is bad? You’ve got to put in a lot of legwork on the internet finding relevant, useful, and quality links. That takes time, and it takes even longer for the search engines to notice what you’ve done.
The word campaign by its very nature implies a large undertaking, and large undertakings take time, months or years in fact. When you embark on a new link building campaign, don’t expect results tomorrow, next week, or maybe even in a month. You’ll see a trickle of new traffic, but if you stick to your guns, that trickle will turn into a torrent over time.
Ranking
You’ve got to consider not only your Page Rank when you begin a link building campaign, but the Page Rank of your competitors, those you are linking to, and those that are linking to you. That sounds like a lot to consider, but just think of it like this: your website will do so much better if websites with high Page Ranks link to you, as opposed to websites with low Page Ranks.
A link from thewashingtonpost.com is a lot better than a link from carlsmom.com, so consider this when you’re choosing your links. But what do you do when someone like Carl’s mom links to you? You really don’t want that if you’re planning on making a successful site. Links that are from inferior websites, websites that exist in a type of ether on the internet, never getting any new content, never getting any visitors, and never really seeing the warm glow of a computer screen again just won’t help you. You don’t want that, but there’s not much you can do about it. There are no link police on the internet after all, unless you count the googlebot.
Anchoring
Anchor text is what your links look like when they don’t look like html. This is how my website appears – http://www.bigskywords.com. The problem is that it just doesn’t look that good. How about this instead – Big Sky Words. It looks a little better, doesn’t it?
Now let’s take the example one step further, and show how anchor text can improve your Page Rank. My website has a lot of writing and history articles on it, so let’s say that I want to link to the best way to write a website’s links without really trying. A lot of people would probably be interested in how that particular sentence fragment sounds, so they’d click on it. And the search engines like it because it’s got a few good keywords in there, like ‘write a website’ and ‘website’s links.’
Both will get good hits. But it looks good too, is fully part of the paragraph, and tells the search engines what your link is about. All three of those links go back to the same spot, but only one of them looks the best, has keywords in it, and tells the user exactly what the link is. That is how you want to use anchor text.
Baiting
There’s nothing wrong with link baiting, at least as far as the search engines are concerned. Link baiting is when you put content up on your site with the intention of drawing in links from other sites.
Videos and pictures are a great example. We’ve all seen or heard about cute kitten or puppy videos that get tens of thousands of hits. Other websites link to that site so that they can get more traffic themselves.
How about a funny photo of someone with their head stuck in something? The way social media is these days, people will be flocking to the picture and sharing it with their friends. Everyone will go back to the site that has the content. So if you can find something hilarious, shocking, or just downright wrong, put it up on your site or link to it; you never know, it might be the best thing you ever did for your website.
So how do you know what is good and what is bad? You’ve got to put in a lot of legwork on the internet finding relevant, useful, and quality links. That takes time, and it takes even longer for the search engines to notice what you’ve done.
The word campaign by its very nature implies a large undertaking, and large undertakings take time, months or years in fact. When you embark on a new link building campaign, don’t expect results tomorrow, next week, or maybe even in a month. You’ll see a trickle of new traffic, but if you stick to your guns, that trickle will turn into a torrent over time.
Ranking
You’ve got to consider not only your Page Rank when you begin a link building campaign, but the Page Rank of your competitors, those you are linking to, and those that are linking to you. That sounds like a lot to consider, but just think of it like this: your website will do so much better if websites with high Page Ranks link to you, as opposed to websites with low Page Ranks.
A link from thewashingtonpost.com is a lot better than a link from carlsmom.com, so consider this when you’re choosing your links. But what do you do when someone like Carl’s mom links to you? You really don’t want that if you’re planning on making a successful site. Links that are from inferior websites, websites that exist in a type of ether on the internet, never getting any new content, never getting any visitors, and never really seeing the warm glow of a computer screen again just won’t help you. You don’t want that, but there’s not much you can do about it. There are no link police on the internet after all, unless you count the googlebot.
Anchoring
Anchor text is what your links look like when they don’t look like html. This is how my website appears – http://www.bigskywords.com. The problem is that it just doesn’t look that good. How about this instead – Big Sky Words. It looks a little better, doesn’t it?
Now let’s take the example one step further, and show how anchor text can improve your Page Rank. My website has a lot of writing and history articles on it, so let’s say that I want to link to the best way to write a website’s links without really trying. A lot of people would probably be interested in how that particular sentence fragment sounds, so they’d click on it. And the search engines like it because it’s got a few good keywords in there, like ‘write a website’ and ‘website’s links.’
Both will get good hits. But it looks good too, is fully part of the paragraph, and tells the search engines what your link is about. All three of those links go back to the same spot, but only one of them looks the best, has keywords in it, and tells the user exactly what the link is. That is how you want to use anchor text.
Baiting
There’s nothing wrong with link baiting, at least as far as the search engines are concerned. Link baiting is when you put content up on your site with the intention of drawing in links from other sites.
Videos and pictures are a great example. We’ve all seen or heard about cute kitten or puppy videos that get tens of thousands of hits. Other websites link to that site so that they can get more traffic themselves.
How about a funny photo of someone with their head stuck in something? The way social media is these days, people will be flocking to the picture and sharing it with their friends. Everyone will go back to the site that has the content. So if you can find something hilarious, shocking, or just downright wrong, put it up on your site or link to it; you never know, it might be the best thing you ever did for your website.
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