How many links on the web are pointing to your site? If you don't know, before you read any more, please go to the MarketLeap link checker and type in your domain name. You may also enter a few of your competitors' URLs for comparison. Pay special attention to the Google column as this is one of the most important. After viewing the results, take a screen shot of the page or write down your numbers so you have a benchmark.
Why are links important? As mentioned in Lesson #2 and Lesson #4, when the engineers at Google (the search engine which responds best to this technique) sat down to devise a strategy to determine relevance, they realized that they would have to rely on the community of webmasters to determine which site was "best for each keyword." One way of doing this is to treat a link as a vote for a particular site.
Each of these votes carries different weight. For example, if you sell rustic decor, links from sites about cabins, country living or rustic decor would count more heavily than links from a site about pop music.
The text used to link to your site (called anchor text) is also very important. The words within a link on a site are called anchor text. For example, if the country living site links to your rustic decor site, we hope that they would create a link that says Rustic Decor and point that link to the homepage. This tells the search engines that the country living site is voting for your rustic decor site for the term rustic decor. If the country living site links to your rustic decor site by saying Visit this site, it still helps; however it isn't as effective as a link using the key terms.
Now that you understand why links are important, the next step is to learn how to build links. There are several tips I can offer to make this process less of a challenge. First and foremost, create an email containing a "link template." When you get someone to agree to link to you, send the template rather than letting them create the link on their own. This gives you a greater chance of getting your desired anchor text in the link.
Your manufacturers are a great place to start the link building phase of this project. Often your manufacturers have established websites that are highly relevant to your product lines. Take the time to call your manufactures. Speak to them about your site and request for a link.
The next step is to find other sites related to your site. One way to do this is to find out who is linking to your competitors. To find this information, go to Google.com and type backlink:www.competitorsname.com into the search box. This will return all of the sites that Google sees linking to your competitor's site. Spend time emailing and calling each potential link target.
Link building is not easy and takes a great deal of time. There are several ways to help speed up the link building process. The first thing you can do to get some quick links is submit to directories. There are hundreds of website directories on the web and the majority of these directories can help your site with a single link. While directories like Yahoo and DMOZ will help you substantially, links from lesser known directories can help as well. Ensure they have a category that is highly relevant to your product line and the page that will contain your link has a page rank of at least 4.
The second shortcut is to hire a link builder. Many college students will build links for a per link commission. Find students who write well and have extensive internet knowledge. Show them how you want things done and let them get to it.
Lastly, you can purchase links. MonsterWebPromotion doesn't advocate purchasing links soley for Search Engine placement. However, purchasing links on high exposure sites is a great way to get both humans and spiders to your site in a hurry. There are many sites who will sell text advertisements that contain a link with your selected anchor text. Be careful to only work with reputable sites when using this method. MonsterWebPromotion offers trusted text advertising to help build link popularity. If you are interested in this method,
I recommend you speak to them before moving forward with a text advertisement campaign.
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Feel free to email us or post in our forums if you would like to discuss the topics further.
Regards,
Stephanie Leffler
CEO, MonsterCommerce
Dan Kennedy
Director of Web Promotion
MonsterCommerce
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