Linking With Other Websites

posted by Ted on November 4, 2011

Link building is an integral part of any search engine optimization campaign.  In this article, we’ll try to cover some things you should watch out for when creating a link building campaign. Hopefully this will help you obtain and maintain the type of quality links to your website that can help launch your site up the resulting page when people search for your preferred keywords.

1. Is The Webpage Indexed By The Search Engines?

If a link on a webpage isn’t seen by the search engines, then it’s not going to pass along too much of a boost to the sites it’s linking to. The further the linking page is from the home page, the less likely it is to be indexed. If a page has any pagerank, then at least you know that it has been indexed (by Google at least). You can conduct your own test by going to Google and typing cache: followed by the url of the page (ie. cache: http://www.domain.com). If the page has been crawled, you should see some results.

2. How Effective are 3 Way Links?

Many people feel that direct reciprocal linking has limited value these days, since the search engines can likely detect it. One way around this issue is the idea of 3 way links; where site A links to site B, and site B links to site C. Site C then links back to site A again. One problem with this is that it is hard to control where exactly your link is going to end up and even harder to verify its existence on an ongoing basis.

3. Association With Particular Sites?

You should have some criteria in mind as to what constitutes a site you want to be associated with. For example, many people wouldn’t want an adult or gambling site linking to theirs. If there is any doubt in your mind, steer clear.  There are plenty of other linking options out there.

4. How To Keep Track Of Links to Your Website ?

This is perhaps the hardest and in some cases the most time consuming part of your link building process. Obtaining links is a time-consuming process, and you don’t want to spend all your time doing so only to find out your link quickly disappeared. To protect your links and the integrity of your sites, you should check that your link partners are keeping to their side of the bargain and keeping your links alive. You could do this by maintaining a spreadsheet of all of the links, and checking them one by one.   We also offer some pretty cool software that can help you not only to track all the aspects of your SEO campaign, but also allows you to keep an eye on your most important backlinks.  Check it out here.

5. What Are The Best Links To Have?

There is no definitive answer to this question. Maybe one way to answer this is the links that deliver the most traffic to you. Or perhaps the links that give the best value to your customers. There is no right answer. One way to find good potential partners is to type in a specific keyword into the search engines, and contact some of the sites that come up at the top of the results. These should be good potential partners.

Backlinks remain an absolutely essential aspect of any SEO campaign.  Hopefully this article helped you to pick up a few ideas for implementing and maintaining a solid link building strategy that will help improve the rankings for your website.

Tags:backlinks,checking backlinks,effective website,internet marketing,link building,search engine,SEO campaigns,website optimization