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Most website owners spend their link building efforts on their home page because that’s what most visitors see first. This is a big mistake as often visitors also enter your site from other pages. If these pages don’t rank well you are leaving a lot of traffic on the table. You need to build links to all internal pages to multiply your traffic potential.
Importance of building links
Link popularity refers to the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to your site. As your link popularity increases so do your search engine rankings. One of fastest and easiest methods for getting one-way inbound links is by writing and publishing articles.
Types of links
Reciprocal linking
This is where you exchange links between 2 web sites. You should only exchange links with sites that compliment or relate to your own web site. This is a time consuming process. Most requests will go unanswered as site owners receive multiple requests from unrelated sites. They may consider it spam and delete the emails.
To receive a reciprocal link, offer a well written article or short report on the topic of the web site you want to exchange links with. Include your web site link in the resource box at the end of the article. Offering something of great value will make you stand out from all the other link exchange requests.
2. One-way linking
This type of linking doesn’t require reciprocal linking because it only goes “one-way.” It’s also called an “incoming link” or inbound link.”
Writing and submitting articles to article directories is a great method for acquiring one-way links because you don’t have to ask for a link exchange. Article directories allow you to insert one or two links in your resource box.
Since article directories get indexed by the search engines every day, your article will almost immediately appear in the search engines. Depending on how competitive your topic is, your article may enjoy good rankings.
Ezine publishers, web site owners select articles from article directories to publish in their newsletters, websites or blogs. These are all one-way links. If these properties receive lots of traffic, the link popularity and traffic generation to your own site will increase dramatically.
3. Internal linking
This refers to linking to other pages within your own web site. Often the home page receives the most links whereas internal pages receive none or a few.
To improve the link popularity of your web site link your internal pages to related pages within the same web site with anchor text (hyperlinked text).
Encourage other web site owners to link to your internal pages by finding the page that relates or compliments their own content. Strengthening your internal pages by getting inbound links will boost your overall site rankings and traffic.
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Improve your link popularity by learning the correct methods
for writing, optimizing and publishing your articles.
Visit Article Marketing Strategies
Getting links from high traffic web sites is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your web site. Some of the most trafficked sites on the Net include .edu and .gov sites because they contain lots of content focused on a particular subject or issue and they often rank at the top of the search engine results.
The problem is that it’s not easy to get links from these sites.
How to get links from .edu web sites?
1. Fill a void
Read the content contained within the .edu site and see if you can add to it or offer something new..perhaps from another viewpoint.
For example I once wrote an article on web design that was picked up by several educational sites looking for a concise tutorial.
2. Create quality content
Create a series of articles that have been carefully written and researched and offer them to the owner of the .edu web site. If the content is good they might link to the articles on your web site or have them added to their own site with your link at the end of the article.
3. Analyze competing web sites
Analyze the .edu links of competing web sites to see what they are linking to. This may be an indication that you could contact these particular .edu sites and offer them good content they can link to. This will save you a lot of time looking through 100s of other .edu sites.
4. Contact student web sites or blogs linked to an .edu web site
There may be students that have active blogs which link to the main .edu site. If you are an authority in your field they may be interested in having you write a post or article for their blog.
Conclusion
By getting incoming links from .edu sites you can boost your search engine rankings because they often have 1000s of incoming links from numerous resources.
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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Development, SEO, Hosting
Receive fresh, in-depth articles articles on how to design, optimize and promote your web site by subscribing to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter at: http://www.isitebuild.com/
Web designers often focus on the aesthetics of a web site without creating a link structure that will increase link popularity and get more visitors. When the site owner contacts an SEO specialist to market his site to the search engines, the specialist may have to optimize the link structure-a task the designer should have included in the original design.
How does the link structure of your website effect your rankings?
The internal link structure of your site allows you to spread the link power of your home page to the individual pages of your site.
For example, if 1000 other websites link to your home page, then your home page has a certain link power that can be spread to the other pages of your site. If you link to 50 pages on your home page then each page will get 1/50 of the link power. If you link to only 10 pages, then each page will get much more link power passed to it (1/10).
The more link power a page receives, the more likely it is that the page will get high rankings on search engines. Your internal link structure allows you to direct search engines to your most important pages.
How to improve the internal link structure of your website
There are several things that you can do to improve the rankings of special pages on your website:
1) Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines.
2) Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page. The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.
3) Use your targeted keywords in the links to these pages. Make sure that you use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted.
Show search engines for which keywords your web pages are relevant.
4) Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you’ll get backlinks from these sites.
5) Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn’t be listed in search engines.
The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site. If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages.
6) Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. This is very similar to tip 5. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages they can take a close look at the pages for which you want to be ranked.
7) Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages. You might want to use the link checker that you can access in the new IBP 10 beta.
By optimizing the structure of how your web pages pass their link power, you can influence how search engines treat the content of your website.
Once you have optimized the link structure of your website, you should try to get more links from other websites.
It’s hard to beat a website with a great internal and external link structure.
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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Development, SEO, Hosting
Receive fresh, in-depth articles articles on how to design, optimize and promote your web site by subscribing to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter at: http://www.isitebuild.com/
Most search engines utilize links to build your search engine presence. The quantity and and quality of the links determine how well your site ranks. A common misunderstanding about links is that site owners think that links to or from any site will be good for them.
