Link development can be an absolute nightmare. It takes up most of a marketer’s time and
yield isn’t always what we originally hoped. Worrying about PR, one way inbound links, triangle linking, where to find quality sites to exchange with, it’s all just a huge headache. To be honest, there’s no real way to wash your hands of it, unless you have a huge budget for purchasing text links or to hire someone to do your linking for you. So here are 13 ways to increase your linking luck. They require a little bit of effort, but executed properly, these steps will only bring your site success. 1. Create a page or series of pages on which you will post links you are reciprocating. It is important to make sure these pages are a valuable resource to anyone who actually visits them. Try to avoid use of word “link” or phrase “link exchange” in your body text, title or file names. Use “resource” instead. Allow visitors to these pages to suggest additions without using link exchange language like “submit site”.
2. Keep your outgoing links relevant, but don’t be too specific. For example, http://www.realestatelicense.com - this is a real estate license school, so we would list resources for real estate, real estate training, post secondaries, trade schools, education, careers, mortgages, architecture, interior design, contractors, etc. It is important to keep your entire web site’s keyword density to a decent level and this includes not just keywords you are targeting, but keywords that relate to theme of your site. keeping your site’s keyword density to a good level is reason why you should only list related web sites. Dedicating a page on http://www.realestatelicense.com to baking will bring down that site’s keyword density.
3. Keep an eye on your link to text ratio. Write paragraphs for each link page explaining what types of sites visitors will find on this page, how you hope this will help your visitors and that they can suggest additions if they know of any. You can also add comments to each link you have on site. Too many links and not enough text will tell search engines that this page is a link page and is only there for search engine optimization purposes. Search engines like real resource pages, that are there for use of your site’s visitors.
4. Don’t worry too much about PR - search trends are beginning to show that PR is less and less important. As I’ve said in previous articles, just like saying “no publicity is bad publicity”, no inbound link is a bad one, more links you have, more your site will be seen, plain and simple. Relevancy is new PR. Keep your outbounds relevant and useful, regardless of PR, and you’ll do fine.
5. Submit your site to directories, including industry and geographically specific. This is a universally known tactic, but most people just do it once. You’ve got to search every once in a while to find new directories, search engines and other people’s resource pages. They pop up daily, keeping on top of it will be most beneficial thing you can do for your site.
