Finding The Links Since you’re looking for links to boost your search engine placement, best place to start is… search engines. A few searches should produces hundreds of potential links. There are a few tactics that work better than others. The first tactic provides best links for their relevancy and for their PageRank. The second provides best results for getting many links quickly and easily.

Getting High Quality Links – The easiest way to get high quality links that will be well regarded by Google and other search engines is to perform a search on major search engines for your targeted keyword phrases. The supplied results will provide you with a list of those sites that engine rates as top sites for that phrase. If engines believe this to be of value for searches looking for a particular phrase then likewise, they will view it as a valuable link to your site, which obviously deals with same subject.

You don’t have to stick to your main targeted keyword phrase either. In this stage of link building you can run searches on all keyword phrases that you are targeting and request that they link to your site. You will have to obey above-noted guidelines and this will mean that there will be many sites you will have to skip, as they are competitors of yours.

Getting Many Links – Getting many links is not as difficult as getting high-quality links. Some of same rules apply here. You will want site to be related to yours, you will want it to be well-regarded by search engines, and you will want it to be easy to submit to. To accomplish this, easiest way is to once again turn to search engines. This time however, search will be a little bit different.

Rather than typing in keyword phrase you are targeting you should type in keyword phrase followed by words “submit” or “add url”. What this will give you is a listing of sites related to your keywords but also with an added bonus; a submission page. Sites that advertise their submissions are traditionally easier to submit to (i.e. they probably have a simple form to fill out rather than you having to email webmasters, etc.).

You’ll be surprised at how many of these sites will link to you without need for a reciprocal link. If form is easy then submit to it. If form will require significant efforts to fill out (requiring information you don’t have on hand for example) or if they require a reciprocal link you will have to use above-noted guidelines to determine if effort is worth your time and/or outbound link.

Build Quality – And They Will Link Why would anyone link to your website without requiring a reciprocal link? What benefit do they possibly get out of this? The answers to these questions depends greatly on website, it’s design, and content it carries.

The most significant factor that will affect your ability to attain incoming links to your website is quality of site itself. If you have a well-designed website that contains a significant amount of useful content it will be much easier to get other webmasters to link to you as your site is a valuable resource. If, however, your site is poorly designed and/or does not contain any useful information then you have provided nothing that other site would need to link to, and thus, probably won’t.

If you have a website on Tea Tree Oil for example, and in it you provided a great deal of information on oil, it’s benefits, and it’s medicinal uses, without cluttering it with a glaring sales-pitch, you stand a very good chance of attaining links from other sites as content you have provided will be useful to their visitors.

An important thing to remember is this: If you want people to link to you without having to link to them you have to provide valuable information for their visitors and present that information in an attractive format.

Where To Start The easiest place to start, when building non-reciprocating incoming links, is directories. There are thousands of directories out there focused on a variety of different fields. Find directories related to your industry and submit your site to them.

After you have submitted to all directories related to your website it’s time to move on to other sites. Now you will have to apply rules noted above and determine how much time each link is worth and how to allot your valuable time in attaining them.

Best Practices For Outbound Links There are a few considerations you will want to make in regards to how you organize outbound links from your website. The most important thing to do is to create a “Resources Page”. You should call it a “Resources Page” or something similar rather than a “Links Page” for both search engine considerations and for your visitors.

Placing majority of your outbound links on one page will avoid inadvertently affecting optimization and search engine considerations taken with rest of your website and gives you a place to place new links as they come in future.

Each outbound link should look something like following example linked from an adventure tour web site: Tea Tree Oil Exposed Everything you wanted to know about Tea Tree Oil! From its history to its many uses, Tea Tree Oil is a requirement for any home first aid kit.

Each link should have descriptive text within it (not something ambiguous like ‘click here’) and there should be a quality description of web site below link. If you don’t know what to include as description, just ask site owner, they are often very pleased that you are putting so much care into reciprocal link.

Something you will also want to do is have outbound links open in a new window. It’s surprising number of websites that don’t do this. If you can keep a visitor in your site, even if your site is now in a browser beneath one being looked at, you stand a higher chance that visitor will return than if they have completely left your site and you’re now relying on them to go back.

Conclusion With these practices put in place your link-building efforts, while time-consuming, will be well worth effort. As mentioned above, however, link-building, like META tags, are not end-all and be-all of attaining top search engine placement. First you will have to build a marketable and optimized web site that provides your visitors valuable content for search terms they are entering. Link building is icing. Without cake it amounts to nothing.

What does a robot do? Search engine robots are very simple creatures. They can "read" text, and they can follow links. That's it. Robots cannot view a Flash movie, they cannot fill in a form, and they cannot click a "submit" button. What that means is that no matter how much great information your web page may contain, if a visitor has to select it from a list, or type a password, or submit a form full of information to get there, no robot will ever visit that page.

The origins of dynamic pages Most dynamic web pages are generated in response to queries run against databases. Behind your widget website there is a large database of widgets. When a visitor comes to your site and looks for left-handed blue widgets, it is this database that supplies response. The database provides that information to visitor. Typically visitor checks a box or selects from a list or even types text onto page and presses a "submit" button. Once she jumps through those hoops, your visitor gets her page full of left-handed blue widgets.

I can't see you Unfortunately, when a search engine robot visits this page, it cannot check that box, it cannot select from that list, and it cannot click "submit" button. Put simply, robot cannot get to page of widgets. If robot can't get there, page will not be included in search engine database. If it's not in database, searchers cannot find it.

So how do you get there? So how do we attract other visitors to our dynamic page of left-handed blue widgets? There must be some way to get there without having to click on that "submit" button.

Next month we will look at several ways to get search engine robots to visit dynamic web pages. Stay tuned.