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10 Tips to Building and Structuring Inbound Links

As any good search marketer knows, the most important thing to ranking well in search engines is to get links pointing to your site. The more good links you can get, the better your chance at ranking higher for your keywords.
The more inbound links you can obtain, the more popular it is. It's like a high school popularity contest. The following 10 tips are essential to ranking well. It's not an easy process. It's a slow, gradual process that can take several months or up to a year to rank well.

Here are the 10 tips....

1. Get links with topics similar to your website

If your website is an online aquarium supplies store, try to obtain links from sites featuring aquariums. These can range from a site about their personal aquarium with pictures or forum sites dedicated to the hobbyists. Try not to obtain unrelated links such as from gambling, drug or casino sites. In the eyes of the search engine, they are unrelated and will have a less ranking effect than on topic webpages.

2. Natural vs Artifical Links

From search engine point of view, the best links are ones that are unrequested. These are sites that willingly link to your webpages because your content is informational and useful to their surfers. In order to write great content, you need to be knowledgeable in your area of expertise or you can outsource. You can hire experts to write for you from outsourcing sites such as Elance. These type of links are natural. Natural links tend to have their anchor text vary and their links increase gradually over time. Anchor text is the link term other websites uses to link to you. An example is the above. Elance is the anchor text linking to the website. Search engines look at the anchor text to determine what your site is about. They also tend not to be reciprocal. On the other hand, artificial links tend to have the same anchor text. The inbound link count increases suddenly and a high percentage of links are reciprocal or swapped. That means you email the webmaster of the other site, that you'll add their website address on your site if they do the same on theirs. They also tend to point to link farms or web rings. These are page groups linking to each other in the network but lack inbound links from outside trusted sites. Trusted sites can be the authority site in your category. They are usually ranked at the top of the search engines for your term and are sometimes whitelisted. A term that means they are not to be penalized. An example is cnn.com

3. Number of outbound links on referring page

If the referring page has few outbound links, it'll have a greater ranking effect than one that has over 100 outbound links. It would be ideal to have only one outbound link on that page and it would be your website. It's usually not practical. Link dilution occurs if your link is on a page with 100 other links. The value of your link diminishes as it'll be divided to the total number of outgoing links. Try to get links with high Page Rank and lower outgoing links from on topic pages.

4. Don't participate in run-of-the-site links

Avoid these at all costs. These are links where every page of a site links to your homepage. When you have 1000 outgoing links all originating from the subpages of one site, search engines can easily detect that it's artificially inflated.

5. Maintain consistency of your incoming links

Did you know that the following urls are all different in terms of search engines point of view even though the surfer is on the same web page?

http://canadianwebhosting.com
http://canadianwebhosting.com/
http://canadianwebhosting.com/index.asp
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/index.asp

If those who linked to you used the 6 different URLs above to link to you, your Page Rank would be diluted by a factor of six which is not good. You must do everything possible to have one consistent URL pointing to you. That could be as simple as sending a polite email to the webmaster of the referring site to change it. There is another alternative in Google Webmaster Central. When logged in, go to Site Configuration -> Settings and navigate to Preferred Domains. You can set it as http://www.canadianwebhosting.com so other sites that link http://canadianwebhosting.com will be treated as the former in terms of search engines point of view.

6. Get your keywords in the anchor text

As mentioned above, anchor text is the text of the link that other websites link to you. It tells the search engines what your site is about. It can at times be daunting to get directories to change the anchor text to your preferred keywords unless your company name includes your keywords. Regardless, it's worthwhile to contact everyone who's currently linking to you to ask them politely request a change in the anchor text. For example, if you are an online site selling aquarium supplies then anchor text such as "aquarium supplies" is much more valuable to your relevance efforts than "click here". The former states the theme of your site while the latter gives the engine no clue on what your webpage is about. If the link is an image instead of text, then use <img> alt and title attribute instead. NOTE: It's more natural to vary the anchor text instead of using the same one such as "aquarium supplies". Vary it and use "aquarium lights", "aquarium filters", "aquarium rocks", etc.

7. Go for deep links

Don't have all your inbound links point to your homepage. Vary it so some link to your subpages. Try to strive for 30-40% of your links to your subpages. In the eyes of your search engine, it will look more natural.

8. Links that are nofollow don't count

Be aware when you get a link, make sure they don't have the attribute nofollow as it won't contribute to any ranking effect. Make sure they don't have rel="nofollow" attribute within the source code of the link. Nofollow renders the link useless to your ranking efforts because Google and other search engines don't credit your page for having the incoming link.

9. Where to get links

Determing where to get links can be a daunting exercise for new websites. Suppliers you do business with or professional organizations you're involved in might be willing to list you on their referrals page. Ask lawyers, accountants, realtors, and financiers you do business as a client to use your company as a case study on their website. Your employees may have personal blogs, homepages or social media sites that could link to you. If you're an expert in your field, you can write as a Guest Blogger on other sites. To find sites willing to do this, go to MyBlogGuest or search on Google such as "your expertise" "guest blogger", replacing "your expertise" with your actual one. "Swap" links with a partner company that you closely do business with - or whose services compliment yours. Spending a bunch of money with a supplier? Hit them up with a link on their website. Press releases are another great way to get links. There can be a number a reasons such as new product launches, staff additions, promotions, partnerships, new services, etc. These are quickly picked up by the engines and the links contained in them are typically trusted. They also tend to remain on the web for a long time. We use PRWeb for many years and if you have trouble writing one, they can write one for you. Another way to get links is to write testimonials along with a link to your site about products you really like. If the testimonial is well written, the company will often post it on their site. One of the underutilized "secrets" for gaining incoming links is to participate in forums that allow a text link in the forum signature. Start a topic you are knowledgeable in and begin posting, asking and answering questions. But make sure you are contributing to the forums and not blatantly spamming it with your forum signatures. One of the most productive tips is to spy on your competitors and see who they are linking to and ask those webmasters if they are willing to link to you instead. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter your competitors domain name, hit submit then click the button that says Inlinks and choose from dropdown Except from this domain and you have a full list of sites linking to them. If you're successful in getting them to link to you instead of them, you do two things. One for gaining a link to your site, and two for reducing the incoming link count of your competitor.

10. Be careful who you link to

Currently, incoming links won't hurt you but outgoing links to sites behaving badly can. The thinking goes that any site can link to you and you have no control over it but you do have control over your outgoing links. In other words, if you have no choice but to swap links with other websites, then make sure to do so carefully. Linking to sites that have been penalized due to search engine spamming can cause your website to be penalized too. Here's some tips on how to determine this before you link to them:

a. Search for domain name in Google and Yahoo. If they are not listed on one or both sites, then it's a bad sign. Linking to them could get your site penalized or eventually banned. If they aren't bad site, then linking to a site that the search engine doesn't know about won't have any ranking effect.

If listed, go to next step...

b. Determine who they are linking to. The more incoming links they have, the better. And the more authoritive sites linking to them, the better. Also, check their Page Rank to determine how important Google thinks of them. To find out the Page Rank, search for "google toolbar" and enable Page Rank tool in Options.

c. Beware of Page Rank zero sites. This could mean that they have been penalized by Google or they have not yet been discovered by Google as they are a really new site. However, if the site has been on the internet for a long time and it lacks any Page Rank, think twice before linking to them.

d. Avoid controversial sites such as gambling, pharmacy, adult, and loan/debt sites. These sites have been notorious for trying to subvert the search engine rankings as the rewards are high.

Note: You likely won't be penalized by who links to you but you can definitely be hurt by who you link to.

Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting

http://www.canadianwebhosting.com

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