Finding High Quality Links – Part 1
Finding High Quality Links
Last week I posted about the importance of both internal and external links for improving your site’s search engine ranking and subsequently your Page Rank (PR). Starting today with part 1 I’ll talk about how to find high quality links for your site.
Where do you find high quality links?
There area lot of places to get links from and here’s a detailed list of all my favorite ways to finf high quality links:
#1: Check your competitors’ sites to see who is linking to them.
This is the first and best place to start. Websites that link to your competitors’ sites are likely to be interested in linking to yours, assuming your website is as good or better than your competitors’ websites, of course!.
Use Traffic Travis’ Backlink Checker tool on the top-ranked sites for your keywords to see who is linking to them. Then contact these websites to see if they are interested in recommending your website to their readers, also. Some of the links may come from directories, in which case you can you should submit your site as well. They may have paid for the link, and you have to put out a little cash to get your site linked, as well. In any case, you know that these links are helping your competitors get the top search engine rankings, the probabilities are good that they will help you, too.
#2: Write or get top-quality content
Content is king as long as it is original. If you use PLR articles be sure to change them between 30% and 50%. There’s probably 50 other people using the same PLR. Change it and run it through Copyscape. You get links naturally from other websites, and it is easier to ask for a link when you provide good content for the other website’s visitors.
You can also offer to write an article for the other websites in return for the credit and a link. This is a good way to get valuable back links as there probably won’t be too many other links on that page.
#3: Social Media Link Building
If you don’t yet belong to any of the popular social networking sites you should join a few. They are great for both click-through traffic and helping your search engine rankings. Here are a few of my favorites:
* Squidoo.com
* Hubpages.com
* Twitter.com
* Del.icio.us
* Wikipedia (very good if you can get links from here)
* Facebook.com
On Squidoo you can build a whole lens (page) full of information on your subject. Squidoo pages are frequently visited by the search engines. You can also earn money on your lens with Google Adsense, Amazon Ads and others.
Digg is a popular site for submitting your web content. Personally, I don’t like it and don’t use it. In fact, I can’t use it as this site as been blocked. I wrote a post sometime back about the Digg Nazis and I guess they took offense. Poor babies got their feelings hurt and that is what is meant by The Digg Nazis. A few elite groups of diggers that tend to control what goes on the frontpage and what gets voted up or down. The Digg platform is outdated and clumsy and I believe is on its way down.
I’m a fan of Facebook, Twitter, Hub Pages, BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. I need to spend some time building new Hub pages, but I’ve been busy designing websites and optimizing others for my clients. Maybe on of these days I’ll get to it!
The important thing is to provide useful content on these sites. Social networking spamming is pretty bad idea.
One site I like is Twitter. Google loves Twitter as well. Set up a Twitter profile and begin “tweeting” and you’ll find the Google crawling all over it. This is great for getting your sites indexed in the search engines, or letting the search engines know when you add new content to your page or your other social networking sites. Just Twitter it, and they will come!
#4: Building links with blogs and feed directories
It’s a really good idea to submit your site to all relevant RSS feed and blog directories. It is a great way of getting more exposure.
Popular directories include:
* Technorati
* Google Blog Search
* Bloglines
#5: Building content to get links (Link baiting)
You could call this the “if you build it, they will come” method for building links. Simply create a good site with useful content, or an interesting tool, and people will naturally want to link to it.
If this seems like hard work, think about the amount of time and money you’ll spend buying or trading links. What if you could put that time and money into building a tool, and then got all your links for free?
Content that is created purely to attract links is often called “link bait”. Here’s a list of types of “link bait” from Wikipedia:
* Widgets hooks – A badge or tool, that can be placed or embedded on other websites, with a link included.
* Tool hooks – Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it.
* Evil hooks – Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger. Provide strong reasons for it.
* Humor hooks – Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be link bait.
* News hooks – Provide fresh information and garner citations and links as the news spreads.
* Informational hooks – Provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit.
Don’t underestimate this method, it’s a VERY good way of gaining one-way links.
#6: Directory submissions
Submitting your site to directories is an easy way of getting links. The links aren’t usually very good quality, but it’s a good place to start.
How to submit to directories:
You can pay someone to submit your site to 100+ directories (manually) for as little as $15 if you use a source such as Submit2Edge.com, or do it yourself with Directory Submitter Gold. This software drastically streamlines what can be a very tedious process, and I highly recommend it and you can try it for free.
The reason you need to do it manually (as opposed to using the automatic submission services and software that you’ll see around) is because most good directories won’t accept automatic submissions.
What to write in your directory listings:
Keep in mind that it’s the anchor text that matters for your search engine rankings, and that directories will usually create the anchor text out of whatever you give as your website name or title. So if I wanted to add my 7DollarBuzz website to a directory, I might submit the following: 7 Dollar Software and Scripts.
Software and scripts to automate web tasks like link building, page pop-ups, blog posting and more. Free ebooks and scripts.
Directories often ask that you don’t just list a bunch of keywords as your title, since it’s not particularly meaningful. In this example I’ve managed to work my “7 dollar software” keyword into the title.
I recommend that you vary your directory submission anchor text a little to make it seem natural to the search engines. I also recommend that you use your keywords in the title field as naturally as you can — Don’t just stuff your titles with keywords!
How much does it cost to submit to a directory?
It varies. Some are free, some require a small payment, some require a large payment, and others ask that you include a reciprocal link. I don’t really recommend going with reciprocal linking directories. You don’t get as much benefit as a one-way link, and if the directory engages in conduct the search engines deem to be inappropriate, you might end up being penalized, but some of the most valuable directories require payment and (if you can afford it) can be very good investments if you’re going after some particularly competitive search terms.
Here are some of my favorites:
* Yahoo.com—$299/year, but many sites I submit to Yahoo end up getting top-3 results in Yahoo over time.
* Business.com—$199/year
* ExactSeek.com—$12 you can get a top 10 listing.
* Dmoz.org (free) — DMOZ is in an open content directory project that organizes Website listings across the Internet. Its name derives form directory.mozilla.org, which was once its original URL. The directory is maintained by volunteer editors and serves directories of the leading search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Overture, Alexa and more who use its titles, descriptions and category metadata.
* Stpt.com—$99 submission, another good directory to be linked from.
If this looks expensive, don’t worry — there are many free directories you can submit to as well. Even if you just stick with the free sites, you’ll still get a lot of backlinks. Often it isn’t really necessary to fork out for paid directory links when you’re going after less competitive terms. For instance, if I tried to tackle “chaep software” head-on, it’s very competitive. If I sidestep that and go for “7 Dollar Software”, however, I would find it much easier to rank highly, if I would actually have time to do something with the site. There are some great deals there, however I just haven’t had time to work it.
The next post will cover 9 more ways to find high quality links. Add this site to your RSS reader and I’ll send the post directly to you.
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Comments
4 Comments on Finding High Quality Links – Part 1
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Tony Murphy - Build Great Websites on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 3:48 am
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Hal Major on
Tue, 21st Jul 2009 7:23 am
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Jack Keeth on
Wed, 29th Jul 2009 11:18 pm
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Hosted Call Center on
Sat, 24th Oct 2009 10:52 am
Great advice, and its nice to see a long post on the important topic of link building.
Am going to digg this one
cheers
Tony
Tony Murphy – Build Great Websites´s last blog ..Why You Should Learn HTML 
Hi Tony,
Thanks for the vote. But, as I said in the post, my blog has been blocked on Digg because they don’t like any criticism.
You can stumble it or vote it on Technorati. I do appreciate your help.
Hal
Great stuff Hal.I like the way you break it down so even I can understand it.
Jack
Hi, i was so confuse about link exchange that how to find links but you cleared up some things for me Thanks 
Hosted Call Center´s last blog ..Predictive Dialer – An another form of Hosted Call Centers
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