Day 5: Why your site needs links

Imagine a house without windows. That is what your site is like without links. No one can see in if you do not have an opening into your world. The first thing you need to do is have people link to your site.

Think of links like votes. You want to be class president, you need votes. You want to be a congressperson, you need votes. Guess who gets to be the president. Yes, you got that right. The person with the most votes.

Guess who gets the visitors. Right, again. The site with the most incoming links.


Before discussing incoming links, let me tell you about PageRank. This is a method of analyzing links so that the value of a website can be measured. No, the Page in PageRank does not refer to page as in web page. That is the last name of the man who came up with the idea. Larry Page is also a co-founder of Google.

PageRank measures the links that a page has and uses that to figure out how valuable the page is. It begins with the concept mentioned above, where each link is considered a vote for that page. What PageRank then does is analyze the important of each “vote”. The more highly ranked (on a scale of 0 to 10) a web page is, the more weight that link (or vote) carries.

Fine. You have your webpage. If your mother, brother, and sister also have webpages and they link to you, the three links are nice to have. However, if their pages have PageRanks of 0, then they will not be drawing much traffic or interest your way. The New York Times has a PageRank of 8. Now getting a link from that site would be worth something.

The big question is how to get high-ranking links to your site. There are, believe it or not, sites that high ranking sites that will sell links to people willing to pay to buy their status in the Internet community. Be careful with this as Google watches for this kind of behavior and can pull rank.

The best method of getting good links is to provide a quality site that makes others want to link to your site. Give them something to visit and a reason to come back.

Write articles with good content and submit them to article directories with your site link in the resource box or included in the main body of the articles. If your articles get posted on a site then you have a link on that site to your site.

Before you consider joining a link farm in order to build up your incoming link, consider the fact that a link farm is nothing more than a form of spam. The only difference from email spam is that the link farm spams search engines instead of emails.

If you are planning on building a solid search engine optimization program, you should be planning for the long term. It is tempting to grab what you can in terms of getting the links that will move your site up the popularity pole. However, the immediate gain might cost you down the road.

Google is not a big fan of link farms because they are designed primarily to get around the PageRank system that Google uses. Because of this, Google has ways and means of determining if a link farm exists.

While it can be a challenge for the search engine to figure out if your links come from a legitimate source or from a link, when a link farm is uncovered, the search engine can penalize the link and its clients by banning them. Being banned is not worth the risk.

The best places to find reciprocal links is to search for sites that are relevant to your site. What you are looking for is a site that you think is worthwhile that is willing to take a look at your site and decide that your site is just as good as theirs.

The first thing you need to do in order to find reciprocal partners is to make a list of the kinds of sites you think visitors to your site will be interested in. The point is to make as long a list as possible of related topics.

The next step is to make a list of the type of sites that might be interested in linking back to you. Perhaps some of the types of sites are the same as yours and they might not want to link back to you because their visitors can find the same thing on both sites. The other site might not want to take a chance of losing customers to you.

When you look at both lists, you will see which type of sites made it to both lists. Begin with the list of these sites that made it to both lists and start searching online for actual sites that match your new combined list.

One of the best ways of getting your word out and getting links is through blogs. You can easily find blogs that relate to just about any topic that the mind can conceive.

All you have to do is make a comment on good blog sites and include a link to your site as part of your signature on the blog. The catch here is that the comment should be valuable. It won’t take long for bloggers to notice that you drop comments that are just filler. Saying, “I agree” as your total message doesn’t cut it.

Blogger.com (or blogspot.com as it is also known) is Google’s blog site. It is a great place to start looking for blogs related to your topic. If you don’t have a blog at blogger.com, you can usually leave a comment anyway. If the blog owner allows it, you can choose to leave a comment as “other” and this allows you to enter in your name and a link to your site.

You can also leave an anonymous comment and add a link to your site in the blog comment you leave. The comment will begin with “Anonymous said…”. This does not give your online presence much of a boost.

In an effort to avoid comment spam where people go to related blogs and make comments that are nothing other than links to their sites, search engines have begun to institute the attribute rel=”nofollow” on hyperlinks in comments and do not include these links in its search engine results.

What this means is that you should test out blogs as a place to get your links recognized to see if the nofollow tag is inserted into all reader comments.

If so, these links may not be of much use in terms of search engines. But if your comments are great, other readers might be enticed to find your website based on the blog comment.