It’s only since I started looking at link building – that is considering how I can achieve a high number of links from other websites to our site – that I have realised how incredibly corrupt and misleading the internet is. Web marketing is a no-holds barred scrum to get high ranking on a search engine – especially Google, and some marketers will do just about anything to achieve that! But why is link building important anyway?
Its important because search engines will come to a view on how important they consider your page to be by giving it a “pagerank”. This is simply a way Google for example decides what sort of priority it gives to your site in a search which involves key words in which you are interested. The greater the pagerank the higher up the search return you will go (it is of course much more complicated than that, and there are other factors involved, but fundamentally the aim is to get as high a pagerank as you can).
How do you know the pagerank of your website?
Simple – download the Google Toolbar, install this and enable the pagerank function (Toolbar Options (spanner icon)/General/Enable Enhanced Features/Use Pagerank..). Then when you go to your website if you hover over the grey box icon in the toolbar you will see your pagerank. This also works for any website you go to – can be very interesting! Pagerank goes from 0 (bad) to 10 (very good – haven’t found one yet!). Our website currently has a pagerank of 2.
So how is pagerank decided?
Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance (or pagerank) of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Therefore to increase you website’s pagerank you need as many links into it from good quality external sites which preferably have a higher pagerank than your own site. The importance of this explains the lengths web marketers will go to to get links to their chosen site.
So How Do You Know How Many Links You Have?
Beats me! There are a number of different ways of trying to get this figure, and so far they have all delivered significantly different results. I have therefore decided to settle on 2 ways to measure this.
- Yahoo Site Explorer – works pretty well and currently reports a total of 41 links in to the website
- Google Webmaster Tools (‘links to your site’) – best option – currently showing 45 links from 32 different unique domains.
Wel’ll keep these two under review as we see how our links build.
How Do You Get Links To Your Site?
There seems to be various black arts involved in this with things like link farms and reciprocal link sites which do nothing more than try to increase links in various useless ways and thereby impact on pagerank. These methods serve no useful purpose and thankfully the search engines have caught on to this sort of activity and largely discount it apparently in their pageranking algorithm. So what other things can you usefully do?
Directory Submissions – There are a variety of site directories which will list your site legitimately. You therefore get a listing within the directory, and a decent link into your site. The most important of these is the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). This is a human edited site with a pagerank of 8/10 so you really want to get listed there if you can. We managed to submit our site successfully and it has been listed. Other free directories are:
- 192.co.uk – still waiting for them to list the site
- Applegate.co.uk – listed (under HRM Solutions Ltd) – they are free but try to sell you paid advertising on their site.
- Splut.com – they have said they have listed it but it hasn’t shown up yet
- Vendora.com – again they have said they have listed it but it hasn’t shown up in the links listings
There are lots of directories, just google it, but to be honest apart from DMOZ I don’t think these submissions achieve very much – either their link is pretty meaningless or they just don’t bother to implement the listing, so I have no intention of submitting to any more. There are also various paid for directories – like Yahoo ($299 per annum) but I have decided not to utilise any resource which incurs a cost.
Article Marketing – this is where you write an article, and get it listed on one of the article repositories with a link back to your website. There is also the opportunity that another website will pick up the article and re-print it complete with a mandatory link back to our website. So far I have registered and submitted a couple of articles to:
Both are very good and the links have appeared already in the links listing. I intend to submit some articles to another couple of article repositories and I’m currently identifying the best ones. I’ll also continue dashing off articles and submitting them. I have submitted the same 2 articles to both sites, but I think there may be policies about having duplicate material so I need to look into that.
Website Content – of course the best way possible to get links to the website is to have material that people want to link to. So improving the content and adding original stuff is the best strategy. Also having “linkbait” is another legitimate strategy – that is having specific pages with very good up to date information or analysis which may need updated regularly and which people can use as reference material and thereby want to create a permanent link to it. Need to think what I can use for that – one I will definitely explore.
Summary
So far to try to improve our pageranking with the search engines – especially Google, we have:
- Installed Google Toolbar so we can tell our current pagerank, and that of any other website
- Registered our website with 5 free listing Directories – the most important being DMOZ. This is of limited use so we will not explore this any further.
- Registered with 2 Article repository sites and successfully submitted a couple of articles to each – we will look at expanding this to other article sites
- We have not, and will not be – seeking to pay for any links, contacting other websites to ask for reciporcal links or spending time surfing blogs and forums just so we can give answers or comments and leave a link back to our website (a pointless and useless activity) . Our main strategy is to create content which other websites will want to link to. We will however look at creating areas on the site which could act as “linkbait” to encourage linking.
- We will maintain as key metrics the number of links reported through Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer and any changes in our Google Pagerank.
Conclusion
The way in which many web marketers approach link building verges on the unethical, and we will certainly do what we can to avoid any part in that. However building links is still an important strategy to improve pagerank, thereby improve our position with the search engines and so drive traffic to the site; we will therefore continue to do what we can through our main strategies of good content and article marketing submissions.
OK hopefully link building will help to increase traffic to the website. However once they get there we want to find other ways apart from Google Adsense to monetise the site. In the next posting we will look at affiliate marketing…
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