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Writing Links

In the first part of this article we learned some techniques to build a solid potential link partner list for your website. Those sites aren’t any good to you if you don’t use a strategy for writing the textual content of those links. Yes. I mean those few little words that are underlined in blue. In the right order they give the key to your website door to the world. In the wrong order, they don’t budge the cylinders in the lock.

Number of links takes second place to quality of links. The words you choose, varying them for each targeted link site, and incorporating some tried and true direct mail standard tactics will make your links more popular in the search engines, which is our ultimate goal. So lets get started!

As we said earlier, links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings. The key to writing good “link content” uses the same tactics for writing all good web content. Namely, don’t write for the search engines. Write for your readers and target audience. After you do that, then go back and tweak the little details to optimize for the engines. Why? The search companies attempt to give results for human readers, and because a number one search engine position is worthless if the description of your site is the most boring thing anyone has ever read.

You have humans that are examining your site to see if they want to link to you. Even if you pay for links someone has to make the decision that you’re worthy of being on their site. And further, you’ll never sell your product or service or attain any readership. Let’s take a simple step-by-step approach and make sure your links are lively, catchy, searchable and gushing to be clicked.

Pretend you’re the owner of a pumpkin company website. You sell all things made from pumpkins.

Step 1- Review Your Keyword List

Those are the words and phrases that you want to rank highly with in the search engines. They are the starting point for your link text. Note: “link text” is the clickable part of the link, the underlined blue type. Let’s take some keywords and apply a few tactics to them to develop a good link.

A few keywords might be:

pumpkin retailer
pumpkin festival
pumpkin plant
pumpkin holiday
pumpkin festival

Step 2- Create variations on those keywords.

Think of phrases that someone might enter into a search engine. Using that thought as the core, build outward by elaborating and specifying. Ask yourself “what type of ____?” to help you expand. For example, take the few keywords above and make them a bit more specific to:

pumpkin pie recipe
pumpkin bread recipe
cooking pumpkin seed

pumpkin patch
how to grow pumpkin
planting pumpkin seed

pumpkin carving design
carve Halloween pumpkin
pumpkin carving pattern

pumpkin costume
pumpkin centerpiece

Note: When coming up with additional keyword phrases (for use within your page elements and link) try this tool. www.inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ is part of Overture sponsored listings (now Yahoo) that will tell you how many times a phrase was searched in their engines on the web. Target the phrases with the most hits.

Step 3 Word Varieties

Your link should contain enough words so that when read out of context it still makes sense. Not so many words that it becomes blurred when a reader scans through a page.

Take the list you just made vary your keyword links using all of those keywords. Search engines raise an eyebrow at seeing “pumpkin recipe” on 50 sites with the exact same phrase all pointing back to you. It doesn’t see natural. Mixing up your link text with “pumpkin pie recipie”,”pumpkin bread recipe”, and “cooking pumpkin seeds” and the rest of your list keeps you well diversified without danger of spamming. And your keywords are more focused and targeted which gives you a better chance of being ranked higher.

Step 4 Incorporating Direct Mail Tactics

Now we have the words that will make up our link text. We’re almost finished. We need to give people some motivation to click.

The simplest of direct mail programs or incentive marketing campaigns all have a solid “call to action.” We need one here too. Why should a reader go to your site? What’s in it for them? They’ve got better things to do.

So many websites use the phrases “Click here,” “Learn more,” or “More info”. There’s a definite boundary between keeping things simple and clean on a web page and just copping out. When I see those phrases on a link I think the writer didn’t have time to get me excited about their product so I don’t have time to go look.

It doesn’t take much to write a simple call to action. For example:

Instead of “pumpkin pie recipe,” say “Grandma’s pumpkin pie recipe and all things pumpkin at The Orange Pumpkin.” Now your reader knows the name of your business (which will also be indexed), and thinks if it’s made by Grandma it’s probably good… I think I’ll have a look.

Step 5 Put it all together

Take your keyword phrase and surrounding text and create your link. The coded form looks like this.

Grandma’s pumpkin pie recipe and all things pumpkin at The Orange Pumpkin.

Every single link doesn’t have to be different, but you should have quite a variety if you follow these steps for all your keywords.

Don’t forget to use those keywords within your page too!!

Step 6 Final Thoughts

Stay away from link farms and free for all link sites.

List in as many Directories as you can, especially ones that are of the same nature as your site.

Try to get one-way links. You might be able to buy some from someone fairly cheaply. If you have to get a reciprocal link, stick to sites that are similar in theme to yours. They don’t have to be identical, but in the case of The Orange Pumpkin Company, a link from a car dealer is a waste of time…unless that car dealer happens to have a collection of the world’s greatest pumpkin recipes on their site. If that’s the case, then try to get a link on the page with the recipes.

Even though you’re goal is to rank high in the searches, write for the end user. Then go back and fine-tune things for an optimized search engine friendly page.

Good luck and happy linking!

Before you start reading this article I must warn you - everything that was written here is my own experience in link exchange. This article should not be referred to as official advice or proven techniques. I only want to share the experience of the helpful methods I used.

When you started your website you probably knew that two major factors play the biggest role in search engine placement: links and content.

1. The first recommended way to get links is to develop useful, unique and original content. Webmasters who visit your website will see that content is good and will link to your website to provide their visitors with some useful websites(info maybe?). If you searched Internet for some information, then you know how hard it can be to find a useful website.

2. Link exchange with other websites. There are two ways you can exchange links:

a) One page links – you place a link on one page and the other website places a link to your website

b) Site wide links – you place a link on all pages of your website

Both variants have pluses and minuses. For example, I believe that a link on all pages counts by Google as a link from one website; but if a website has thousands and thousands pages, the repeated link title on each page may effect you position in search engine results for that specific keyword.

If you are doing one page link exchange, I would recommend you to create special pages where links to other sites will be stored.

Thousands webmasters every day search for other websites to exchange links. When selecting a link partner, pay attention to the number of links on the page where he offers to place your link. The more links on that page, the lower benefit you will get exchanging links with this website. Also, try to keep numbers of links lower then 40 in all your link pages.

If you want to exchange site wide links, try to exchange non-direct links. Non-direct means that you must follow the pattern:

Website “A” gives a link to website “B”, “B” website gives a link to website “C”. This way the benefit from site wide link exchange may be increased significantly.

3. Write articles or tutorials. Make them free of change to republish if a link back to your website is provided with the article.

4. If your website is close to web development area you may want to create online software (such as guestbook, online calendar, etc.) with the open source and permission to use if a link back is included on pages. As an example of popularity gained that way you may see website of phpbb – free online message board.

Now you know where to start and the direction to go. If you found this article useful, please include the link to http://www.metamorphozis.com on one of your website pages;-)

This article may be reprinted and distributed with no charge until the credit line (links) below remains without changes.

Thanks for reading.

Article source: http://www.metamorphozis.com/tutorials/the_art_of_link_exchange.shtml

Link Exchanges are a very time consuming project. The time it takes to find the sites to exchange with, contact them and place a link on your page can seem like an eternity. The hardest part about link exchanges isn’t the research, it’s the waiting. This article will give you some tips to help speed response time to your requests.

“How long does it normally take?” you ask. The average wait can be 2 to 3 weeks, sometimes even longer. The reason for this is that many people operate their web site as a hobby or side business and may not be on top of their email. Keep these timeframes in mind before you judge the successfulness of a link campaign.

The first step is to find sites related to your web site that DO NOT have a large directory of links posted. You want to link to sites that have less than 100 links on their link page. Their Page Rank (PR) should be at least equal to yours. Higher is better, so always aim for the heavy hitters. Now, on to the business of saving you time.

Once you have located a site to contact, send a short but poignant email. If your email is too long, it may not be read. What should be in your email? First of all, your email should be personalized. Don’t send the same email to dozens of people, send one at a time. This will help avoid being thought of as a spammer. The personalized touch shows you are serious and that the email was sent by a real person. Nothing says “this is of little importance to me” like a form letter, so avoid using them.

The letter should also include:

• The HTML code to your text ad. This will make it easier for people to add your link to their site.
• A link to your link page. This will make easier for whom ever you are requesting a link from to find your page.
• Also, if they ask for you to link first, do so. If you have already been to their site (and certainly you should have if you are requesting a link), you will more than likely

know if they want a good faith link up. The email you send them should have a confirmation that their link is up and that you are requesting a reciprocal link.

Once you make contact with the web site owner, how long will you wait? A week? Two weeks? Honestly, it may be a month before you see your link unless you show some persistence. It doesn’t always depend on how often they do updates. I would contact them once a week after your initial inquiry after checking their site first. They may have placed a link up without notifying you.

So, in summary:

• Spend time finding sites that will be an asset to your enterprise to save time by not corresponding with those that won’t.
• Succinct, personalized E-mails
• Include all coding and links necessary to make it easy on the site you want to exchange with
• Research their link policy ahead of time
• Be persistent

Link exchanges are very time consuming. It takes patients and great recorded keeping to keep track of who has and has not added you. I do this with an excel spread sheet. It makes keeping track a lot easier to do. Especially, if you are doing large link campaigns.

Good luck.

This article was posted on August 09, 2005

The Basics

A reciprocal linking program is the quickest and easiest way to get your link popularity off the ground. In fact, this technique is so widely used that there are numerous companies specializing in managing your linking campaign or offering link exchange networks. There is no doubt that reciprocal linking can help your search position and maybe even get you referral traffic from other sites. I have used this technique to successfully boost the ranking of my own sites to #1 position on several key search terms in Google, Yahoo and other major search engines.

A Word of Caution

However, the problem is that many of the so called link exchanges are basically filtered out by the search engine due to the number and quality of those links. When a site carries over a thousand or so links most search engines will treat it as a “link farm” and those links will carry no weight at all. You may get penalized for carrying an excessive number of “low value” links. Worse yet, if you inadvertently link to a site that the search engines consider to be in a “bad neighborhood” they may lump you in the same category and filter you out all together. So the motto of the story is be careful who you link to and focus on quality links over quantity. It’s also important that the links to your site are related to your own web site and that these links have value to your visitors. Only quality links will bring you targeted traffic and increase your search engine rankings.

Tools of the Trade

I prefer link management software over link exchanges because it makes it much easier than maintaining HTML manually on your site and its also much easier to find goods sites and control a quality linking program. Also, there are no monthly fees and I can use the software for any number of my web sites without having to pay extra. The best software I have found for this purpose is Axandra’s Arelis Tool. It is by far the easiest and most efficient link management software on the market. Another great feature of this tool is that it helps you find out who links to your competitors and convince them to link to your site. Another thing to watch out for is linking to sites that are not reciprocating. You’ll find that only 20-40% of the sites you invite to exchange links will actually do so. If you’ve already placed a link to their site you’ll want periodically remove those sites that are not reciprocating. However, keeping track of sites that do or don’t reciprocate is no small task. Because search engine do not index every page on the web you can’t rely on them to determine if a site is reciprocating a link or not. The best way is to use a software tool that spiders through the sites of your link partners to find a reciprocal link and to find the free-loaders that are not linking back. Such utility can be down-loaded through this link: Free Reciprocal Link Checker.

Conclusion