How To Use Links To Optimize Your Site For Google.
May 12th, 2008Google as well as other major search engines such as yahoo and MSN all look at how many links your site has in order to determine its importance. This is also what determines your ranking.
Not all links have an equal value. What determines the value of the link is its relevancy to the page it is linked to. The more relevant the page is the greater the value of the link. If not just the page, but the whole site is relevant the link is even more valuable.
Here are some ways to get quality links to your site:
Reciprocal Links.
Once upon a time they were considered very good, today they don’t have the value they once did but they are still useful. It is important that the links you get in this way are very relevant to the content in your site. This way reciprocal links will still increase your ranking.
Article Writing.
This is the best way of creating links that can be viewed as very relevant. It is a long slow tedious journey as it means regularly writing articles and submitting them to article directories. These articles will link back to your site by leaving a hyperlink in the bio section. Most article sites will not allow hyperlinks in the body of the article. You can submit your articles to hundreds of article directories. Here are some you should submit to: EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, and GoArticles.com.
Link Farms
A link farm is a site with scrolling pages of endless links. They allow you to place your link there no strings attached. If you come across one run the other way. They are considered part of a spammer’s network. Linking to these sites can actually damage your ranking. Google will downgrade your links and your page rank.
Directories
Links from directories can be very helpful in upgrading your ranking. This is especially so from such directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo. You can also look for other respected directories. Try to get your site listed with DMOZ. It can be very difficult but if you keep submitting it every 4 - 6 months. Search for the best category and keep trying for it.
Yahoo directory is a little easier to get into but not painless. There is a yearly charge of $299 to be listed in the Yahoo directory. Google sees Yahoo directory as an authority and this is very helpful in building your ranking.
One other thing that is very important is links anchor text. What is this? These are the words that are linked to a hyperlink. For example; To download this product clicks here. The click here is the anchor text. It is not wrong to have “click here” it is appropriate in certain areas. If you were to search the keyword “click here” you will find Adobe to be the site listed for that keyword. This is because there are thousands of sites that point to the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.
An anchor text link that uses the keyword or key phrase is far better. For example if you were targeting the keyword phrase; “low cost web hosting” You would anchor it this way: “to really benefit from our low cost web hosting here are some pointers” The keyword phrase we are targeting is our anchor text.
These are just a few of the many things you can do to increase your ranking with Google.