Search Engine Optimization & Getting More Web Page Links

There are web sites offering to guarantee you hundreds, even thousands of links to your web pages. Do NOT use them EVER. They will charge you $ per 100 links. Such link farms as they are called are frowned upon by search engines and normally the links are of little relevant value.

The search engines also know of these sites and you can bet your life that links to and from them are penalised in some way. Why? Simply that the SERPs are being manipulated just like the spam from good cheddar cheese we discussed a while back was doing the same kind of SERP manipulation.

Search engines do not like to be manipulated and they need you less than you need them so my advice is keep away from anything smelling of manipulation, tricks and make millions in 10 days kind of approaches.

On the same tack many web sites offer to do all the hard work of finding and arranging links for you, within 1 day at a cost of only $100. Keep away from them. It cannot be done. End of story!

On the other hand you should go out of your way to ask for links into your site from similar sites. Some sites will be prepared to do this especially if you offer to link to them in return. When you ask for a link (normally e-mail the web master) use a personalized note and give the specific words you would like to have used in the link eg please take a look at this great site about garden ponds . This approach we will come back to in great detail later.

The desire to gain links should never stop. The more links the better. Remember they are just like recommendations.

Finding links is hard repetitive boring work that has to be done.

Google can help to get good links

Lets take a look at Google from the users point of view for a while. This can point us to some good ways of improving our web sites or at least getting to know how to find out more about them. Decide early on which page you would like links to point to.

Google tool bar a very useful tool

Before going into any detail I would encourage anyone who still does not have the Google tool bar to load it onto their browser window. Below is what the Google tool bar looks like when you open your browser after you have downloaded it. The blue arrow points to the tool bar. This shows irrespective of which web site you are looking at. The first big advantage is that you can search Google at any time you do not need to go out of the page you are already in. Here is the link to download the tool bar http://toolbar.google.com/

The red arrow points to a particularly important piece of information It is called PageRank (see below) and is a horizontal green bar chart representing scores between 0 and 10. The Google PageRank is a perfect 10. It essentially means that you are looking at a very popular and/or authoritative site as measured by the volume and quality of links pointing to the page concerned. Google has 252,000 links pointing to it. We will revisit PageRank later in some detail.

Yahoo has 654,000 links pointing to it. Alexa has only 2,650 links pointing to it. How do I know? Google told me!

Select advanced search from Googles home page and this screen shown below is what you will see. As the red arrow indicates there is a specific search query you can do. A quicker way is to type the following into the search box link:www.thenameofyourownsite.com and the results will be returned to you as normal SERPs.

This is important information. You now can discover which sites are linking to your competitors. You also know how many more or less sites they have linking to them. Everything else being equal the number of links wins. If any of the linking sites to your competitors site has a PageRank of 6 or more then your competitor has a particularly good link.

If your competitor can get so many links why cant you get more. Well maybe you can as you will see later.

This search would probably also identify other sites belonging to the same company because it almost certain they would link back to themselves. Of course Google can only identify links from other pages if those other pages are in its database go back to what I said about the spider a few pages ago.

There is a quicker way to find out this information using the tool bar. See the little blue button identified by a mauve arrow in the above screenshot click this. All the information is sourced from links data.

The green arrow above is also pointing to a useful feature. Does your competitor update important keyword pages at least 3 monthly. If yes then you should be encouraged to do the same or better.