Link Building
Pillar #7 – Link Building
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There are a variety of right and wrong ways to build links to your website.
Building up good quality, relevant links has to be an integral part of any search
engine optimization strategy.
However, bear this in mind – link building is about quality, relevant links and
not about the number of links. While I believe it to be a little easier to ‘game’
Yahoo or MSN search with simply generating a large volume of links that point
to your website, this is a short-term game. Although it didn’t in the past, Google
certainly now prefers quality over quantity – and that isn’t going to change in the
future.

The consistent approach works best
You need to view your link building strategy as an ongoing project. Attempting
to get 1,000 links to your site this week and then thinking ‘that’s my link building
done!’ will have little or no impact.

When developing your link building strategy you need to think about how links
would evolve to a web page naturally, and do your best to try to mimic the
evolvement of links in a similar manner.

You have to remember that Google and other major search engines have now
been going for more that 10 years, and in that time they’ve continually improved
the manner in which their software works. Good search engines do this for 2
reasons. Firstly, to continually improve the user experience and try to stay ahead
of the competition. Secondly, to try and stay one step ahead of those who try to
game the search engine results with underhand (often called ‘black hat’) search
engine optimization tricks.

Because of this, the focus on search engines have been to try and study how links
evolve naturally, and try and determine link building patterns which don’t
appear to be very natural at all.

The lesson from this with regards to link building is not to try to do things that
have no chance of happening naturally. That way your link building techniques
have a better chance of flying underneath the search engine radar.

Link building methods discussed in this chapter

Pillar #7 (this chapter) discusses 5 ways in which you can build links to your
website:

•Free Directories – where to find relevant directories that offer you free website
listings

•How to analyze a competitors’ links to their website – How to establish who
is linking to your competitors’ websites and how to get the same web pages to
link you your site

•How to acquire links from respected institutions and why these links are often
a lot more valuable in the eyes of a search engine

•How top acquire links by giving testimonials to other people’s products

•How to search Google and other search engines to find other relevant web
pages that may consider linking to you

Free Directories
There are 2 main sorts of free directories that are worthwhile focusing on to build
your inbound links:

1) Industry specific directories
2) Local specific directories

1) Industry specific directories
There is a useful website called Directory Critic, (directorycritic.com) which is
actually a directory of directories (Figure 7.1). Use this resource to search for
directories within a niche that is most relevant for your business type.

Figure 7.1 – Directory Critic

Directory Critic is the directory of directories
Relevant industry-specific directory link building is a useful and worthwhile
place to start. Search engines regularly crawl directories, and these directory
links will start to educate search engines about your website topic.

The more relevant the links are, the better the quality of the link. This is because
if search engines are able to make a reasonable assumption about your website
topic, your site will be more likely to rank more highly for that topic in search
engine results pages.

Where else to find industry specific website directories

Another incredibly easy method of discovering new directories suitable for your
industry is to search Google for a keyword phrase that describes your industry,
and adding the word ‘directory’ at the end. Let’s consider an example of this
using our old fictitious favourite, Freddie Faldo the golf shop owner.

Searching for a golf directory

After searching for ‘golf directory’ in Google, one of the first websites I found
was a website called Your Golf Directory (Figure 7.2). To get his golf equipment
shop listed within this directory, Freddie should simply navigate to the category
called ‘golf equipment and accessories’ – and then complete a form with a little
information about his website before submitting his details.

Figure 7.2 – Your Golf Directory

Searching for the correct category on Your Golf Directory
There are often a number of options when submitting your link for possible
inclusion in the directory. If paid links aren’t too expensive, and for that you
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- 100 – THE 13 PILLARS OF INTERNET MARKETING
receive a more prominent position on a relevant, valuable website and a
comparably rapid review time, then it may be worthwhile just going for the paid
review option. You’re just going to have to judge whether or not you think that
this is of value.

Reciprocal links
Five to ten years ago, one of the easiest methods of ‘gaming’ the search engines
was to swap links with as many websites as you possibly could – no matter
whether the content on either website had anything in common at all!
Exchanging links is generally referred to as reciprocal linking.
Reciprocal links worked so well because it was much easier to persuade other
webmasters to link to your site if you were prepared to link to their site.
However, because search engines gave a reciprocal link the same amount of
weighting as a one-way link, this actively encouraged reciprocal linking as a
form of search engine optimization.

Other websites quickly evolved which functioned as a meeting place for people
who were interested in trading links. As a result, this actively encouraged
webmasters to try to short-cut their way to the top of Google search results.
As a result, in order to try to continue to deliver the best possible search results
to their users, Google decided that it needed to radically change its search engine
ranking algorithm. And the first stage in this significant algorithm change was
the reduction in value of reciprocal links – and the reduction in value of links
from website deemed to be not from the same industry sector.

Choosing to link for the right reasons

If a website chooses to link to your home page, or another page on your site
because they find it to be a valuable resource for their own visitors then that’s the
right reason for wanting to link to a web page.
The secret is to try and replicate that linking ideology and style in future links
that point to your site. That’s in addition to trying to replicate the style of sites
and locations of links on those sites that point to your web pages – replicate the
natural building of links and you can’t go too far long!

Don’t think it’s always a bad idea to exchange links
You shouldn’t think that it’s always a bad idea to exchange links. As long as if
you have links from lots of other sources, it’s quite acceptable to have one or two
link exchange pages on your site that feature relevant link partners. As a rule of
thumb, as long as if less than quarter of your links are from link exchanges, and
hand-on-heart you could say that each link which you include on your own site
could be a useful resource for visitors, then this volume and quality of reciprocal
links should only have a positive effect.

By participating in a minimal amount of industry-relevant link exchanges, it
demonstrates to Google that you are an independent authority within your
industry, because you are comfortable linking out to other websites in the same
industry sector and spreading some ‘link love’.

Another example of an industry-specific directory
Figure 7.3 is another example of searching for an industry-related directory,
using the case study of Jane Jobs’ sales executive recruitment company.
Having searched Google for ‘sales recruitment directory’, one of the first search
engine results I encountered was a website called SalesWork, which contains a
list of useful links of where to find sales work.

Remember, whatever your business is, search for your industry sector keyword
and the word ‘directory’ in Google or another search engine, and you will
hopefully find at least 10 good, relevant directories that you can get decent
one-way links from to your site. For these types of links you need a combination
between quality and quantity – so be selective – but not too selective.

Optimizing your link text (title) and description
Another thing to bear in mind when you are submitting your site to various
directories is to try to ensure that you vary the title text and the description of
your submission details.

Because you’re submitting your own website for prospective inclusion in a
directory, the chances are that if the directory owner decides to include your
website in their listings, they’ll choose to use your suggested title and description
instead of bothering to write one for themselves.

This gives you a fantastic opportunity to influence your off-site search engine
optimization (i.e. controlling the links and text in the links from other sites witch
point to your site).

To maximize the search engine optimization impact from your directory
submissions you should use a mixture of different keyword phrases within your
title and description choices. This is because if you just used the same title and
description in all of your directory submissions, search engines could easily
assume that it’s you that’s been doing the submitting. However, if you mix
things up a bit, it may well be perceived by the search engines as being the
directory owners choosing to link to you.

Figure 7.3 – Sales Work Website

The free link exchange form on the SalesWork website
Search engines have lots of different ways of deciding whether or not it looks as
if you’ve been building links yourself, or other sites have chosen to link to you.
One easy method that they use is to analyze the text within the links that point to
your pages – if most websites use exactly the same phrase then that may be
perceived as representing unnatural link building. Another rule I go by is to
never have more than 50% of my text links to any one page linking using the
same keyword phrase.

Comparing Directories
There are 3 main methods which you should use whenever you need to analyze
the potential effectiveness of getting listed in a directory.

1) Manual review for relevance and suitability

2) Google Page Rank

3) Alexa Rank

1) Manual review for relevance and suitability
As already briefly covered, you need to try to ensure that your website is being
featured in the right neighborhoods. That’s on sites which already feature a
reasonable quantity of subject matter in your chosen field, and don’t display
material that you aren’t comfortable having your business associated with.

2) Google Page Rank
Google Page Rank is a method of ranking individual web pages between 0 and
10, 10 being the highest score and 0 being the lowest. It is an approximation,
according to Google, of their perceived value of a page. It is not a very accurate
method of measuring, but it does give you an indication of the potential value of
having a link to your site on the page.

One of the easiest ways to determine the Page Rank of an individual web page is
to download the Google Toolbar. (Simply search for ‘Google toolbar’ in any
search engine). The Google Toolbar is a small software program which adds on
additional functionality to the top of your website browser – there is a version for
both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

As part of the toolbar you will be able to view the Page Rank of each web page
you visit via a small green line representing the Page Rank score. The length of
the green line indicates the quantity of Page Rank that the web page has been
awarded by Google.

However, bear in mind, Page Rank is only updated about every three months.
This therefore means that Page Rank isn’t an accurate present-day representation
of what Google currently feels about the page, but it provides a reasonable
starting point for analysis.

It’s also important to remember that just because a web page doesn’t have any
Page Rank; it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t bother trying to get your website
listed on that page. It could be a very popular site that gets lots of visitors, and
there may be some technical reason why Google isn’t choosing to give the web
page in question any Page Rank. That’s why you still need to use your gut
instinct – along with one other method of rating the value of a website – Alexa

Rank.

3) Alexa Rank
Unlike Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank gives you a rating score for the popularity
of a website as a whole. It can also give you a reasonable estimate of how
popular a website is in a particular country.

Alexa ranks the top several million websites, and it will give you an approximate
traffic ranking value for your website. If it is number one this means it is the best
website in the world!

To show you how it compares websites against each other, Figure 7.4 is an Alexa
Rank graph showing a ranking comparison between the Google.com,
Yahoo.com, and MSN.com websites over a five-year period.

The great thing about Alexa is that you can view how much websites have
increased in popularity (or decreased in popularity) over a period of time. This
will allow you to make more of an informed decision on whether or not it may
be valuable to approach a website, and ask the owner to link to your site.
Alexa has is limits though. When a website has a ranking of much lower than
200,000, Alexa struggles to produce a graph to represent the popularity of that
website over time.

Figure 7.4 – Alexa.com

Alexa graphs comparing traffic of Google, Yahoo and MSN
2) Local specific directories
Having covered major directories in pillar #5, and industry directories over the
few previous pages, local directories are the final type of directories to which you
need to submit your website.

If you are a business with a physical address then there are 2 local directories I
would class as being very important to try and get your website listed in –
Google Local and Yahoo! Local.

You can also search Directory Critic (as previously discussed) to find different
local directories. As well as having industry-specific directory categories,

Directory Critic has a section for country-specific regional directories. And once
again, in a similar manner to what was suggested to find more industry-specific
directories, you can easily find additional local-specific directories by searching
for them in Google.

Google Local Directory
You can add your business to the Google Local directory at
http://www.google.com/local/add/ (Figure 7.5). To do this, you will need to
create a free Google account. Having done so, you will be able to fill in your
business name, description and your address. Google then sends you a physical
postcard to your business address with a pin code. You need to log back into
your Google account and enter this PIN code to make your listing live.

Figure 7.5 – Google Local Directory

Google Local Directory – one of the most important local directories
Getting your business listed in Google Local will only become more important in
the future as being featured will also mean that you will be able to appear in
associated services like Google Maps. It could be argued that local mobile search
is the next Internet frontier, and getting your business listed in all the big online
local directories now will give you a head-start in the next stage of local directory
evolvement.

Yahoo! Local Directory
Yahoo! Local (Figure 7.6) works in a similar way to Google Local – and when
your business is listed on this directory it should appear in Yahoo! Maps.

Figure 7.6 – The Yahoo! Local Directory

The Yahoo! Local Directory is important local directory
Don’t forget Directory Critic – and the 2 reasons why you’re building links
Remember not to forget the Directory Critic website when you’re searching for
local-specific directories. These types of links should be able to offer you 2 main
benefits. Firstly, the search engine optimization benefits, and secondly, the
visitors who click on the links through to your website.

More Local Directories
As with industry directories, you can find other local directories using search
engines. Below (Figure 7.7) shows the Google search results when you search for
“Glasgow directory”.

Figure 7.7 – Google Search results
Searching for local directories in Google
Glasgow, of course is just an example. You can conduct a similar search for any
other city in the world. This search will help you find specific directories that are
often run by local people on a non-profit basis who are simply interested in
providing great information about their local area.
Links from these types of sites can be extremely valuable for a number of
reasons. For instance, in addition to the benefits of helping to educate search
engines about the locality of your business, these directories often have category specific sections which will be better for your SEO.

‘Glasgow Trading’
Figure 7.8 below shows the categories found on the Glasgow Trading website.
Remember, when you’re reviewing local directories which may be appropriate
for your business, make sure that you take time to browse and find the most
appropriate category for inclusion in.

Figure 7.8 – Glasgow Trading
Selection the most appropriate category on Glasgow Trading
Reviewing the categories on the Glasgow Trading website, you can see that once
you click on ‘Professional Services’, there are plenty of options to choose from
including ‘Accountancy’, ‘Advertising’, ‘Architects’ etc.
To submit your website to a great, relevant local directory like this, it’s often just
the case of navigating your way to the most relevant category, and them looking
for a ‘submit’ button.

You will then be presented with an online form which requests the title and
description of your website. Because it’s a local directory, it may also ask you for
your business address and telephone number – and perhaps a password so that
you can return to the site in the future to edit your business information. (See
figure 9 for completing a submission form on Glasgow Trading)
Figure 7.9 – Glasgow Trading

Completing a website submission form on Glasgow trading
Remember to bear search engines in mind when you’re submitting your website
to local directories. As well as selection the optimum category for your business,
it’s important to remember to try to include a relevant keyword phrase in your
submission title and description.

Another thing to bear in mind is that if you’re planning of trying to get listed in
lots of local directories, it may be a prudent idea to replicate your submission
strategy that you have with other directories by rotating your titles and
descriptions.

Figure 7.10 – Glasgow Trading

An example of a company listing on Glasgow Trading
Figure 7.10 shows you why it’s worthwhile spending some time to come up with
a quality, lengthy description for your business prior to submission to local
directories. As well as giving each directory submission having their own web
page (with a unique URL), the web page also contains a link that visitors can
click to see a location map of the business.

Although this particular local directory example doesn’t actually give you a
keyword rich link back you your website, it does pass on ‘link juice’. You can tell
this because if you view the source code of the listing, the link HTML doesn’t use
a ‘nofollow’ attribute.

Competitor backlinks
Another important part of a successful link building campaign is to be able to
analyze the links that are pointing to your competitors; (backlinks) determine
which ones are most valuable and come up with a strategy to try to encourage
these web pages to link to your site too. Let’s take a look at our fictitious example
Freddy Faldo, and how he would analyze which websites to target using the
keyword phrase ‘golf equipment’.

Using the previously mentioned Google Toolbar, after having loaded one of his
competitor’s home pages, Freddie would begin by selecting the drop-down
menu on the right-hand side of the PageRank icon. Then clicking on ‘backward
links’, he would be able to view a list of several other respected websites which
link to his chosen competitor (Figure 7.11).

Figure 7.11 – The Golf Shop Online

Searching for competitor backlinks using Google toolbar
Don’t just rely on Google to analyze your competitor’s backlinks

It’s important to note that Google chooses not to display all the links (according
to their data) which link to your competitor’s home page. In fact, Google may
only display around five percent of the links that they know about. So you
shouldn’t just rely on Google when you’re analyzing your competitor’s
backlinks!

However, the good news is that Yahoo is a lot more willing to divulge its link
count information, so collating the Yahoo and Google results together means that
you will be able to get a good feel for who’s linking to your competitors.

You’re better off downloading all this research onto a spreadsheet – or it may be
a good idea to use semi-automated search engine optimization software like SEO
Elite to carry out this task, as suggested at
This SEO software – or the added time investment to create your own
spreadsheet will help to make sure that you don’t miss out on as many link
building opportunities as you otherwise would do.

Analyzing the number of links pointing to a competitor’s website using Yahoo

To analyze the number of links pointing to a competitor’s website using the
Yahoo search engine, all you have to do is visit
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/, and then type in linkdomain: and then the
full URL of your competitor’s home page – for example this search would look
something like linkdomain:http://www.competitorsdomain.com.

Once you’ve selected a number of competitors, and downloaded all of their
backlinks according to both Google and Yahoo onto your spreadsheet, you need
to sort them in order of value. This is generally done by using a combination of
Google PageRank and Alexa Rank.

(This is probably the point where you choose to definitely select some semiautomated time-saving SEO software instead of doing all of this manually!)

Contacting the websites that link to your competitors

So, you’ve solved half of the puzzle – you’ve discovered which websites are
linking to your competitors, and that’s the main reason why your competitors
are ranking so well. The next half of the puzzle though is to work out a strategy
that is most likely to get you competitor’s link partners to want to link to you too.
One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when they’re trying to
encourage other websites to link to them, is they send out generic emails saying
something like:

“Hi, I really like your site and wondered if you might be interested in swapping
links?”

Webmasters receive emails like the above one far too often. And because there
isn’t one degree of personalization – or indication that the message sender has
even looked at the recipient’s website, the chances are extremely small that the
message will be treated with any serious consideration.

Alternatively, if you took just a little time to visit each web page on which you
wanted to get your business listed, decided how exactly how your competitor’s
links came to be and educated yourself on the business model of the website in
question, then you would be phenomenally more likely to obtain a link back to
your website.

This is because your new email to the website on which you would like to get
listed would look something like:

“Hi John,
I’d like to compliment you on the set of useful resources that you are listing at
http://www.johnssite.com
I regularly revisit your entrepreneur articles – they’re full of really informative
content. I especially like the most recent article by Laurie Hayes on ‘how 3 simple
no’s can change your life and business’.
I run the website www.businesstime.com which helps businesses brainstorm
with each other to try to improve their long-term business models.
I was hoping that you feel that my website would be a really useful resource for
your readers – and that you’d be happy to link to this resource from your
Entrepreneur Articles section.
In anticipation that you’d be happy to do this I’d like to offer you a
complimentary bottle of wine as a thank you!
Just reply showing our live link, your preference for red or white wine, and an
address to send the bottle to and I’ll get it in the post!
Many thanks and keep up the good work with Build Your Own Business!

Craig Thomas
Owner, Business Time”

If you approach people in the right manner, say why their site is valuable and
explain why they should want to link to you, then ask them to potentially add
your link as well, you might be surprised at the number of websites that will give
you a link to your website. (An incentive like a free bottle of wine might help
too!)

Taking a personal approach and ensuring that you are focused in your requests
will be much more successful that using automated software to request links.
Like building any kind of relationship, you only have one chance to make a first
impression, so be sure you do not spam people with generic e-mails.

Take the time to find out a little about the website that you want to appear on –
and the person who runs the website before you make contact. It will make the
world of difference to your link request conversion rates.

How to discover the owners of websites
You don’t just have to rely on finding a website owner / manager’s contact
details on their website. Don’t forget the often forgotten tool to assist you with
an internet marketing campaign – a telephone! It’s always worthwhile phoning
up a head office to see if you can try to discover the name of the person
responsible for looking after the website.
Another option that you have if you just can’t find out who’s responsible for
managing the website is to look up a service that may tell you the person
responsible for the site admin according to the domain registration.

Figure 7.12 – easywhois.com
Looking up the contact details for the domain purpleinternetmarketing.com
Whenever you register a domain, you have to submit some contact information.
Most people don’t hide this contact information, meaning that it’s possible for
the general public to view – as long as if people know where to look. This is
called the WHOIS of a domain – where you can see who is registered as the
administrative contact for an individual domain.

One of the places where it’s possible to view this information is through a service
called easywhois.com. (Figure 7.12)

Although looking up these contact details in a service like this shouldn’t be your
first port of call when trying to make contact with a website owner – as the
details are often wrong and it can come across as a little bit impersonal to contact
someone after finding them here – if this is the only option you have, it’s
certainly worthwhile.

Respected institutions
It’s all about thinking out of the box when it comes to attracting valuable, oneway
links.

Search engines often value links on educational, charity or government-run
websites a little higher than links on other websites. There is a lot of opinion on
why this is the case. Reasons have been cited including the length of time that a
domain has been around for and the quality of links that point to the website of
the respected institution. Either way, it’s not important why these links are often
deemed to be more valuable by search engines. What’s important is the fact that
they are, and that getting links from these types of websites are very good for
your own website’s ranking.

One way to obtain links from a respected institution is to try to forge a
relationship with a university, perhaps offering to give a seminar to a group of
students about a particular topic in exchange for them mentioning you on their
website and giving you a link to your site.

Libraries often have local directories which you can get listed in for free. There
are numerous business networks that you can join, many for free, that will give a
one-way link – all you have to do is ask.

A local Chambers of Commerce can also be very useful – they often have a
directory of businesses which are members and an additional directory of
members which are willing to offer special discounts to other chamber members.
This is yet another method of creating a valuable, one-way link to your site.

Testimonials
Another great way of getting one-ay links to your site is through giving
testimonials. Any product or service you buy will no-doubt be happy to hear
positive reviews on what you thought about your purchase.

Sending an unsolicited, positive testimonial about a product or service that you
have purchased to a marketing director – not the customer service department –
can be very effective. A receipt of a positive testimonial by a company’s
marketing department may prompt them to use it as part of their future
promotional material.

When you’re leaving your testimonial, always leave your website address rather
than your phone number for your contact details. That way, if your testimonial
is published, readers will be able to visit your website to find out more –
hopefully via a live one-way link.

Figure 7.13 – afgs.com

A quick online search will find you more link building opportunities

Searching Google for more link partners
Searching Google – or other search engines – can quickly find you additional,
relevant link building opportunities. Try searching Google for your keyword
phrase and the phrase ‘add URL’, or your keyword phrase and the phrase ‘add
site’.

For instance, using Freddie Faldo and the golf example, if you search Google for
‘golf’ and ‘add URL’, what you are searching for is any pages that mention the
word ‘golf’, but also mention the phrase ‘add URL’, or the phrase ‘add site’.
Generally, these types of web pages will be about golf – and be looking for link
partners.

Figure 7.13 is one of the first pages that we find when we conduct a Google
search for ‘golf’ and ‘add URL’. The afgs.com website (America’s favorite golf
schools) offers a link building opportunity. They ask for your website name, site
description, and a reciprocal link.

When you search for link building opportunities like this online, you’ll often find
that websites look for a reciprocal link. That’s’ not a bad thing – it’s just not as
good as a one-way link from them to your site.

As long as if you build links in lots of different ways, that any reciprocal links are
relevant resources for your readers and that reciprocal links are the minority of
links that point to your site, this can still be part of an effective internet
marketing strategy.

Pillar #7 – Link Building Summary

•To achieve good, consistent search engine rankings it is important to get
quality links from relevant sites to your website. However, large numbers of
non-relevant links pointing to your site can have a negative effect on your
search engine rankings.

•Submit your website to free directories, such as local or industry-specific
directories. Use DirectoryCritic.com to search for niche industry directories.
Both Google Local and Yahoo Local are valuable local directories.
DirectoryCritic.com can also be used to find more local directories.

•Researching the links that point to your competitor’s site can be a good way to
discover which sites might be willing to link to your site. You can contact
these site owners by using contact forms on their website, or using the
easywhois.com service.

•Respected institutions such as universities, libraries, or business networks are
often willing to link to your site if you’re willing to help them out by giving a
free lecture or seminar on your specialized subject. Perhaps you can offer
these organizations something else of value in exchange for a link?

•Remember to send a testimonial for any product or service that your business
invests in. Send your testimonial to the marketing director and include your
website address to make it much more likely to give you a free one-way link.

•Search Google for your keyword phrase plus the phrases ‘add url’ or the
phrase ‘add site’ to find websites that are actively looking for link partners. If
the site is relevant for your readers then consider arranging a reciprocal link.
This offers value as long as if is part of a wider link building campaign, and
not the primary focus of the campaign.