"Targeted Link Building Draws Traffic and Increases Rankings"

¤ Reciprocal link building has become one of the cornerstones of any effective search engine optimization campaigns. For many sites, a strong link building campaign, in conjunction with a strongly optimized web site, is enough to push those competitive keywords in the top positions.

Targeted, reciprocal link building, is an essential part of all our optimization strategies. We also offer stand-alone, reciprocal link building services for those not necessarily seeking a full optimization campaign.

Our link building services consists of :-

Researching your industry to find related but non-competing sites that would make strong link partners.
Researching individual web sites for quality and relevancy.
Developing professional keyword-targeted link text and descriptions targeting your optimized pages.
Corresponding with approved sites for quality link exchange partnerships.
Overseeing reciprocal links, verifying return links and uploading of approved links to web site.

¤ Links That Work :
The first consideration you have to make in your link-building efforts is who should be linking to you and whom you should link to. These are two separate considerations and despite that fact that you will be working on both at the same time, they must be considered independently.

¤ Who Should Link To You? (Incoming Links)
When you are looking for sites to link to you there are five questions that you must ask yourself:

Do they compete with you? While you can try to request a link from a site that provides the same or similar products and services that you do, this is generally a waste of time that could be spent finding legitimate links from sites that would like to promote your product or service.


Does their site relate to your content? If you have a site promoting carpet cleaning products, a link from a hair salon will not be of much benefit. Google and the other major search engines look for content relationship when determining the value of a link. If the content of the two sites is totally unrelated the link is given very little weight if any. Focus only on attaining links from sites relevant to your own.


How does Google rate the site? Google has come out with a fantastic tool called the Google Toolbar. The advanced version of the toolbar includes the PageRank of the site you are currently visiting. Without getting into a long description of PageRank, the higher the number the better (it is a ranking out of 10 where traditionally anything above 4 is good and anything above 6 is excellent. If Google rates the site well then the link will be more valued than from a site that Google rates poorly. When looking for links give more time and attention to those with Page Ranks of 4 or higher.


Will they require a reciprocal link? Whether the site will require a reciprocal link or not is a serious consideration. The more links to your site that you have that are not reciprocated the better. These links are given added weight. This area will be addressed further below.

¤ Who Should You Link To? (Outgoing Links)
The question, "who should you link to?" is a very serious one and can have significant repercussions on your search engine placement. If you are linking to sites this is your way of saying, "This site is highly relevant to mine and that my visitors will enjoy the content on it." For this reason there are a number of considerations that have to be made when determining whether reciprocal links are in your best interest. Factors of the website that should be considered when determining whether to link to that website are:
Is the site’s content related to yours? Like incoming links (sites linking to you), the relevancy of the content on both sites should be high. If you have a number of links from your site to websites that are completely unrelated to you’re the value of these links is negligible and further, will reduce the perceived value of your site.


Does the site compete with you? In this case it is your interests, not those of the other webmaster, which must be taken into account. Do you want to link to a site that provides the same or similar products/services as you? Unless the site is willing to reciprocate the link and they have a very high PageRank it is probably not wise to give your visitors the opportunity to go to the site of a competitor.


What is their PageRank? Many people falsely believe that any outbound link will hurt your placement. This is simply not the case. Poor link-building is the cause of this misconception, not the link itself. When you are determining whether to link to another site, take a look at the PageRank it has been assigned by Google. Like the boost this gives to your site in the incoming links, so to can this have a positive effect on your outbound links. If all of your outbound links are to highly regarded sites (by the search engines) and whose content is relevant to yours then these links will help, and not hinder your rankings.

¤ Finding The Links :-
Since you’re looking for links to boost your search engine placement, the best place to start is… the search engines. A few searches should produces hundreds of potential links. There are a few tactics that work better than others. The first tactic provides the best links for their relevancy and for their PageRank. The second provides the best results for getting many links quickly and easily.

¤ Getting Many Links :-
Getting many links is not as difficult as getting high-quality links. Some of the same rules apply here. You will want the site to be related to yours, you will want it to be well-regarded by the search engines, and you will want it to be easy to submit to. To accomplish this, the easiest way is to once again turn to the search engines. This time however, the search will be a little bit different.

Rather than typing in the keyword phrase you are targeting you should type in the keyword phrase followed by the words "submit" or "add url". What this will give you is a listing of sites related to your keywords but also with an added bonus; a submission page. Sites that advertise their submissions are traditionally easier to submit to (i.e. they probably have a simple form to fill out rather than you having to email webmasters, etc.).

You’ll be surprised at how many of these sites will link to you without the need for a reciprocal link. If the form is easy then submit to it. If the form will require significant efforts to fill out (requiring information you don’t have on hand for example) or if they require a reciprocal link you will have to use the above-noted guidelines to determine if the effort is worth your time and/or outbound link.

¤ Best Practices For Outbound Links :-
There are a few considerations you will want to make in regards to how you organize the outbound links from your website. The most important thing to do is to create a "Resources Page". You should call it a "Resources Page" or something similar rather than a "Links Page" for both search engine considerations and for your visitors. Placing the majority of your outbound links on one page will avoid inadvertently affecting the optimization and search engine considerations taken with the rest of your website and gives you a place to place new links as they come in the future.

Each outbound link should look something like the following example linked from an adventure tour web site :-

>> Tea Tree Oil Exposed Everything you wanted to know about Tea Tree Oil! From its history to its many uses, Tea Tree Oil is a requirement for any home first aid kit.

Each link should have descriptive text within it (not something ambiguous like ‘click here’) and there should be a quality description of the web site below the link. If you don’t know what to include as the description, just ask the site owner, they are often very pleased that you are putting so much care into the reciprocal link.

Something you will also want to do is have the outbound links open in a new window. It’s surprising the number of websites that don’t do this. If you can keep a visitor in your site, even if your site is now in a browser beneath the one being looked at, you stand a higher chance that the visitor will return than if they have completely left your site and you’re now relying on them to go back.