Linkbacks- How Important Are They? Part 2

Now that you are ready to go out and get some links to your site, it is important that you follow these general rules. First, you need to decide what keywords you want to rank high for in the search engines. If you do not know yet, then you’d better start researching all of the keywords related to your site to see which ones will bring you the most traffic as well as the most relevant traffic. Read my post titled “Let’s Get Down To Business” for the tools you need to research your related keywords.

Once you have a list of all the keywords that you want to show up for on the search engines, you will want to make sure that when someone links to your site, they use some of the keywords you selected in the text of the link.  Remember from Part 1, search engines see a link from another site to yours as a vote. And whatever keywords they link to you with is a vote for your site for those keywords. So, if someone links to my blog with the keywords “Online Business Help,” that is a vote for my site for each of those keywords as well as for the whole phrase. Keep in mind also that a one way link is much better than a link exchange. Search engines know that if you’ve exchanged links, both sites have mutually agreed to vote for each other for those keywords. A one way link tells the search engines that a site voted for your site just because they thought your site was relevant to those keywords. Make sense?

In Part 1 I also talked about some links being more relevant than others. I’ll explain what I mean by “relevant.” If I get a link from an electonics site to my site with the words “Free Online Business Information,” that would not be as relevant as if I were able to get the same link on a site that is all about Online Business Information.  Also, if you are trying to get to the top of Google, you will want to pay attention to the page rank that Google has assigned to each website that you request a link from. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, then do a search on Google for “Google Toolbar.” You’ll find a link to Google’s download page that also explains what the toolbar is all about including pagerank. Once you have the toolbar installed, you’ll want to click on “Settings” then options, and then select the More tab at the top. Then under “Even More buttons, check pagerank and page info and then select OK. This will enable the pagerank bar showing you what pagerank Google has assigned to each webpage. So, when you go to get a link from a site, the higher the pagerank the better. Additionally, the higher the pagerank and the more relevant the site is to your site, the better the link will be.

Many times, when you request a link from another site, they will just use the name of your site as the text of the link(also known as anchor text). This can be very frustrating if the name of your site is something totally made up and has nothing to do with your site content(Amazon or Google for instance). So, it is really helpful if your domain name contains your most important keywords. On one of my sites, I sell primarily outdoor socks. So registered the domain name thesocksite.com. Now, even if someone doesn’t link to that site using the kewords I suggest and they just use the name of the site, I will still get a vote for my most important keyword “Sock.”  Stay tuned for Part 3. I will suggest some crafty was to get links from other relevant sites.