Getting Links To Your Website

Step Three : Get Links To Your Website

Here I think it is appropriate now to explain to you how the search engines use links to rank your website so you can understand this critical but most often overlooked Step Three of search engine marketing.

This is a highly condensed and “simplified” explanation, but it's accurate nonetheless...

Google is a multi-billion dollar business that depends solely on its millions upon millions of daily users to use it as a starting point on the internet. Google monetizes its search results by displaying targeted text-ads related to the query searched for.

Users choose to use Google because its organic, unpaid results, are usually relevant to the query – and because it works & loads results quickly. Relevance and speed, then, are the single largest foundation of Google's success. Therefore, Google literally wants to send you traffic – but your site needs to be relevant to the user's query.

 
How does it decide which sites are relevant to a query?

Ah, yes... the million-dollar question (perhaps more aptly re-worded as saying, “So how can I make Google rank my site for a certain query?”). Well, as they say – a picture is worth a thousand words.

So before I explain how Google ranks sites, let me show you an example. Please take a quick moment and open a NEW browser window. Head to Google.com, and then search for the following keyphrase:  "click here"

What comes up as the # 1 position is Adobe.com's page where you can download Adobe Reader.  Now – why is Adobe Reader considered by Google to be relevant to the search term “click here”? Why not rank a site that has to do with “clicking”, or perhaps a site with a domain name such as “clickhere.com”?

Because Google uses a natural, link-based voting system to determine how to rank any given site within its index. So in other words, though there are many factors involved in how a site ranks, Adobe Reader's download page has the most links pointing to it from across the Internet (on thousands of different sites) whose links with that URL are worded with the phrase: "click here".

For example, if you wanted to rank as the #1 spot for the search term “Pretoria Temp Agency”, then you would want to get as many other sites as possible to link to your own website, with the link-text (the words that are linked, usually in the format of blue-underline) says Pretoria Temp Agency.

The amount of links required to influence Google's rankings as such ranges from 1 to 100,000 or more. (It depends on how many sites are aiming to be at the top for the same keyword, in other words, how competitive your industry is).

But it has as much to do with quality as it does volume. Obtaining one such link from a site that Google weighs highly – such as an official Newspaper website – will have much more overall value than a link from a free classified ads website.

This, in a small nutshell, is how Google “works”.  There are other factors, but this is definitely the most influential part of the formula.

So What's the Strategy Then – Build As Many Links as Possible?

Yes and no.

Remember how I'd said that Google's survival depends on it's ability to provide actual, relevant results for its users? This means that as a company, part of their own strategy is to continually improve their search algorithm so as to defeat the efforts of webmasters and website owners who are exploiting the way Google works in order to obtain free traffic.

Google doesn't mind sending free traffic at all – but what they definitely do care about is making sure that users trust their service. If non-relevant sites are capable of ranking for a given term just because they built numerous links – then that's a problem.

In fact – Google's algorithm is currently much harder to manipulate than it once was. Google actively looks for UN-NATURAL linking patterns which would indicate paid links, mass-submissions, link-trading and other schemes designed solely to manipulate their engine.

For example, if you built 10,000 links to your site this month, I can absolutely guarantee you with complete certainty that not only would your site NOT be listed in Google for months to come (they delay rankings for new sites that obtain unnatural-seeming links). And perhaps even more than that, it would be tagged as “spam” and simply blacklisted.

Natural links, then – are the ONLY way to go. Meaning, building links the hard way (contacting sites individually and asking for a link, submitting press releases, advertising and creating exposure, and then letting the natural “word of mouth” across the web equate to a natural linking pattern, etc.)

So, as you can see – normally, this would be a major headache. Google only wants to rank sites that get “link votes” naturally, and from trusted websites.

But here's the good news... The System Can Still Be Exploited
And this is where I come in. Very simply, I have through trial and error discovered exactly what works.  How to build quality links from other websites over a period of time that will show up as a natural growth in your website’s incoming link pattern, generating one-way links that Google will soak up like a sponge – because they're natural.

Google sees these links as being natural and relevant, which means that you can effectively rank your site for several, reasonable keyword targets. It also means that you  can rank different pages of your site for their target keywords.

But it doesn't stop there – in fact what you'll find is that the majority of your traffic from Google is going to come from a whole range of similar variations of these keywords, based on your site's own text content.

But it all starts with building natural links.

>> Where To Get Links From  >>