The Importance of Inbound Links

One of the most important factors in generating a high search engine ranking, is how many inbound links your site has. What the heck is an inbound link? An inbound link, is a link from any other site on the internet, pointing to your site. When your buddy links to your page from his or hers, that is an inbound link. Seems simple, right?

Here’s why inbound links are so important. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Ask go out and “spider” the internet. That means that their automated programs surf the internet and collect data about the sites they find. The most common way these spiders find sites, is through inbound links, so without some inbound links from already-indexed sites, your site has a very low chance of being found in the first place. Unless you manually submit a new website to a search engine, if your site has no inbound links, there is a possibility that it could NEVER be indexed. Imagine putting in all the work to build a great site, then NEVER having it show up in Google, Yahoo!, or any other search engine. The good news is, just about every website (with it’s own domain name) has at least one inbound link – from the domain registrar. As soon as you register your domain name with Go Daddy or any other registrar, your registrar publicly lists the registration information for your site. That means, that EVENTUALLY, some search engine spider will find that page and then make it’s way to your website.

While it is a pretty sure bet that your site will eventually be found by the search engines, that is only the first step. Once your site is indexed, you need to make sure that it can be found in the results for relevant searches. The most important factor in “being found” on the search engines, is your page’s rank on those search engines. Google calls their page ranking system “PageRank”, and it is the gold-standard, by which all ranking systems are measured. I encourage you to read the following pages on Google’s own site, describing how they rank pages. Google Corporate Information – Technology Overview is a broad overview of their PageRank technology, and Google Webmaster Guidelines – Webmaster Help Center is a very clear and detailed set of guideline for webmaster, to help in creating a “Google Friendly” website. Take the time to read both pages, and you will have a much better understanding of what it takes to have a highly ranked page on Google, and as a result, a highly ranked page on all the other search engines. Rest assured, if your page is Google friendly, then it is also Yahoo! friendly, and MSN friendly, and AOL friendly, and Ask friendly.

More Inbound Links = Higher PageRank

Once the search engines have found your site, and begin the process of indexing it, they have to establish a value for your site and information, relative to all the other sites like yours, on the internet. One of the ways they establish that value, is by counting how many times other sites link back to yours. Think of inbound links as “endorsements” from other website owners and content creators, and you can see why this method is effective. In a sense, any time a web designer, or content creator links back to your site, they are recommending your content to their readers, and that sends a very important message to the search engines. It says, “this site has something important to say”. So the logic follows, sites with many inbound links, must have a lot of very important content, otherwise they wouldn’t have so many “endorsements” by other site owners.

In addition to the number of inbound links, the type and quality of those links is very important in establishing your site’s rank on the search engines. Inbound links from very highly ranked sites, are much more valuable than links from sites with very low PageRank scores. This is because the search engines reason that “good” (highly ranked) sites wouldn’t recommend “bad” sites (sites with poor quality content), and “very good” (very highly ranked sites) sites would probably recommend other “very good” content.

The PageRank of the site posting the inbound link is probably the most important measure of the quality of that inbound link, but it isn’t the only thing that matters. Inbound links should be relevant. That means that the keywords and tags in the link should reflect the content of your site, and the link should come from a site or post that has information that is similar to yours. This helps to ensure that your site is properly categorized in the search engines, so people find you when they search for content like yours.

It is important that you don’t compromise when establishing inbound links. Never seek out links from sites that offer “bad” content. You will be judged by the company you keep. If Google finds a links to your site, from sites that it deems as bad or harmful, your PageRank will be negatively effected. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines – Webmaster Help Center for more information on this topic.

Inbound Links Mean Inbound Traffic

This is a point that can’t be overlooked. Maybe more important than building your PageRank score through inbound links, is DRIVING TRAFFIC to your site.

Here’s the scenario. A dog lover reads an interesting blog post on grooming, on his favorite doggy-related blog. At the end of the post, he sees a well thought out comment, that adds value to the original post, by an obviously intelligent dog groomer. The comment contains a link to that obviously intelligent dog groomer’s website. The dog lover clicks the link to see if the obviously intelligent dog groomer has anything else to say on the subject, and finds a wealth of great information on the obviously intelligent dog groomer’s own blog. The dog lover is now a devoted reader of the obviously intelligent dog groomer’s blog. He subscribes to the mailing list, and buys all his doggy products from the obviously intelligent dog groomer. Ka-ching!

Benchmark Your Website

Before you start optimizing your site, it is a good idea to know where you currently stand on the search engines. Start by searching for your domain name (www.your-domain-name.com) in Google. If your site doesn’t show up, when you search for your domain name, you have a lot of work to do – You are basically invisible – not necessarily un-indexed, but VERY hard to find. If your site does show up, search for a few relevant terms or topics that should definitely show up in your site. Try your name in quotes (“your name”), the name of your company in quotes (“your company name”), or the title of your site in quotes. At this point, if your site is showing up on the first page of the search results, you might be feeling pretty good. Don’t get over-confident. Next, you should try checking your PageRank – www.PRchecker.info offers a free PageRank checker. Chances are, your page rank is much lower than you thought. Compare it with other sites that you visit, and see how you stand.

A Simple Method For Generating TONS Of Relevant Inbound Links

While there are many methods for generating inbound links, from simply asking for them, to establishing multiple sites and cross linking between them, to link exchanges, I am only going to focus on one method in this post. I am going to share my single, favorite method for generating high-quality, relevant inbound links. This method allows you to generate literally THOUSANDS of inbound links in a relatively short amount of time, and lets you control the quality of every one!

My Guaranteed, Slam-Dunk System For Amassing Thousands Of Inbound Links

My Favorite method for generating inbound links, hands-down, is commenting on blogs (weblogs), and I have a really simple system, that guarantees that the links you generate will be relevant, and high-quality.

Most blog authors allow feedback on their blogs. They gather this feedback by allowing readers to comment on specific posts. This benefits them, because it allows them to gauge the effect of posts, and improve their content over time. It also means more content on their site, that they don’t have to write. On a busy blog, it is not uncommon for comments to account for 10% or more of the total content. That is a lot of free creativity, and means a higher PageRank, without the work of content creation. Most blog comments will display the name of the person posting the comment, and normally the name is formatted as a link to that person’s website.

Blog comments are an excellent source of inbound links for many reasons.

First, search engines love blogs. Good blogs tend to have lots of original content and search engines value original content very highly. Blogs tend to be text driven, which means that they are easily indexed by the search engines, and blogs tend to have lots of links to other content, which helps the search engines find other related content.

Second, you can control what types of links you get, when you are creating the links yourself. If you only ever post links on sites that are related to yours, you are guaranteed to have EXTREMELY relevant inbound links. To put it another way, if you have a “health and wellness” website, and you only ever comment on blog posts on other “health and wellness” sites, you can be sure that when people search for “health and wellness” content, on a search engine, your site will come up. You can also be assured that your site won’t show up when people search for “aquarium maintenance”.

Third, you control how quickly the links are created. If you follow my system, it is totally possible to create 1000 high-quality inbound links, in just 3 months. In a year, you can easily have 3000, and you can sustain that growth as long as you want!

I have a few rules, that I always follow, when I post comments.

Rule #1 (Most Important!!!) - Stick to a schedule.

If you post just 12 comments a day, in just 3 months you will have approximately 1000 inbound links. Here are the numbers. 12 comments per day X 30 days per month = 360 comments in a month. 360 comments per month X 3 Months = 1080 inbound links in just 3 months. Lets take that a step further. 360 comments per month X 12 months = 4320 high-quality inbound links in a year. Any site with 1000 (or 4000) high-quality, relevant, related inbound links is going to have a VERY high PageRank score.

I can just hear the questions – “How can I find that many sites to comment on?”, “How much time do I have to devote to this?”, “Is there any way to automate the process?”. I will answer these questions here, but I will also, happily answer any others that are asked in the comments section of this post. This will give you the change to put this method into practice, and gain valuable knowledge at the same time.

O.k. Here goes. “How can I find that many sites to comment on?” New blogs are started at an astronomical rate. You could comment on literally hundreds of new blogs every day, and not even scratch the surface. If you don’t believe me, just Google any term you think is relevant to your business, then count the results. Chances are, the vast majority of the results are blogs. Chances are good that there are MILLIONS of results. I give you my word, you will NEVER run out of places to comment.

“How much time do I have to devote to this?” I usually spend about an hour per day commenting on blog posts. Some days, I spend significantly less time than that. I almost never spend more time than that, and because I don’t like to work on weekends, I try to do more than 12 per day, to keep my monthly average around 360. At first, you may find that it takes you an hour to do 3 or 4 comments, but I promise, you will get faster. In “My Quick and Efficient System for Screening and Commenting on Blogs”, I share my personal method for quickly finding relevant content, and posting comments on numerous blogs, very quickly. I encourage you to read “My Quick and Efficient System for Screening and Commenting on Blogs” as soon as you are done with this post.

“Is there a way to automate this process?” Yes, but it’s called comment spam. There are robots (automated web programs) that seek out blogs, and post hundreds of comments per day. These programs are used almost exclusively by spammers selling viagra, or pushing pornography. These comments are quickly eliminated by comment spam programs, and the ones that aren’t, are a HUGE nuisance to blog owners. Before I had Akismet installed, I would have to moderate literally hundreds of these spam comments per month. I was eventually forced to turn off the comments on my site. Take the time to read my expert tip post, “Plugin and Supercharge Your Blog”, to find out how I deal with comment spam now. Don’t be tempted to try to automate your comments. Once you learn the system, there is really no need. The time you will spend writing creative comments will be well worth it.

Rule #2 – Only comment on blogs that you would recommend and you want to be associated with.

Here are my guidelines for judging a blog as worthy of my comments. I will let you determine your own. Blogs that I comment on must be well-written (no excessive slang or profanity, reasonably intelligent, no broken english). I don’t comment on adult or off-color blogs. I do not wish to be associated with violence, pornography, drugs, criminal activity, or other off-color content, so I never comment on blogs containing that type of content. I (usually) don’t comment on political or religious blogs. While I have very deep convictions about religion and politics, these things very little to do with my business, and I don’t want to offend a potential reader, by associating myself with the “wrong” political or religious content. Finally, I don’t comment on “re-blogs”. I only comment on original posts, written by an author who has put some thought and work into the content.

Rule #3 – Try to be an “A” Student

I have a system for ranking the value of my blog posts. I use a lettered grading system from A-F, just like in high-school. If you don’t like the idea of letter grades, numbers work just as well. The point of the system, though, is that I NEVER do “D” level work. While I try to do as much “A” level work as I can, sometimes it’s just not possible, and “B” and “C” level work is acceptable, as long as I always strive for the best.

I will explain my grading system, and things will get much clearer.

“C” level comments - The lowest level of blog comment I will post, is a “C” level comment. A “C” level comment meets the following criteria. First, it meets the requirement for “Rule #2″ it is placed on a blog that I don’t mind being associated with. Although I receive an inbound link from the comment, the post isn’t specifically related to my blog’s content. Therefore, it doesn’t really contribute to relevancy in search engine results. The body of a “C” level comment contains no links to specific content on my site, and finally, it really doesn’t add any value to the original post. An example of this type of comment would be, “Great post, I had never really looked at dog grooming that way before. The world needs more great groomers like you. Thanks for your hard work”. While the comment doesn’t really add value, it is still a nice recognition of the authors work and contribution, and is totally acceptable. The only real value gained from a “C” level comment, is the inbound link.

“B” level comments - “B” level comments add value. If you read a great post, and can offer some additional input, you have the makings of a “B” level comment. a good example of a “B” level comment would be, “Great post on Wordpress Plugins. While you didn’t mention it in your post, I have found Akismet to be a very good plugin as well. It is a very powerful comment spam filter, and since I installed it, I have gotten no comment spam at all”. This comment adds value to the original post, and while it may not be directly related to your specific content, there is a decent chance that comments like this will drive traffic to your site.

“A” level comments - “A” level comments are what I strive for whenever I post blog comments. Not only does an “A” level comment add value to the original post, it also is directly related to specific content on your site. An “A” level comment should cast you as an expert in your field, and should add some new perspective to the original post. It doesn’t necessarily have to be long, but your comment should definitely be well thought out, and clearly written. Additionally, an “A” level comment should link directly to specifically related content on your site. Here is an example. I will expand on the “B” level comment above, so you can see the difference. “Thank you for the great post on WordPress Plugins. While you didn’t mention it in your post, I have found Akismet to be a very good plugin as well. It is a very powerful comment spam filter, and since I installed it, I have gotten no comment spam at all. It was easy to install and configure, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do. I have written a full review of Akismet here.” Notice the link to specific content at the end of the comment. This type of comment accomplishes all of the things I have talked about in this post. It contributes a high-quality, relevant inbound link, which the search engines love, and it is very likely to drive traffic to your site.

Rule #4 – Only one RELEVANT link per comment

Only some blogs allow you to place links within the body of a comment. Many specifically forbid the use of any HTML within the comment. When you can place a link in the body of a comment, it is important to make it relevant. I ALWAYS delete comments with irrelevant links, as I see this as a cheap tactic to generate low-quality traffic. Placing more than one link within the body of a comment is a sure way to get flagged by spam filters. As a rule, I never place more than one RELEVANT link within a comment, and if there is not a good reason for me to add one, I don’t. I would rather have my comment posted, with just my name formatted as a link to my site, than try to overdo it, and be marked as a spammer.

Rule #5 – Start now!

Procrastination never benefited anyone. Put these rules into effect now, and see the results for yourself. Take five minutes to comment on this post, or another post on this site. Ask a question. I will answer, or add some value. Show me what you have learned!

If you follow these simple rules, you will quickly gather LOADS of high-quality inbound links, and your search engine ranking, and inbound traffic will EXPLODE.

Good Luck,
Garritt

Sometimes we get so caught-up in the complicated aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and business in general, that we forget to do the simple things, and many times they can be really powerful.

I have dedicated much time and effort on this site, and on my personal blog, to explaining SEO, and giving easy-to-implement tips. These tips have helped many of my readers attain amazing Google rankings, very quickly. As an example of their power, When I launched this blog, neither “Renegade Marketing Strategies” or “Yvette Hampton” were ranked terms on Google (At least not YvetteHampton.com, there is some swimmer or runner who shows up). Within two weeks of launching this site, searching “Yvette Hampton”, or “Renegade Marketing Strategies” yielded this site, as the first, unpaid result on Google. That is an amazing feat! While Google search rankings change almost daily, You will still find us at the top of the Google results (within the first page), although we move around a little bit every day.

Those are just the simplest search terms, but all of my sites perform equally well for more obscure search terms as well.

The Tip

You can spend all the time in the world on SEO, and forget to do the simple things, like SUBMIT YOUR OWN SITE to the search engines.

If you have a blog, you can submit your site to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping. This is Google’s Blog Search engine. Once you have submitted your site, you can search for it at http://blogsearch.google.com.

You can submit your site to Yahoo! at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

You can submit your site to Altavista at http://www.altavista.com/addurl/default.

You can submit your site to Microsoft’s Live.com at http://webmaster.live.com/.

You can submit your site to MSN at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

To add your site to Ask.com, you have to have a valid sitemap. Search this site for the term “Sitemap”, or Google the term “Sitemap” for instructions on creating a sitemap. Detailed instructions are outside the scope of this post, but once you have your sitemap created, you can “Ping” Ask.com with the address, and Ask will begin to spider your site. You can get instructions from Ask.com at http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22, or you can do it yourself by changing the following address to include your site, then entering it in your address bar and pressing enter.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

In this subscribers-only “Expert Tips” post, I will give an overview of the plugins I am currently using in my own blogs, explain how they work, and tell you how to install them on your own blog to give it power and flexibility you won’t believe. Keep in mind that although this post is specific to wordpress, most blogging software offers the use of some plugins, and while you may be using another blogging tool, you can take the suggestions in this post, and use them as a jumping-off point to search for similar plugins for your blog. Also, don’t feel constrained to using the plugins I have suggested. There are usually some great competing plugins for each of the ones I am using. For example, visit the plugin page at wordpress.org, wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and search for plugins to allow you to add a Digg link to your posts. Just enter “Digg” in the search box. You will be amazed at how many plugins allow you to do this one thing. The same is true for almost all of my plugins.

While all of these plugins are available for free download at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, wherever possible, in this post, I will link to the homepage for the plugin or designer. To install them, download them from either the Wordpress.org plugins page, or the designer’s page, then unzip them and copy them into your wp-content/plugins file using an FTP program, or your webhost’s control panel, file management software. Once you have placed the plugin in your wp-content/plugins folder, log in to your Wordpress dashboard, and click the plugins button at the top right of the page. From there, follow the instructions on the page to activate and set up the plugin.

Akismet

Akismet is, without a doubt, my favorite Wordpress plugin. like most great tools, It does one thing and does it very well. Akismet is a comment spam filter.

If you have ever had to deal with comment spam, you know that it can quickly eat up your time, frustrate you, and cause you to lose faith in humanity. Before I found Akismet, I used to have to moderate approximately 200 spam comments a week. After a few times, spending 10 minutes deleting spam comments, and finding that I couldn’t even weed the spam comments out of my blog, without losing the good ones as well, I turned off the comments on my blog. I hated to lose the power of allowing comments on my blog, but I couldn’t stand the trouble that they brought.

Akismet has fixed this problem, for good. Now, I allow comments on all of my blogs, and never have to deal with comment spam. Akismet is such a great plugin, it is now included with every installation of Wordpress. I encourage you to activate it immediately when you install wordress.

Google XML Sitemaps

One of the most powerful SEO tools I have found, is Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps are XML or HTML documents that tell search engines what, and how many pages are on a website. They also tell search engines when these pages were created, and how often they are edited, and how to find them. The idea behind Sitemaps is, “why wait for search engine spiders to find pages on your site, when you can just tell them where they are”. I have found Sitemaps to be a very quick way to get ranked on Google, and like I have said before, If you can get found on Google, you can get found anywhere.

You can visit Google’s Sitemaps page here. While you are there, take a look at the rest of Google’s Webmaster tools. They are very powerful.

With small sites, it is possible to build XML and HTML sitemaps by hand. But if you have more than a few pages, or if you update your site often, it gets VERY time consuming to keep your sitemap up to date. If you regularly post to your blog, say weekly, it is nearly impossible!

This is where Google XML Sitemaps comes in. This plugin will automatically update your XML sitemap every time you update your site, then it will automatically notify Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com about the changes. Very Handy!

I Love Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites allow users to submit links to sites, pages, videos, blog posts, or other content that they like, and then, allow other users to vote on the the submitted links. Links with more votes move further up the list. While this is a somewhat obscure concept, it is simple to understand the effect of these sites. Digg is the most popular social bookmarking site, right now. If you have a blog post that gets voted to the top of Digg, you will get literally thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of hits to your site. It is not uncommon for sites to be knocked offline, due to high traffic, when they hit the front page of Digg.

In order to benefit from the HUGE amount of traffic that these sites provide, you have to actually get people to link to you (Digg you). If you have a really great site or post, they might do this manually, but it is much easier to get people to Digg you, if give them an easy way to do it, then encourage them. This is what the
“I Love Social Bookmarking” plugin does. It places a link at the bottom of every blog post that allows people to Digg that post, or submit it to any of several other social bookmarking sites, in a few easy steps. To see it in action, Purple heart and “Social Bookmarking (Digg This)” link at the bottom of this post, then DIGG THIS POST. I’d do it for you!

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images automatically sets the proper ALT and TITLE attributes for images you put on your blog, and if you haven’t added these tags, it adds them according to criteria you set. SEO Friendly Images also validates the xHTML in the post, to W3C standards. That’s a lot of technical gibberish to say that this plugin cleans up your posts and tags images, so they are easily indexed by search engines.

Tell-a-Friend

Tell-a-Friend adds a button to the end of every blog post, that allows readers to email the post to a friend, or group of friends. To see this plugin in action, click the “SHARE THIS POST” button at the bottom of this post. In marketing, “calls to action” are very important. While you might expect that your readers, clients, or customers should know exactly what you want them to do, you can be reasonably assured that you will have a much better response, if you just ask them to do something specific. That’s what this plugin does. It asks your readers to spread the word about your great content.

Ultimate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very powerful website statistics service provided by Google. The Ultimate Google Analytics plugin adds JavaScript to each post, page, and link on your blog, that allows Google Analytics to generate statistics on what your visitors are doing while they are on your site. Additionally, Google Analytics can tell you how visitors arrived at your site (did they enter a search term in a search engine, or click on an inbound link on another site), and how they left your site (did they click on an outbound link, or did they close the window or browser).

I have found Google Analytics to be an irreplaceable tool, in that it allows me to very effectively, guage the effectiveness of certain aspects of my sites. It allows me to work to increase the “stickiness” of my site, by adding more of the features that my readers like, and it allows me to track the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns, because I can see which landing pages people are entering through, then what they are doing once they are on my site.

For anyone who is serious about conducting business on the web, I highly recommend a good statistics program, and Google Analytics is by far the best that I have used.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does just what it’s name implies. It automatically upgrades your wordpress installation to the newest version. This is a great time saver for me, because I have multiple Wordpress blogs that I manage, and manually upgrading all of them would be a real hassle.

yaCAPTCHA

yaCAPTCHA adds a CAPTCHA field to the end of forms. CAPTCHA is the technology that creates distorted text images, to ensure that the person filling out a form is an actual person. In concert with Akismet, yaCAPTCHA insures that the only comments I get on my blog, are from real people. I also use CAPTCHA technology on my subscription form. To see this plugin in action, comment on any post on this blog.