SEO Tips - Link setting

SEO Tips - Better Link Setting

Setting links to your site is one of the most important tasks you undertake in bringing your site up to the top of the search engine rankings.   Encouraging other sites to provide a link your blog or website is an exercise in relationship building requiring many hours of hard work – preferably some each day.  Otherwise, you can run into serious burn-out in trying to grow your site all at once. 

Links are more valued if they come from highly ranked and high traffic sites in your genre.   In other words, “Consultants” links would be more highly valued on business consulting sites than on social ones.  So just finding relevant websites or blogs upon which to comment are difficult enough.  There is no easy or quick solution to this process; one must just keep fishing around using the search engines, reference links, links to other sites, etc.  In short, it takes a great deal of reading and looking for link building opportunities.

Once you've identified a good place to place a comment or link, the issue of what to say always arises.  Remember that the same rules that apply to presenting information on your site or blog also applies to leaving back links and comments on other sites.  Key elements are then:

• Relevancy
• Value
• Keyword-containing (comments or observations should at least contain your keywords)

Relevancy:
Creativity helps in finding relevant sites.  The general rule though is to identify a website that is relevant to the subject matter on your blog or page.  This task is made more difficult because many niche or micro niche areas are simply too small to have many immediately relevant sites.  Therefore, develop a Fallback Plan.

A Fallback Plan is simply an expansion of your original subject matter to areas that may be tangential or partially related to it.  For instance, a consultant specializing in road engineering or bridge construction will soon run out of places to post links and comments.  He would then need more places to get his message out.  The Fallback Plan then expands the types of blogs or sites that might provide some value for his linking efforts.  

A good standard rule is then to closely examine single keywords within your keyword string to search for separate blogs.  If “consultant” is a keyword, there are many small business consultant blogs that might be able to provide at least some degree of relevancy.   Think carefully and creatively about your keywords and look for opportunities that might be “one-offs” from your original targeted type of site.  Searches for   “contractors” or “consultants”  yield multiple pages that might not be directly related to your type of business, but the might be somewhat relevant to a broader definition of your industry.  Professional associations and newspaper articles relevant to your topic are also useful places to look for opportunities, but these, too can be few and far between.

Value:
This seems like a ‘no-brainer’ but try to avoid the “Thanks for the Post” message.  No one really reads them.  Contribute something meaningful.  After all, folks reading the comments might be attracted to the wisdom of your comment and be inspired to click on the corresponding link.  Your comment is an invitation to to other readers to visit your site, so provide them with a reason to click.

Adding value is frequently difficult.  Your comment may just confirm a point made in the body of the blog post, but of course this requires reading and understanding what the author is trying to convey.  Offering your own perspective on the author’s point – or telling a quick story – is a good way to grab reader attention and convey your own point and value.

Keyword-rich:
This is actually a fairly simple technique.  Each blog comment requires one to provide a screen name.  Just use your keywords or your page title in the screen name.  In our street-paving consultant example, he could use something like “paving consultant” as his screen name and provide the URL to his site.  This would then (hopefully) set the link to include parts of his keywords in both the screen name for the ink as well as in the URL.  This makes Google happier as it will understand the content and value of the link.

Even with these techniques, there is no substitute for hard work and for doing your homework.  Reading, setting links, reading some more and contributing value to the community is not easy nor is it quick.  It can take weeks of this to start generating return traffic, value and business.  There simply is no quick way – no matter what product claims are out there – to jump to the top of Google without hard work.

For more information on Search Engine Optimization, please visit the SEO Consultants Denver home page.