Links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings, but
you must be very careful about to whom you link. I'm going to
help you develop a simple link strategy for your website that
will help you decide which sites to link to so you're making
your way up the search engine rankings and not accidentally
hurling yourself backwards.

So the natural questions are:

Should I link to everyone I can find?

Should I allow everyone to link to me?

Should I get one of those "link to 2,000 site for $10" things?

The answer to all of the above is NO!

Develop A Link Strategy

We're going to do an easy-to-digest version of what a search
engine optimizer would do if you were to hire one. There are
many reasons for having your site professionally optimized
which would take up articles in themselves. This is one of the
attack strategies for determining optimum, quality links for
your site.

Step 1 Where are your competitors linked?

Don't arbitrarily find random sites that you like and link to
them. A little bit of research goes a long way. Start with your
competitors. Type the keywords for your site into a search
engine. You have them, right? This is the list of key word
phrases that you want to score the number one position when
someone types them in a search. Who appears in the top 10
positions? They're your direct competition that is doing
something right or they wouldn't be coming up first. So let's
look underneath and see how they got it to work and save you a
year of work!

Go back to your search engine and type
"link:http://www.competitorsite.com". Up will pop a long list
of sites that have a direct link to your competitor. Do this
for your top 10 competitors. Do you see any trends in those
results? Do you see any similar sites, or perhaps directory
listings? Take some notes. A spreadsheet or a few sheets of
loose-leaf paper is helpful and analyze what you've uncovered.
You should have a good solid list of links that are helping
your competitors rank high!

Step 2 Search for similar themed sites.

Look at your keyword list again. Do these words appear more so
on any of the pages you have listed so far? Narrow down your
list to sites that have at least the same theme or related
content to yours. Even your competition will have quite a few
odd links.

If there are 300 links to a site that sells pumpkins, it's
natural to have a car dealer or an airline in there too.
Chances are they were so pleased with their pumpkin purchase
that they added the site to their own web page. You can
disregard these right away.

Take your list and look at the potential link site for
similarities to your topic. If in the pumpkin market your
competition links to a site that tells all about how to cook
pumpkin seeds, see if you can find other sites that tell how to
make pumpkin pie, make jack-o-lanterns AND cook pumpkin seeds.
Make a list of these sites as potentially better ones.

Step 3 Look at the Google Page Rank

You can find a page's page rank by looking at your Google tool
bar if you have it installed or by going to a site like
http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php. The actual importance of
Google Page Rank to Google searches in particular seems to
depend on whom you talk with. It shouldn't be the make or
break, but it can help to choose between several similar sites
if your unsure of which one to go with.

Page Rank is more of a relative scale of the number and quality
of links to a site. The higher the rank, the higher the number.
The lower, the worse. It's not unheard of for a link from a
site with a Page Rank of 6 or 7 to boost up a low score by a
couple numbers. This seems to, at least in Google's case, get a
site indexed much faster. And the faster you're indexed, the
faster you can start climbing.

Step 4 How many sites link to your selections so far and how
good are they?

The more links a site has pointing to it, the more important it
appears to be to the search engines. Say your looking at company
ABC to put a link on their site to you. Let's first see how many
sites link to company ABC. (Just as you looked at your
competition). We know search engines place more weight on sites
linked to you that have similar content. Now the big search
databases seem to know what kind of content is on those linking
pages.

Using the pumpkin model, if your potential target is teaming
with 100 inbound links from gambling, girls, horses, moons,
leprechauns and horoscopes then throw it in the trash pile
fast, even if it has a Page Rank of 8 (very rare).

Find that site that has 10 links good, quality links to it.
From a pumpkin farmer, a vegetable recipe blog, Halloween and
Thanksgiving festivities, how the first settlers used the
pumpkin to build houses, etc and has a Page Rank of 5. This is
the better choice. Quality, related themes and content to your
site and keywords outweighs quantity of random, useless links.

Step 5 Your final list

Don't think you can do this in an hour, or a day! It's quite a
bit of work just to find good, potential targets. Here's a
bonus? when you have your finished your first wave a link
possibilities, here's great way to give it a solid foundation.

Find some relevant directories to list with. Directories of a
given theme will have many, many similar links pointing to it.
Directories are usually considered to have Authority. (It's not
uncommon to have to pay a fee for the good ones anyway.) Try to
find a directory of pumpkin farms and pumpkin recipes to build
your other links upon.

Another bonus. Avoid this mistake at all costs! Do NOT link to
Link Farms or Free for all sites or any sites that will give
you 1000 links for $10. These are not directories, but
collections of completely unrelated links that exist solely to
try to boost search engines rankings. Search engines ban many
of these sites. The consequences of being listed with a banned
site could ban you, and then you're doomed. The only way to
succeed is to build your links honestly and strategically with
a plan and method.

Note: Search engines give more weight to one-way links rather
than reciprocal links. i.e. links that link to your site
without asking for one in return. The easiest way to get these
is to buy them. This plan will work on all the different kinds
of links you can get.

So now you have some potential sites to link to. In the next
article learn how to phrase your link for maximum
effectiveness. The sites to link with is only the first half?
the quality of the words you use that make up the link's
content called anchor text are just as crucial! Hint: using the
same link in every web site is a very bad idea. See you soon!


About The Author:

John Krycek is the owner and creative
director of http://www.themouseworks.ca. Read additional
articles on identity, web and graphic design and logo creation
in easy, non-technical, up front English!