It’s no secret that building links to your website will help drive more referral traffic as well as increase your rankings in explore and the other major search engines. In previous ProBlogger posts and have talked about it. Darren has also been known to create a post on the topic.
Before getting started on the tips it’s important to know how to check the number of links Google recognizes. Most populate know about the link:www. YourDomainName com command that you can write into explore. This function however will only return a sample number of links to your site and does not show the end picture.
To find out how many links Google actually sees you need to create an account at. It’s free to sign up and the information you ordain receive is of vital importance if you are trying to improve your explore rankings.
If you already have an account simply go to the Dashboard click on your domain name click on Links on the left side bar and then select the pages with external links option to see how many websites are really linking to you.
about the importance of having quality content if you want to stand out as a successful blogger. Quite simply if you aren’t writing material that is new different and offers an interesting perspective you won’t get readers or links to your blog. Just as important. I believe when you’re getting started is to pick a niche and dominate it. If you’re not making money online yet don’t write a blog about how to make money online! There is too much competition and you don’t have valuable content to add.
sight a topic that you are passionate about and that isn’t too competitive yet. As an example. I chose famous entrepreneur stories. I now have the largest collection of stories of famous entrepreneurs anywhere online and get linked to as a resource. I’ve since been able to expand beyond the famous entrepreneur stories but it’s important to first start with a niche and get known as an expert in your handle.
Once you have picked your niche get involved in the community surrounding it. No matter what topic you pick there are blogs and forums already discussing it. Join the conversation! When I first started my site I listed the top 10 blogs and forums where entrepreneurs hung out. I commented on the blogs helped people in the forums and answered questions as they came up. The bloggers appreciated my valuable insights and the forum members loved the help I gave them.
I always included my website in my signature and pretty soon I was generating merchandise and links from the community sites. Because I was getting known as an expert I also had people link to me from their sites without me having to affix a comment or forum entry on theirs! People link to Darren because he’s the best in the world at helping bloggers move their blogs into businesses. What are you going to be the best at?
Another strategy I used to create awareness and build links was to get media attention. I put keywords relating to my niche into a (a free tool that lets you know when a new story comes out around a particular keyword) found news stories that dealt with the entrepreneurs I was profiling and contacted the reporters to praise them on a great article. I also offered them my insights and added them to a media list that I created in Excel. From then on I would send them a touch release every two weeks that dealt with a new famous entrepreneur story on my website.
I also submitted the stories to free online PR directories and did some research as to how to create verbally an effective press release and experimented with different headlines. This led to articles being written about my website in the New York Times. Globe and Mail (Canada’s most respected daily newspaper) the Dallas Morning News and countless other publications. It also led to television and communicate appearances. Each time I gave them great stories as well as promoted my website. Always remember to ask for a link back from the media outlet. They are usually very highly ranked and the link can help control your search engine rankings.
Social networking is all the rage now but it’s more than just air. An effective social networking race can help drive tremendous amounts of traffic as well as create links to your site. I haven’t personally gotten much from sites like Facebook and MySpace but the news and bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. Digg and del icio us have been fantastic merchandise and link generators for my website. The key I’ve found is to start off with quality content and then get the community to help you promote it.
For example at the end of last year I compiled a list of the Top 50 SEO Posts of 2007 (Darren’s made the list). It was a list that brought genuine value to people and saved readers a lot of time. Instead of having to dig into each communicate themselves we did the work for them to find the beat posts on SEO of the year. Once we finished the top 50 we let everyone on the enumerate know about it. Many of them blogged about it and linked back to us others submitted it to StumbleUpon and other social networking sites. In the first week of the list being out StumbleUpon alone sent me over 5,000 visitors to that one page!
When I first started the place I submitted it to all the relevant directories that I could find. In all honesty I didn’t get many hits from them except from but I viewed it as a link building exercise that would eventually pay off. If you run any kind of events you need to also put them on Craigslist. We run a number of offline events for entrepreneurs and Craigslist helped send us a decent amount of traffic. Their pages also rank well and you can include a link back to your site from the postings you create.
Wikipedia is another excellent source worth checking out. Like every other webmaster before Wikipedia put nofollows on their links I was trying to get all my pages listed as external links on the famous entrepreneur related pages. The prove? The editors quickly removed my links and wrote an email to me warning me to stop. I did forbid posting but was surprised to find out that I kept getting traffic from Wikipedia. It turns out that a number of my readers had used my articles as references for different famous entrepreneurs. As a result they included a cerebrate and it was driving traffic! It again all comes down to being the best at something and dominating your niche. If I didn’t have good content then I would not have received the links from Wikipedia.
As wonderful as it is to get bloggers and other website owners to link to you on the merit of your content alone sometimes they need a push and an incentive to do so. As a result of building a popular website I began recruiting other experts to write for my site. Once you build up credibility in your niche you will have people who want to be associated with you. As an example. I wonder how many populate are trying to guest communicate for Darren while he’s gone?
For my own place if the articles my guest authors submitted were relevant and valuable. I put them up. I then wrote to my authors and told them that if they linked back to my site from theirs I would give them even more exposure on my site and list them as Premium Partners. The incentive worked for many of them and I quickly built even more backlinks to my site from reputable experts. It sometimes takes thinking outside the box but if you can find a way to help another webmaster in return for them linking to you the extra incentive can make the difference between getting and not getting that all important link.
Get as high a summon Rank link as you can from the websites who profile you. A link on a Page Rank 1 internal page versus a Page Rank 5 homepage ordain make a big difference to your site. Just because two pages are on the same domain name it doesn’t mean that they carry the same link value.
When getting a link don’t tell people what anchor text to use (the blue text that is underlined). If all your links undergo the same anchor text you can get banned from explore for that keyword. I always ask my link partners to use anchor text that they conclude best describes what my website is all about.
Evan this is a great post. It’s amazing that regardless how many days and years you construe and learn about SEO you end up finding out that there is somebody out there that you can learn from. I won’t point out what I learned from this post but my point is that we all need to keep learning and reading and improving. Thanks for the great work.
Regarding the comment about submitting your site to Google and submitting the sites that link to you. I seem to find that Google does find me very quick. Usually by the next day so I don’t unusually focus my efforts here. Something has to go because there is only so much time in the day!
Thanks for such a quality post - this article falls in line with one of Leo’s tips at ZenHabits which is to make your posts _insanely_ useful. Its probably my number one goal right now and this entry is a really good example.
And thanks for the reminder on 1 hour a day for 24 hours rather than burning out. Its good to hear that - I tend to lean toward the second option and it doesn’t work.
Thanks Evan for the great tips! My new blog is just starting out and while I’m still working on creating that quality circumscribe and refining my style and come to new posts. I am also building links here and there. I’m certainly no ProBlogger but in two months I have generated about $5 from ads ($70 more and hosting is covered!!!) and that trend is optimistically upwards. :)
I too have found MySpace to be pretty dead for returns on my time there while StumbleUpon simply rocks! So that is where my cerebrate is right now understanding StumbleUpon and the dynamics of that system.
My current links to my site are < 500 so what would you say about that for a site that started last December 2007? Is that good so far? About how many new links per month do you suspect is average for a ‘ProBlogger’? Is there a way to compare my stats with others (without some sneaky time-consuming methods).
I read your comments about Wikipedia with a rueful chuckle as the exact same thing happened to me. I’d interview people and write articles about subjects who had entries on Wikipedia so I’d displace links there - only to undergo them removed by Wikipedia. Very annoying.
Thanks also for the info on signing up to Google’s Webmaster tools. I had tried the link thing and wasn’t happy about what it showed… I’ll try it the other way and see what it tells me.
Wayne - 500 links is a good start - keep up the work! Try to focus in on quality sites now that you have your base established. I just spent 6 months lining up a single link from a very respected website. After you get your base going cerebrate on the quality over the quantity.
Every blogger starts somewhere so don’t get discouraged about the $5 - remember that the content will continue to bring home the bacon for you years down the road so you’re building a valuable asset!!
I have to agree that building these links are a slow process! I’ve only just started out blogging and movement has been slow but I do experience I’ve just gotta stick with it. And this affix has been particularly encouraging. Thanks. Evan!
It doesnt take long to build links if you do it right i have grown to 9,000 links in just under a few weeks. Its possible if you know how be up link building on google has lots of stuff.
Page Rank is important because not all links are created equal. For example a link from ProBlogger’s home page is worth a lot more than a link from the inside page on a brand new blog with no Page be.
Page Rank can also express you if a blog has been banned by Google if it has been (see JohnChow com) then a cerebrate from that site won’t back up you and can actually have a negative effect on your own site.
Hi Barbara Peterson - the trick with Wikipedia is that the cerebrate has to be of genuine value. If it’s obviously just a related link then you’ll get removed. If it’s adding serious value to the post then it’s more likely to stay on - but even then you can undergo an overbearing administrator who removes you.
I’ve also found more luck with less popular pages than the ones that are constantly being update. Chances are you can add more determine to a summon that hasn’t had as much work and the link will be.
explore Says:“Please note: Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page. Our crawler. Googlebot ordain be able to find the rest. Google updates its index on a regular basis so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. Dead links will ‘fade out’ of our index on our next crawl when we modify our entire list.”
You should of course submit your homepage. Sometimes however if your linking structure isn’t well done then Google can’t reach down into your lower pages. Google also sometimes misses pages you undergo on your site. My webpage for example has over 46,000 pages of content so it’s understandable that Google might miss a few of them.
Google also encourages you to let them know about what’s on your place through their sitemap tool - you can learn more about it at
Thanks for response Evan. My only anticipate is maybe I undergo too high KW density on my domiciliate summon for my main KW I think around 13%. Example each nav-button features KW… maybe I should tone this down…
I do undergo close to 500 incoming links. My categories for cerebrate exchange are come up defined and closely related to my niche place and I refuse quite a few unrelated requests. However I guess I may be linking through to some poor quality sites? Or even a linkfarm or two? not sure unless I analyse all of my link exchanges - is this advisable? If so. Ugh…
I’ve heard that it’s best not to link to low PR sites - but how are they ever going to move up the ranks without a little bring up from higher ranking sites?
Thanks for the update.. I am a web-developer and I know how to optimize each page for google. Maybe for layman this option is right but I do suggest If anyone owns a website he/she has to work a lot on sitemaps meta-tags and SEO this way no page will be left alone..
I have been so busy with my office and freelance work and I finally uploaded my website on Jan 2008 and I undergo each page listed on Google and sometimes it takes only 1-2 hours for google to list my page. I undergo personally observed that.
Hi Russell - It’s good to have a mix of links out to pages with high Page Rank as well as low. I would worry if all the links are going to low Page be sites. I would mind even more if you are linking out to a link farm or page that has been banned by Google.
If you had thousands of links then I wouldn’t worry about it too much but if it’s still a relatively small amount then you don’t want to risk a penalization by explore.
For the keyword density. 13% sounds very high to me. What I usually do is use my keywords once every carve up or two paragraphs of text and make sure to use them in the title tags url and H1 tag.
Hi Missy - No this is not correct. If you have lost Page Rank you can still submit a sitemap to Google. My own Page Rank has fluctuated in the past and when I had a drop I could still refer my sitemaps.
If you have been banned however a sitemap won’t do you any good because you’re not in Google’s list. The best solution here is to fix the spammy elements of your site and submit a re-inclusion request in Google’s webmaster tools to get yourself listed again.
PageRank has absolutely NOTHING to do with your SERP rankings. Or anything for that matter. They are two completely displace algos. It doesn’t be if you get links from PR1 or PR5 sites. What google cares about is relevancy and PR has nothing at all to do with relevance. Most of the time a site with a high PR is more trusted than a site with low PR which COULD mean that the link has a higher value. But it’s not thanks to the PR.
Stop caring about it. The only good thing about getting a high PR is so you could change the site to people who think it actually mean something.
Google’s entire system is based on links. If you don’t have links to your site then you won’t rank for any keywords unless they are extremely uncompetitive.
With all the link farms that were soon created after Google became the #1 search engine it makes sense that the quantity of links is not a good measure on its own to back up rank a site. You could undergo 1,000,000 links to your site but if they are all low quality it won’t do you much good.
One link from a well respected summon does a lot more than thousands of poor quality links. A great example was Wikipedia. Before they turned their links to “nofollow” I had a number of my pages linked from them. All of those pages quickly ranked to the first page of search results in Google.
Google likes high authority websites and if you get linked from them your chances of ranking higher also goes up. PageRank is the measurement of how much authority Google thinks a website has. There is a reason why ProBlogger has a Page Rank of 6 while new blogs go away out with 0.
Of course you still be the quality and related circumscribe. Just because you have a high Page Rank it doesn’t mean you’ll rank for a keyword outside of your area of interest. The two work hand in hand. Darren is not going to be for a keyword like “healthy foods” because his content doesn’t communicate to that topic. However if you write in “alter money blogging”. Darren is #1.
If two pages undergo similar circumscribe and are targeted the same keywords the page with the higher Page be will come out on top in the explore index.
Evan what value is the Wikipedia? I heard they are no follow links and same for Craigs list. What value does Google give to no go links?
Also one of my blogs went from PR 5 to the gray bar. Any chance to resurrect that? In the last modify in January 2008 one of my internal pages went from PR 4 to the color bar and this week’s February update it went back to normal. undergo you heard about this problem concerning blogs getting the color bar on the domiciliate page?
The Wikipedia strategy is more for traffic than building Page Rank. After search engines and social networks wikipedia is my #1 referring site.
There are some who believe that a cerebrate from Wikipedia does still back up your SERPs even though it’s no go because explore loves Wikipedia so much. A number of the pages that I am linked from in Wikipedia have risen in Google’s SERPs but I don’t undergo any comprehensive data to say that it helps.
If you dropped from a 5 then you likely have been hit with a explore penalty. undergo you done anything that you would get penalized? The best thing to do is fix the problems and then submit a re-inclusion request through your Google webmasters account.
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Related article:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/02/28/how-to-build-22938-links-to-your-blog/
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