Building Quality Links That Count!

Building Quality Links That Count


Ok - well - yada yada yada , we all know that building inbound links to our website is currently the most important part of our marketing efforts, but do we all know about where those links should come from?

Lets go over it a bit and make sure we know...

First of all, every inbound link to your site isn't going to be the best link... People that link to you will generally title that link whatever they want, so don't go crazy trying to contact them to get it changed - just build new ones whenever you can.

You don't want every link to your website to have the same exact title anyway... Keep it mixed up a bit so your site doesn't get flagged as using search engine optimization...

Make sure you build links to your site from websites that have something to do with your website (theamed links)....

Like for example.....
If your building links to a website about sneakers.... You want to gain inbound links from other sites about sneakers as well as sites about clothing, outerwear, shoes, footwear, even some from sportswear or any apparel site.... It doesn't have to be just from sneaker websites.... Anything in the catagory of shoewear will help out dramatically...

Acquire any link possible from sites of authority.... .gov, official organizations with .org, local news sites, or any county state local government links are very very valuable, so get them if you possibly can....

Remember - 10 GOOD links is better than 200 crappy ones....

I link 95% to just related sites because I believe it should matter not that I've seen that it does matter. Does anyone have any real evidence that related links are more valuable than non-related?

I've stuck exclusively to what I consider themed backlinks and directories, which place us in the appropriate themed section. When I look at the various google backlink information (that is more telling) like @www.url.com the relevancy is pretty different than what I would imagine.


Can anyone comment on how to determine relevancy to your theme. It seems to me, (just looking at one site) that relevancy is closest when the site url, or title match the keyword phrases. After that its anyone's guess.

Dave

A good way to see what G feels is related (apart from close examination of the related: query) is to experiment with labs.google.com/sets . Try it.

Thanks Wit:


I've never used the query command so I'll try it and go to labs.

Dave

Hope you meant the related: command, otherwise I'll have to start "watching my language" . Cheers.

The related command s*cks. There was a thread a while back. Everyone seems to have 31 sites in the related command. In my case the sites have 0 to do with our subject matter. Some of the related sites are rediculous. Some are connected to sites that link to us, one of them is a site controlled by a webmaster that links to us, some have absolutely nothing in common except both sites use the english language.

That's peculiar. However, I've found that in my case the related: search is based on backlinks (and maybe outbound links), and doesn't just take your site's theme and give Google's interpretation of that. It's rather that G takes your BLs and OBLs and compiles a list of sites relating to that! So IMHO if your related: s*ucks, maybe your BLs are too diverse for G to get a grip... FYI - I have a lot of stats checkers in my related:, couple of DMOZ posts, the rest is ok (all within topic and region). I guess a dmoz/G-dir listing helps focus your results in this case...

Finding themed links isn't too hard - just look for sites that rank in the top 200 for the search queries you want to rank well for.

Other than that, I like using Google's 'Flavors' to figure out if a site 'fits' into my category - the site-flavored search is also in Google Labs.

Common sense and the DMOZ are good indicators too - if your site is about selling programming services, anything in the software field is related. If your site is about New Jersey restaurants, anything dealing with New Jersey or with Food is related - go for narrow relationships first (i.e. sites that are ranking for terms you want to rank for), then move on to broader relationships.

Right now, I ONLY have themed links - There's only 2-4 out of 700 sites that link to me that aren't closely related to what the site is about. Is it helping? Only time will tell...

I've been doing all that is mentioned. I just don't see google responding well. On top of that when I do a search on google backlinks that is more comprehensive than the link command, I see some surprising results as to sites that appear toward the top.

I'm just skeptical. In my limited experience google's relevancy is tied to specific words in the url or title. Relevancy beyond that just doesn't seem to be that tight.

Dave

I found a disturbing trend in my links. I manually go through my links and as I was checking them I found out the sites I had been linked to the longest had gone from a good link to a bad link. I think people build sites and are all fired up about them at first maintain them but as time goes on they begin to ignore important parts of it and they lose page rank links etc. I was amazed at the percentage that had really become a link not worth linking to. I was and still am pretty careful whom I link to so I know they were at one time a quality link. I am writing this to suggest maybe it might be a good idea to see how the sites you are linked to are performing. Some of the sites had resorted to black hat tricks so I would suggest check your links from time to time to make sure they remain a quality link.
God Bless Joe

I like to use the adword tester to see what Google thinks my page is about.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/1496.htm

- Mike T.

Yes - If your using adsense - what ever type of ads it runs on your sites - are relevent...

Earl - I agree. GG doesn't seem to notice much.

I do think that it's good prep for the future, though, and we SEOs have got to stay ahead of the game. Those links may not count for as much today - but six months from now...

To be clear, I focus exclusively on themed backlinks and placeing my site in the right categories of directories. I'll trade links with any "themed" backlink and search them out continuously. I have no non relevant links (except for one as a return of a favor!!)


BTW my site is currently #1 for allinurl, text, and anchor, for my main keywords, and we are ranked 5 or 6 today with ggl. All the sites above us have dramatically more backlinks. Some of them have some considerable sitewides that add to their totals. In reviewing backlinks I think we have as many or more "themed" backlinks as our competitors. Since we are basically a regional business we focus more on local convertable traffic than straight backlinks. On the other hand higher ranking brings in more traffic that converts and makes our regional search phrases (which is where we get search conversions) very strong.


Having said that when I check for relevancy off of lists of ggle backlinks I am amazed at some of the sites that rank high and some that don't. My idea of relevancy and googles are very different. The main determinant for relevancy from google seems to be if keywords are found in the url or title. After that there is seemingly little relevancy.
I'm no expert and I don't have lots of sites to test so this is one persons humble opinion.