posted on Wednesday, December 14, 2005 7:15 PM
by
administrator
The Nitty Gritty of Link Requests
How to be successful in driving qualified traffic to your site.
Content
is king. Many
will argue this assertion for hours, some even claiming that content
alone will help determine search engine rankings. The fact is,
however, that content by itself will not drive traffic to a
website. Links drive traffic, and the quality of inbound links
can improve search engine rankings. This article provides
recommendations about how to make a link request, who to ask for a link
and where to place a link.
How to make a link request?
There
is a diverse amount of software available today
to assist with link requests. If you own or manage a
website, you probably have seen the end result of such software, either
in the form of an email or a contact submission form calling
on you
to exchange or simply add a link to your site. This is not the
recommended practice for requesting links. An automated
contact system is far too impersonal and will be more likely to draw
the ire rather than support of a webmaster. In my opinion, the use
of a contact submission form is even worse.
What
website owner wants to sort through
link requests when they open a mailbox full of potential leads?
Many unsuccessful link requests are automated; having been submitted by
a robot designed
to crawl the Internet to find contact forms and submit cookie-cutter
petitions. This kind of software does have one redeeming quality
in that most versions provide the ability to track links and to ensure
that they remain live, which is considered important in the case of a
link exchange.
“think of it as entering into a business relationship
and act accordingly.”
One recommended
method of asking for a link is through
a personal email followed up by a phone call. Take some time to
study the website that you desire your link to reside at and find at
least two reasons that you believe the website is worthy. Use the
first reason in the email and then the second (and any others)
when you initiate a
reply. Generally, the website owner is the best person to ask for
such a link. Webmasters and site maintenance personnel are not
good targets for link requests because they more than likely would
say no, unless instructed by the site owner to accept petitions from
particular types of websites. As well-known linking expert Mike
Grehan says: “Think of it as entering into a business relationship and
act accordingly.”
Where to place a link to your site?
Now
that you know how to ask diplomatically, you may wonder where the best
places are to seek links. First and foremost, the page should be
somehow relevant to the page that you are asking them to link
to. This is vital and
bears clarification: the inbound links you seek should not
only go to your home page but also to site
specific subpages. Let us use an example of a
site selling rugs. If that site has a specific page dedicated
to introducing Nourison Brand rugs, links should be obtained, if
possible, from other Nourison site specific pages. This means
more work, but the results would likely justify the amount of time
that it takes to complete the process. This is quite
often referred to as "deep linking.”
You
could classify all other web pages as belonging to one of the
following three groups, all related
to either products,
services or information available at your site: “like industry”,
“sub-industry” or “out-of-industry”. These three classifications,
for the most part, are listed chronologically, from the
most to least important. If your main goal is to drive
traffic and you do not particularly care about relevance, more popular
“out-of-industry” sites may lead to more visits. However, if your
goal is to gain relevant qualified traffic and a possible boost
in rankings, the first two classifications, as a rule of
thumb, should be your target. Remember that old
pages tend to have more value than new pages in terms of
transferring “voting power” when linking.
Desired sites for
linking will have at least one page worthy of hosting the
links. The ideal situation is to have a link placed within the
content of such a page and in a manner that would lure the
page visitor to more useful information about a particular
topic. However, this
sometimes poses difficulty because it is a given that many site
owners would rather place their link on a “resources”
page. If this is the best you can do it can still be of
value. Be sure that the resources page has links that
are not blocked from becoming indexed by search engines.
Otherwise, you may lose any benefit gained by ranking
algorithms.
Do not get burned by worthless links.
There are tools available that
identify all the outbound links on a particular page such as the “Links Spider” that exists at
our educational website, Instantposition.com. This kind of
research should be performed for all potential link requests on any
page that you wish your link to reside. There are many other
tricks that are used by less scrupulous link-hawkers that will render
inbound links completely useless.
Once you
know what to look for, positive attributes of a target page for a link
are easy to find. Begin by analyzing
the inbound links to the page. If the page has many “good” inbound
links (e.g., authority sites, .edu domains or .gov domains) then it is
a desired candidate. Also, analyze the company that you will be
keeping – if there are links to random unrelated sites especially
dealing with gambling or prescription drugs be sure to stay
away! Another factor to analyze is the totality of
links residing on a page. Although there is no consensus as to the
number of links a page has to have for it to be devalued, many search
marketers and researchers agree
that the more links the less likely they will be of use in driving
traffic or helping with rankings. Personally speaking, it is
best to shy away from any pages with more than 20 outbound links.
Blog Links and Directories
Since
links have proven to be an important part of search engine algorithms,
many website owners have tried to build as many links as possible in as
many places as possible, emphasizing
quantity over quality. Although this tactic may still work in some
search engines, the more prominent ones have refined their algorithms
to reduce the effectiveness of some links. One prominent example
is placing links in Blogs. “Blog Spamming,” as commonly
called, is a serious problem for both search engines and blogs
alike. If you are considering placing links in blogs you should
ensure that they will count and that the blog is somehow relevant to
your site, with the exception being traffic. If
a blog enjoys significant traffic it may drive some of it to your
site if your comment or post seems interesting to the blog’s
visitors.
From
a search engine ranking perspective, be careful of the newly
created and widely used <nofollow> attribute attached to
some pages. Such attributes act as an extension to the
robots.txt tag, identifying to the search engines those
links that you do not officially condone. Most major search
engines have incorporated this attribute into its crawlers’
programming, rendering the links useless in a search engine
optimization sense.
This
article mainly covers requesting links from other sites, not
directories, but a quick comment should be made in regards to
listing your site within a directory. In short, if you do not
have to be accepted for a link, it is probably not worth being listed
in a directory. The only directories considered truly valuable by
search engines require human review of a website before inclusion
such as the Yahoo Directory which has been shown
to help in Google rankings. If it is a “Free-For-All” (FFA)
directory it is probably not worth your time even from a traffic point
of view.
Last and least: PageRank
Recognized
as a part of the Google algorithm, PageRank has been proven easy
to manipulate. Therefore, it is no longer viewed as
important
as it was last year. Google’s true PageRank for a webpage is
not even that which is displayed in the popular Google
toolbar. That being said, PageRank is still a good
guide. If
your website’s pages average a toolbar PageRank of 4.5 you
should try to stay within your “PageRank neighborhood” for the
majority of your links. But beware of link salesmen who
try to sell you links based purely on PageRank, as this could
backfire and possibly even raise a red flag within the
search engines if done excessively.
Chris Boggs - G3Group - Thanks to Todd Malicoat of
Stuntdubl.com and We Build Pages for his invaluable contributions to this article.
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