Welcome to Day 6 of 30 Days to More Traffic!
Introduction
Your site’s ranking in the search engines is worthless without a healthy amount of incoming links. You literally need hundreds if not thousands of links for long-term traffic success. Also, the more incoming links from related sites, the higher your Google PR (PageRank). Everyone on the Internet wants to “be your friend” when you have a high PR, which leads to joint ventures, better branding, and other benefits.
Getting other sites to link to yours should be your top priority in your traffic strategy.
Again, especially if you’re new to being a webmaster, remember that more incoming links equals higher confidence search engines have in your site (more search engine traffic).
Each link you get is like a vote for your site. The more links you get the higher your rank. But not all links are created equal. A link to you from a site that has a rank is worth far more than many links from very low ranked sites.
Link Text Matters
The actual text used in the anchor tag to link to your site is very important. Google looks at the text found in links as well as how many links you get.
Ideally you want your keyword phrase in your link’s text when someone links to your site.
Example:
<a href=”http://www.my-site.com”>keyword phrase</a>
An extreme example of this is Google Bombing. In 2006 if you searched Google for “miserable failure” the first search result was the Biography of President George W. Bush.
Now as I recall, the Biography of President George W. Bush didn’t have one occurrence of the keyword phrase “miserable failure” anywhere on it but enough people had linked to the site with the keyword phrase “miserable failure” as the link text that it came up #1 in Google.
Your link text is incredibly important.
Learn more about Google Bombing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
Reciprocal Links
One thing to keep in mind is the difference between one-way links and reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are where two sites link to each other usually for the purpose of boosting each others ranking. Google has caught on to this and doesn’t value these kinds of links as much as a simple one-way links.
While reciprocal links aren’t as valuable, they are easy to get and can be used in moderation to increase your rank in the search engines, especially when you’re first starting out.
A good place to find other people interested in reciprocal links is:
http://www.linkmarket.com
Just make sure that the people you partner with have PR greater than 0 and are related to your site’s topic. Also visit the site and make sure it’s something you want to link to.
Links from Testimonials
Chances are that someone is trying to sell something in your niche and would love a testimonial from you. In return they’ll give a sample (or sometimes complete) version of the product. They will also frequently give a link back to your site at the bottom of your testimonial.
This link can be the source of a lot of traffic to your site if the sales letter your testimonial appears on gets a lot of traffic.
One thing to remember is that the first testimonials are usually read more often and the link at the end will be clicked on more often than testimonials found at the very bottom.
Links from Blogs
Making comments on high traffic blogs related to your niche can be a great way to get traffic to your site. When you leave a comment on a blog post you usually supply your web address and name in addition to your comment.
Tips:
- Make sure you understand nofollow and how to find blogs that don’t use it. Read more about nofollow here:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/1168_why-nofollow-matters-and-how-to-find-blogs-that-dont-use-it/ - Make only relevant and worthwhile comments. Crappy comments get removed and may get your IP banned. If on the other hand you appear to be an expert and leave a comment that is wildly insightful people will likely click on your name and visit your site.
- When choosing the name you wish to have associated with your comment, choose wisely. Use good and relevant keywords that will entice people to click on your link.
- Comments appear on a blog post in the order they were submitted. So the first comment is at the top of the stack and is read most often. Its link will be clicked on more often. So it pays to be the first commenter. Many blogs offer a way for you to be sent an email whenever a new blog post appears, making it easier to be the first commenter.
Best Poodle Site Award
If your site is somewhat authoritative you can come up with an award to give other related sites and get a free one-way link.
What you’re going to do is do a search on Google and find 20 other related sites. Make an attractive image that looks like an award. Contact the site owners and tell them you would wish to give their site an award. Supply the owner with the necessary HTML and host the graphic yourself.
Submitting Your URL to Free Directories
While submitting your link to free directories doesn’t normally send significant amounts of traffic, it raises your PR, which in turn sends you more search engine traffic.
In fact, search engine optimization doesn’t work unless you have incoming links.
Take the time to at least submit to the free directories found at:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/free-directories-to-submit-you-site-to/
If you have a blog, submit your RSS feed to blog directories. Blog directories will send you quality traffic as well as raise your PR:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/submit-your-rss-feed-to-blog-directories/
Consider also applying to get accepted at blogburst.com free major media syndication service.
Links from Education Sites
Getting links from .edu sites can help your rankings. The easiest way to get backlinks from them is by posting comments on blogs hosted on .edu sites.
Sounds great and all but how do we find such a site.
I search for the following on Google:
site:.edu inurl:blog dogs “post a comment” -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in”
This may seem kind of scary so I am going to break it down for you pierce by piece.
site:.edu – We are only looking for domains ending in .edu
inurl:blog – We can greatly narrow our search results by adding this which only includes the word blog in the web address.
dogs – We only want blogs about dogs. Start with keywords that are general.
“post a comment” – We want pages that have the text “post a comment” as they are the most likely to allow comments.
-”comments closed” – This tells Google to exclude sites with the text “comments closed”.
-”you must be logged in” – This tells Google to exclude sites with the text “you must be logged in”
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Re: Blog Links
It should also be noted that a few years ago all the blog software (including your WP) has introduced the tag <code>rel="nofollow"</code> hoping to combat spam. Well, it didn't help much with spam but it succeeded to punish the legit commenters: their links are not followed by the search engines. Which means, by commenting on blogs you can not get real "incoming links" from relevant and/or highly ranked blog sites… however, it might help with real human traffic.
I love the idea of creating an award. It's a great way to combine content and incoming links. Instead of just creating the award out of nowhere, you can hold a series of teleseminars or even just a simple e-course that has a test at the end of it. Not only is it a great way to show your expertise but again – it gives you those great backlinks you talk about.
SEO doesn't have to be painful but you have to be creative about where you get your links, that's for sure.
There are so many ways to make good links but people still spam. Don't know why? Is there some way to report spamming?
Link building is more important than ever, and this article details several effective ways to get people to link to your website. Use these ideas to think of your own. Be creative! Create an online resource that other site owners can use and that includes a link back to your site (think Google Maps).
Actually, link building is less important than it used to be. Google is finding other ways to judge the usefulness of the site besides looking at the number of links it gets.
thanks for all your tricks dude, I´ve been working a lot on backlinks. it´s working.
Everyone on the Internet wants to “be your friend” when you have a high PR
you're right Nick, it's happened to me, when my other blogs have PR3
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A large amount of for taking the time to discuss this, I believe strongly about this and enjoy learning scores of on this topic. If plausible, although gain expertise, would you mind updating your online place with significantly information? It is really particularly for me.
The google search string is a awesome! And yes, even though many blogs use the nofollow attribute, my own experimentation still shows *some* juice leaking through
I feel we should not worry so much about "building links", but focus more on "participating in the discussion" when it comes to blog commenting.
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I think you hit the nail on the head. If you want traffic you need to build a community and engage in discussion. If you do this you will get traffic.
Hi Nick what if I build incoming link from sub domain ? can this method help to get better position for my keyword, in search engine result. And how to get more indexed by search engine not only google, e.g bing.
Thanks
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You can build back links from a subdomain but it's not as effective as doing it from a completely different domain on a different IP. And I believe 80% of link building for Google will also work for Bing and other search engine.
Thanks for the tips. I really like the one about getting links from .edu sites. Will tinker around with it and see what I get.
The problem is that most of the .edu blogs that we'll get by using this search phrase are "nofollow".
Right. The trick is to find ones that don't use nofollow. This may take some research.
Its interesting to read about the .edu backlinks. I had never considered that before. I'm going to do some tinkering just to see how well it works. Has anyone else had any success with this method?
thank you Nick for these good link building tips. Your steps gave my website traffic momentum and helped me create incoming links on my healthy coffee business blog. Cheers!
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I have been reading information on your site about back linking. See I am new to internet marketing and I am trying to learn how to get my sites on to page one of google. Based on reading your articles on back linking I need to start learning how to build quality back links to my site. It sounds like I may 100 and 100 of back links based on the keyword I choose for my site.
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You may consider first doing a little keyword research.
Hi, Nick is backlink from edu good for link building ? because most of them full with spam comments. Thank you
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I think they are still decent but they have lost some of their effectiveness.
Good Article, I know there has been much debate over Google and the validity of nofollow and dofollow links and I've personally stopped worrying about it. I appreciate the .edu idea and will test it out. I've tried other methods and really like the techniques you share here!
Thank you! Keep us up to date on how things are going with the different techniques you are testing.
Hello Nick,
I requested your guide. I look forward to learning your prospective and tips on
traffic generation. I am new to your site and am impressed by your site's strong content. You definitely have a solid foundation of knowledge regarding traffic generation and related topics.
I am sure I will be a regular visitor from now on.
Betsy
I really just want to ask how can we search for our niche related blogs. Searching them is really a headache. Problems is in searching do follow blogs, which are very hard to find. please can you suggest some tips, will really be helpful
If you want to find blogs in your niche then checkout http://blogsearch.google.com
Finding dofollow blogs is harder. I have a list of them here: http://nickstraffictricks.com/3931_huge-list-of-d…
Am overwhelmed in reading your articles all the way in different posts. Am into SEO for just over an year and a newbie in this field. I find great tips here on your website. I just wanted to make it clear that – are reciprocal linking too bad? I think most of the websites do this kind of job at the backend -like exchanging links reciprocally. They set up pages as links and add other linkimg websites links on that page. I think it helps to some extent in gaining PR.
But its little difficult to find such partners in some niches like thesis/dissertation. Am struggling with this.
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Building reciprocal links is not necessarily a bad thing. And the sites that you exchange links with don't have to be in your particular niche.
With that said, you may find that there are more effective ways to get traffic for the amount of time you're spending.
This post of your contain best summarize content regarding the off site SEO. After reading this i come to know how imporatant is the link building for the site and how we can make back links by using different method. Thanks for the information and keep posting such type of post that help us.
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Thanks for sharing this information! Backlinks are very important in the the offsite SEO field. I think that one of the major keys with backlinks is diversity and you seem to explain that very well in your post. Thanks for sharing!
Interesting post, link building is the most time consuming part of seo for me. Never have any luck with .edu, but will try your idea.
Yes link building is time consuming i also have troubles finding edu's worth posting to.
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Most of what I read is ways to improve your webpage by use of appropriate keywords meta tags descriptions etc. I’ve done some page analysis of my top competitors (That rank #1 in with my chosen keywords) and it seems that most of them have done nothing to improve their site google rank by improving these things on their site. But all of them have several back links. It seems that improving your site content will set you apart from your competition but the most important thing is getting good quality back links to your site. Does that sound right?
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For now you should ignore meta tags descriptions and work on building back links and a community.
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