How to Optimize your Website - Part 5

Best Linking Practice.

Linking is without doubt the most important part of your optimization strategy. It is important therefore to spend some time making sure that you are doing as much as you can to promote your site correctly.

There are many misconseptions regarding linking, but as long as you follow the following points you will create a solid foundation for your website.

Firstly remember that in the beginning very little will happen, you will get some links to your site and yet you will still not rank very well. It is at this point that most people give up assuming quite wrongly that they are doing something wrong. It is important that you keep going, every link that you get to your site is one link closer to how many your site needs to rank first.

Important rules to follow;

-Limit the quantity of links that you get in any month to less that 125 max. More than this will have a negative effect and can lead to your site being sandboxed by Google. Sandboxing is like being quarantined for up to 18 months and excluded from the rankings. This can happen to new sites that often try too hard too early. If you think that your site has been sandboxed contact me through my site Search Engine Optimization as I have a few methods that can get your site back from the sandbox much quicker.

-Start by linking to your index page, using your main keyword as the link text.

-Try to get as many of your links as possible from Google friendly sites with a PR score. This will help Google to rank your site quicker.

- If you want to rank in the UK then get links from as many .co.uk sites as possible, for worldwide then .com sites work best.

- Get your link added to pages with less than 100 links on them. Google only reads the first 100 links on a page including navigation so if your link is at the bottom of a very busy page then Google will never count it.

- Reciprocal linking is the easiest to manage as it is easy to use software that will check if a site is still linking to your site. The problem with reciprocal links is that Google knows that they are a tit for tat process, so it is slowly devaluing them. Google wants to see totally natural links whereby you appear to add a link to a site from yours purely because you think it is a good useful site. This is called one way linking.

-It is much harder to effectively manage a one way linking campaign, but the rewards are worth the effort if you do. The idea is that instead of site a linking to site b and b linking to a, you use two sites that you have access to , and when contacting a potential link site, you offer to add his link to site a if he links to site b from his. This as I said gets very complicated which is why I prefer to use a software program to run the process for me.


- Try to get links from topic sites or topical pages, so if you have a gift shop, a link from a site about sailing is still ok if the site has a section in its link directory called "Gifts". It is not vital for the link page to have its own page rank, but it does help. As long as the index page of the site has a pr then one day the page containing your link will too.

- If you can get a link on the home page of a site it will boost your rankings no end. A link on the home page of a PR7 site will get spidered daily and your site will be highly regarded because of it. Some PR7 sites sell such links and in certain circumstances they are a worthwhlie investment in order to get your site ranking as quickly as possible. Be warned they are not cheap!

Next time I will discuss linking strategies further.