After much thought and work with my designer (thanks Chris) here it is – voila!

Link building is already time-intensive, sometimes frustrating and also confusing – yet completely unavoidable for all SEO’s (Pro and small). Because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for gaining guaranteed higher rankings. That is exactly why the SEO Linking Pyramid is so important – print it out (click image above for full size image) – post it – blog it – tack it up on the wall and remember what your spending your time on is very valuable!

Cheers,
Jeremy

However, if you want to get links from authority sites, you have to send link exchange requests. The secret of successful requests is to write link exchange messages that aren’t spam.

Get the reader’s attention

If you want people to read your link exchange message, it should not sound like the dozens of other emails that the webmaster receives. Use the recipient’s real name throughout your message. If your message starts with “Dear webmaster” then it’s likely that it will be moved to the trash. Be personal. Write a personal message for each recipient.

Use a real email address with a real name as the sender address. Free email addresses and email addresses with numbers look spammy.

Get the reader’s interest

What’s in for me? You should answer that question as soon as possible in your email.

Do not list any features. Focus on benefits. First, nobody is really interested in the great features of your website. Tell the recipient how your website solves his problems or the problems of his readers.

Appeal to the ego of the recipient. Tell the recipient that you list only 10 websites in this special category and that he is in that top 10 list. It’s easier to convince people if you appeal to their ego.

Create desire

The recipient of your link exchange message won’t react to your request if you don’t create desire.

To create desire out of interest, you can tell the recipient that you downloaded his ebook, subscribed to his newsletter or RSS feed, etc. The other webmaster is more likely to reciprocate if you have done something in advance.

Give the recipient the feeling that he’s special. Include your phone number in your email message. Summarize why the recipient benefits from linking to you.

Make action as easy as possible

Don’t make the recipient think. Make the linking process as easy as possible by giving him copy/paste HTML code with your link information. Of course, the code should only be an option and you should not insist on that code. If the webmaster want’s to use another code to link to your site, that’s okay.

Check out the rest of this article at: The art of writing a link exchange request that is not spam

In reality, there are several link building methods and some of them offer short-term gains while others can your website ranking on search engine exponentially. At the end of the day, the ranking and visibility of your website will depend on the quality of the links and not on the quantity. For example: you can actually get hundred of inbound links from any of the online auto-submission services but the problem is that your URL will be submitted on irrelevant search engines, directories and ad websites. The end result is that maybe your URL is there on hundreds of directories but they will not be counted by Google or Yahoo and thus your search engine ranking will be at the bottom of the table. In fact, Google or Yahoo are known to even ban such websites and considers it as spam linking or black hat activity.

So what you really need to do is identify topical websites or those websites that are related to your trade, business or industry and try and link to them. So if you have around 10 inbound links from top websites or quality websites or high-ranking websites then your website ranking will be far better than what it was with hundreds of low quality or spam links. For example: If you are able to get a link from Yahoo to your website then the ranking of your website in different search engines will be exponentially enhanced because Yahoo is one of the leading and popular web sites over the Internet.

Of course, the process and analytics of website ranking varies from one search engine to another and hence you might have a different ranking on Yahoo as compared to Google. If you have a travel firm and are offering travel packages then linking to iexplore.com can get you more rankings than if you link to hundreds of unknown travel or other websites.

While linking to a website, you need to focus on certain aspects like:
1.    The website you are linking to should be related to your industry or business
2.    The website should have keyword optimized and high quality content
3.    The website should have high internet traffic
4.    The website should have a high PageRank on Google, Yahoo, and MSN

Consider all these factors while choosing your linking partner. You need to remember that Quality of links will always stand you in good stead. The better the linking, the higher the visibility, the faster your business will grow!

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It increases the utility of your site. People will see you as being helpful. People will see you as non-partisan i.e. not always favoring your own stuff. Webmasters may see your inbound link in their logs and follow them back to you. Links are, at the most fundamental level, a connection between people.

If you’ve read something about the HITS algorithm (.pdf), you may have noticed that HITS looks for, and evaluates, both authority and hub pages. i.e. pages that contain multiple links out to authority pages. HITS stands for “hypertext induced topic selection”, and, like PageRank, is concerned with link graph analysis.

Outbound Linking For Fun And Profit : SEO Book.com

‘Siloing’ is the solution offered towards this kind of link dilution, which is sometimes referred to as unfocused linking (I know I don’t make this up). Siloing can resolve the poor linking problem and help you to achieve a high rank on search engines for specific as well as general keywords/specific keyword phrases – basically you get the best of both worlds. This is done mainly by using a themed vertical page construction or linking. The best way to achieve high ranks for keywords is by incorporating silos right into the website structure.

There are mainly two types of silos and they are:
1. Virtual silos
2. Directory based silos

Both the ‘virtual’ and ‘directory’ based silos are capable of creating a keyword theme using linking, but they achieve this method using very different methodologies. The ‘virtual silos’ are capable of creating content as well as subject relationships by cross-linking them so that a theme can be created. On the other hand, a directory based silo will create a relationship through linking different directories to a group.

If you use the directory silo method then it will build relationships between different pages by grouping similar-content pages under one directory and the directory theme will be then tied to the main directory structure (simple and most common). Most directory structures will need a minimum of five content pages that will support the topic that your directory is trying to address. One thing that you need to remember is that all directory silos will need to be extremely well structured as well as organized.

The only way to ensure that your directory silo has been implemented correctly; you will need to group similar-content into different directories. To understand it better, let us take an example of salami and cheese. You will need to create a separate directory for each of the themes, which are one for salami and one for cheese. You will have subsequent pages in the directory that are content rich in order to support your overall directory theme. Now if there are two types of cheese: feta cheese and Parmigiano reggiano then both the different types of cheese will be categorized under the main cheese page. We can extrapolate this idea with Salami, and build out pages based on type: Genoa, Hard, Soppreseta etc…see it’s easy and I’m getting hungry.

On the other hand, you can create a virtual silo theme through linking. In a virtual silo environment the page names are unimportant because the relationship between the pages might not necessarily be in under the same silo. The silo will always be defined by each of the pages it is linked to. Thus in a virtual silo, you are basically creating a theme that is based on links vis-à-vis a directory structure in directory silo.

Try SEOintelligence and use our Keyword Manager and Categorization features to easily create and manage your own optimized Keyword silos!

The quantity and quality of incoming links to your website is very important. A website that has more incoming links is considered popular by search engines, and therefore, an important website. Back linking is also one of the all important factors that search engines use to determine the ranking of your website on their result pages.
Additionally, you must remember that not every incoming link to your website is important. Only a link that has more incoming links than yours will bear greater weight age than the one with a lower link count.

On the other hand, despite having a text ad link from a website that has a larger count of incoming links, you still may be at a SEO disadvantage. Why? Because websites are typically categorized as good or bad. Bad sites include: free for all sites and link exchange websites, while other sites are good sites and valued more by SEs such as Google.

Text links are also called anchor texts. Defined as a text found inside a link, anchor text looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.yoursiteonly.com/>Text Ad Links</a>

The term Text Ad Links is an anchor text. Anchor text link is important as most people who link to your website would use your website’s keywords to describe your site. An anchor text points to your website and helps SEs determine the keywords your website should be pageranked for.

Now that I have explained about text ad links, you may be curious to know where you can find them. Honestly, there are many ways that you can use to find suitable text ad links for your website. To start with you can directly contact the website owners or the webmasters of the sites you are interested in. While this is a significantly time consuming method, it can also lead to some disappointment unless you have great convincing power!
The other method is to create a resource like feature that draws other webmasters to link to your website. This is not a very effective method and may or may not solicit much response.
The third way to obtain text ad links is to buy them. Yes, an easy but resource driven method, purchasing text ad links allows you to have complete control over the quality of links on your website for long term. Buying text ads increases your chances of being noticed by SEs manifold.
But remember, text ad links are not for all. Use them only if they are part of your long term SEO strategy!
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