The second part of my “All in one” series discusses, strategies which help a website increase backlinks, to gain popularity through the links they build with related websites.
This is a tricky subject to cover, as there are so many ethical and unethical ways to build links, through spamming of forums or blogs, to innocently adding your link to an article or putting your URL in a forum signature.
If you would like to know more about link building, before I go in to detail on the ways in which you can link build you can find out more through my start link building now article.
Search engine submission
Perhaps you are wondering how soon you should submit your website to the search engines, there is no right time to submit however I have two proposals I can suggest.
Either submit to the top 3 search engines or do not submit at all
I mean it, the top 3 search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN these are the only ones you want to be spending your time submitting your website to, however if the website is not brand new then its more than likely it has already been indexed.
Why?
Well these search engines crawl the internet daily, weekly, monthly all the time they are crawling the web for new websites with new unique content. If you are frequently adding content to your website which I would advise you do, then the search engines are more than likely to come to you. However if your website is brand new and you cannot wait to be indexed, then help the search engines out and submit your website to the top 3 search engines.
Here are the links to the URL submission pages
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
One key fact to remember is to not submit your website to the search engines more than once, some people suggest submitting your website monthly or every couple of months but once you have submitted the site, search engines will start crawling your site and picking up your new content. You can read more about search engine submission here
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are generally coded in XML and submitted to search engines to help speed up the process of indexing web pages (The importance of sitemaps).
If you have over 15 pages in your website, I would suggest that it is time to add a sitemap especially if you’re planning on continuing to grow your website. If you’re uploading new pages to your site daily then again I advise you to create a sitemap and upload it in to your website and then use Google webmaster tools to submit it to Google search engine.
If your website has less than 500 pages then you can create a sitemap for free here
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Then use http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ to submit your sitemap to Google.
Niche directory submissions
What I mean by a “Niche directory” is a directory that has been built to focus on one single market. The best way to find these niche directories, is to search on the main 3 search engines for directories in your market.
It is best to submit your website to directories over a long period of time, instead of taking one day to submit your website to a hundred directories try doing 10 directories a week; this will seem more natural to the search engines and will overall put you in a better position. Change the anchor text slightly when submitting to directories, don’t always keep with the exact same anchor text this will look strange to the search engines and may harm your website. Make sure you target the keywords you want to on each page however change your anchor text round slightly, you don’t have to do this all the time however for every 5 or 10 submissions I would suggest you do.
Don’t always link to the home page
Use deep linking when your submitting to directories don’t just submit your home page to each directory submit appropriate internal pages this balances out the amount of incoming links you have to your website and allows you to use more relevant keywords in your anchor text.
Relevant forum signatures
Forum signatures is a method of building links which comes up again and again, however not all forums allow do follow links and this is something you may want to research in to before you start using a particular forum to build links.
When you do find a forum that does accept do follow links though, don’t just start spamming the forums with your signature. Try to answer people’s questions accurately and with as much information as they need. Participate in conversations and try to focus on helping people in your most skilled niche or area that you know the most about.
When you write your signature don’t just write it for the search engines, write it for the people on the forums too. It is most likely that if you are helping people out some of they will take the time to visit your forum signatures to see what you are all about. Ensure that you add each of your keywords for that particular page to your forum signature but make sure people will know what the site is about before they even click on the link.
You can usually add more than one link if you have not used too many characters up this might be a good chance to put links to both your home page and alternative internal links. You could change the internal link each week or month to ensure you keep some sort of balance.
Anchor text
The anchor text is the visible text of a hyperlink.
For example Click here this is a hyperlink set up to connect to the homepage however the anchor text is not specific to the home page and it does not tell either the user or the search engine what the home page may be related too.
To optimise the anchor text you can pick out certain keywords that you find in the page you are linking to and use them in your anchor text. This allows the search engines to know what the page is related to and helps the user understand what the page is about.
Anchor text optimisation can be done internally and externally, internal anchor text optimisation involves linking from one internal page to another internal page, using the relevant keywords of the pages linked in the anchor text. External anchor text optimisation uses many different link building strategies such as forum signatures, directories, search engines and other relevant websites to link to a single page on your website using the relevant keywords of that page to be used in the anchor text.
Internal Linking
Everyone knows that you can build a large amount of backlinks through linking with forum signatures, search engines, directories, other related websites, email signatures, blog carnivals, blog comments and many other forms of external linking. However many people usually forget about or dismiss the fact that you can also build links through internal linking, which has more than one advantage.
Not only does a well structured navigation bar help users in moving around your website but it also helps to build links and helps search engines crawl your site. It is important to be able to access every page you want to be indexed from every other page on your website, through using a sitemap and a solid internal navigation system you can do this.
Other than ensuring your website has a solid navigational system and that each page links with one another, it is also important to link within articles to other appropriate articles.
If you have writ an article and it seems that you can help the user more by adding a link to another page on your website, then do it. Internal linking does not hold as much strength as external linking however it helps users and search engines and increases the strength of your website. Be sure to use your anchor text optimisation to maximise the benefits you can receive from adding these internal links also making it clear to users what is on the other side of the link.
