Linking neighborhoods
Ok, there has and will always be a lot of discussions regarding inbound links, paid links and reciprocal links. I personally have never done paid links nor have I ever done reciprocal links. I do not mind linking to others sites as long as I find the content interesting for my audience.
I usually get all my sites indexed within 1 or 2 weeks, what I do is I usually find a domain I like and I will put up one or two pages of content the first day and then I proceed to create a an XML sitemap and I submit the sitemap to the search engines (Google Webmaster Tools). If your CMS does not provide that functionality you can use this sitemap generator.
I will then pick one of my articles and I will submit it to Digg, StumbleUpon and other social media sites. It is ideal to add at least one new article a day for each site that you own. I personally have many sites, and I will only link in between my sites if they are relevant to each other, it is my opinion that you want to try to keep your links coming only from sites that discuss the same topic as you do, the reason for this is that you will get more targeted traffic and the search engines recognize sites with similar content, I would much rather have only 5 inbound links from sites with similar content than 1000’s of links on sites that are completely irrelevant, some of you might now be laughing but I have done this time and time again and I constantly rank very well for fairly competitive keywords on both yahoo! and Google.
Where it counts to have a lot of links is if all things equal your competitors are also using the same techniques and are getting a lot of inbound links from relevant sites. Another point is that in my opinion a natural link which is embedded as part of the content has much greater value than say a footer link.
What you definitely do not want to do is comment spamming and forum spamming, play by the rules and you will see that if you are consistent you will see results.
Other relevant sites you might want to consider are specialized directories, and the only one I would pay for is the Yahoo! Directory. When you are submitting to directories or linking from articles make sure you use different variations for your anchor text, AND DO NOT use automated submission tools semi automated is ok, instead add your links and directory submissions gradually and keep it steady.
There is software out there that guarantees you millions of links but beware these tools are usually letting you post ads on FFA (Free for ALL) sites, and submission there can cause more harm than anything else.
There are only 3 reasons you should be using links:
- Getting targeted (relevant)traffic
- Improving your rankings in the Search Engines for relevant keywords
- Letting your users know about other resources that are relevant to your topic
There are 2 reasons why or where you should NOT get links:
- To improve your toolbar PR
- To get a massive amount of irrelevant links from bad neighborhoods
For excellent information on link building and general SEO theory check out Michael Martinez’ blog which I believe is one of the best ones out there.
