Link Tools and Tactics from SES New York 2007

An informative session at SES New York 2007 titled "Link Building: The Basics" presented useful information about this traffic-building strategy. The program was presented by Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link and Detlev Johnson. Highlights from this discussion are presented in this article.

Link popularity is one of the largest factors in determining rank and is used in some degree by all of the major search engines. Tips for building effective links include:

It's not necessarily about quantity anymore. It's more about quality. You need a lot of links from quality sites to rank well.

Anchor text links used on other sites linked to your sites that use the same text as titles or file names will result in a higher page rank. This is true because search engines read words around anchor text and throughout the page looking for on-topic and subject relevance. They want sites relevant to the query and theme.

When using links to build rank, avoid links that that use rel="nofollow" Use Firefox SearchStatus tool to point out pink links = quirk.biz/searchstatus). Also, don't use links that are irrelevant such as links in Javascript code, image links, redirected links through 3rd party sites - affiliate links and tracking codes. Affiliate marketers, can still pass link popularity through tools by searching for Naked Links. Stay away from link farms.

Email-based communications with over 100k subscribers are an excellent opportunity to take advantage of the residual effect of linking.

When using outbound links, link to people who mentioned you and back to similar industries and established sites.

TouchGraph offers a tool where you are able to input a keyword to find out who has been linking to your site by term. This tool points out topically relevant websites.

Place links on your site to press releases, directories, award sites, affiliation listings, associations, and articles.

Ask visitors for links. Debra shared that she created a page for a client that asks for links and in four years the list has grown to 365 links. Offering incentives and freebies boosts the likelihood of obtaining quality links. Request that the links are submitted using code.

Search for a specific term at Google and Yahoo and determine how they rank. If there is a commonality between the two, use this link. This is an indicator of an authority site.

Use media contacts related to your niche. Gebbie Press and Burrelles Luce are examples of these sources. Topix.net breaks down sources into category and geographic location. It pulls up all the sites that have press information in them. Cyberjournalist.net and Yahoo News were also mentioned.

Use your expertise to provide articles on your website to encourage others to link to your site. This is a hot tactic for building links because everyone is looking for quality content. Create a lens on Squidoo and link out to the article resource center from your site. There's a list of article directories at www.arcanweb.com/resources/article-directories.html.

The presenters recommended these tools for link building:

• www.marketleapcom/publinkpop.com - a comparison tool

• www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - brings back all links. The links that come back are typically brought back in the order of importance as seen by Yahoo. Yahoo has Trust Rank (whereas Google has PageRank). A point to note is that Yahoo recognizes authority sites.

• www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php - brings back anchor text, unique domains. You can save the results to Excel spreadsheet and it's free.

• www.linktree.info.com - takes multiple sites and looks for recurring backlinks. It's another free site that allows you to export the results to Excel.

• www.urltrends.com - paid and free options. It brings back all the information about a site. This tool can be used to see where your competitors are listed.

Debra talked briefly about the relevance of directories. She recommends the $300/year Yahoo! Directory to those who are new at this game. She points out that AOL's search partner, DMOZ, supplies Google with its directory results and can provide a lot of different relevant page links. She warns, however, to avoid directories hosting excessive search engine ads. Also, check robots.txt and nofollow links.

The presenters pointed out on the topic of buying links to make sure that your links grab the attention. Stay away from sites where it's obvious that it's a paid linking section. There are brokers that sell links or you can do this yourself. Blogs are a less expensive avenue for this tactic. Consider adding social site icons to your articles such as the ones provided by AddThis.com.