Using a Link Wheel to Promote Your Business Online

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different link building strategies that your business can utilize to help promote itself online. This is true regardless of whether you are solely an online business, or you are a traditional brick and mortar looking to establish a foothold in the online realm. Using a link wheel is one of the quickest growing of these strategies, and it can be a quick and effective way to build up your presence, and improve your positioning in the search engines.

The Importance of Link Building

Before diving into the specifics of using link wheels for online promotion, it's worthwhile to take a quick moment to review why link building is so important to begin with. Incoming links to your site are one of the main determining factors of your site's Google PageRank. PageRank, in turn, has a strong affect on your website's positioning within the search engine's results. The more incoming links you have, and the better they are, the higher you get ranked.

What is a Link Wheel?

Most links leading to your site are sourced from a single other website. I might use an article like this one here to link to my SEO content writing website, for instance. Associated Content is a high quality, credible source, and that link should hold some weight. But that's usually where the "power" of that incoming link ends.

Using a link wheel though is like building a chain of incoming links, so that the one link you end up pointing in your direction is super charged. So, I might piece together several different articles, on different platforms, linking from one to the next.

For example, I could go to EzineArticles.com, and write an article on SEO content writing that leads to an article on HubPages.com. That Hub might then link to a Squidoo lens on Squidoo.com about the same subject, and that lens might then point to the article on Associated Content. Now, that incoming link that I have from Associated Content is actually backed up by three other sources, making it much more powerful. (See the image above for some visual cues).

It will build up the credibility of the link source, while also making it even more strongly tied to your subject and keyword. This means that one, single, original link is actually worth substantially more than it used to be, and it's a much more effective means of boosting your SEO.

In addition to providing you with the powerful incoming link, another benefit to a link wheel is that you'll be giving yourself, your business or your product a wider online presence. You'll quickly establish yourself on three, four or more other websites besides your own, leading to a more recognizable and well known brand.

Link Wheel Specifics

In the above example, I wrote articles on a few different sources pointing from one to the next, but you can use any other site or platform of your choosing, and you can have as many spokes in the wheel as you'd like. The more you have, the more powerful it is. You can include video marketing sites, different article directories, mini blogs on Blogger or Blogspot, or anything else.

Another factor that you'll have to consider is whether or not you want to "close" the link wheel. That means that the final destination where the original link points, ends up including a link back to the first point in the wheel. This creates a full loop where every site benefits, but you'll have to play around for yourself to see if it works better for your site than an "open" link wheel, where the final destination doesn't link back to anything.

Want to see a link wheel in action? Check out this article on iPad bling cases, and follow the included links using that phrase until you end up at a website entitled ThePadWarehouse.com.