Chapter 7: Building Link Love

In This Chapter

Discovering why links matter

Encouraging links

Getting the easy links

Staying out of trouble

Creating link bait

Link building — getting other sites to link to yours — is critical to your search engine optimization efforts. However, many people ignore the rest of SEO and focus entirely on acquiring links. Link building is not the only component, and ignoring great copy, great code, and a well-structured site in favor of link building is a mistake.

This chapter explains why links matter, how search engines weigh links, the factors for quality links, and several tactics for building links to your site.

This chapter is very technical and detailed, so keep some perspective. You don’t need to spend the next two years writing link bait. But you should do everything up to and including the suggestions in the “Leveraging Your Partners for Links” section. For everything after that section, you can read and learn. If you have time and a big budget, go for it. If you don’t, take it as advice in case you’re ever bedridden for a month with nothing to do but putter with your website.

Understanding Link Votes

To a search engine, every page on the Internet has a certain number of votes it can hand out to other pages through links. The exact number of votes each page has differs, depending on the site’s overall SEO strength.

This voting concept first hit the search world in 1998, when Google launched the beta version of its now-dominant search engine. Google called the voting system PageRank.

To make things even more complicated, every vote can be worth more or less to your SEO efforts, depending on the relevance of the linking website, the text in the link, and dozens of other factors that search engines won’t divulge (but users can try to guess).

Link velocity — the rate at which your site acquires new links — matters, too. If you get 2,000 links overnight and then nothing, that likely won’t help as much as getting 10 new links per day for 200 days.

So, every link you get is a vote. Each vote is weighed by search engines according to relevance and other factors.

A lot of links is better. And links, like everything else, start with content.

Links that don’t count as much

A link helps you only if it links directly to your website. If a link first goes to some type of ad-tracking server and then to your site, the search engines won’t consider it a vote.

To check whether a link is direct, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the linking page and roll your cursor over the link.

2. Look in your browser status bar and see where the link points.

If it shows your page address, as in Figure 7-1, it’s a vote. If it shows a redirection address or simply Done, as in Figure 7-2, it’s not a vote.

Some webmasters get tricky and use JavaScript to make it look like a link is a vote. Don’t worry about it — they’re in the minority, and the effort to find those fake votes probably isn’t worth it.

Understanding nofollow

Another form of links that are less valuable are nofollow links. The major search engines now recognize a special command that webmasters can add to any link on their website:

<a href=http://www.harrisonsbikes.com rel=”nofollow”>

That rel=”nofollow” command tells a visiting search engine to treat that link differently, by passing little or no authority through that link to the target page. SEO geeks refer to that link as nofollowed. Nofollowed links are less of a vote than followed links.

Us SEO nerds don’t know as much about the value of nofollow links as we thought. They pass some value, but they clearly don’t pass as much value as a normal link, and they appear to only pass value in specific circumstances. The best rule is to get a normal, followed link first. Don’t ignore nofollow links, but don’t stake your campaign on them, either.

You can easily detect nofollow links by using SeoQuake. In SeoQuake, nofollowed links have a line through them, as shown in Figure 7-3. Turn to Chapter 1 of this minibook if you need to install SeoQuake.

Using nofollow as some form of SEO tool will probably hurt you. If you use nofollow on a link on your site, it doesn’t redistribute that link vote to another page. Instead, it burns the vote. Poof. Also, using a nofollow command might not prevent a search engine from crawling content. It’s not a security tool. It’s not a way to hide content. And it’s not a way to improve your rankings.

Writing Link-Worthy Content

The best way to acquire links is to attract them naturally, with interesting, useful information. The importance of writing great content appears in almost every blog post on the subject of link building. Try these tips:

• Be original. Copying or rewriting someone else’s content might get you noticed in court, but it’s not going to help you build links.

• Write quality stuff. Publishing polished content should go without saying. Have others help you edit before you go live.

• Avoid the sales pitch. No one will link to your services page if it just includes a sales pitch. You need to write something that has general value.

• Write for easy scanning. See Chapter 6 of this minibook for information on copywriting.

• Include images. Even if they’re just silly, images make folks more likely to link to your site.

• Have a punchy headline. “Treatise on link building” won’t get attention the way “10 Ways to Link Building Nirvana” will. Again, see Chapter 6 in this minibook.

You just never know what will turn out to be link-worthy. You can spend days sweating over one article, only to have it ignored, while another page hastily put together may attract a lot of attention.

Encouraging Links

You can encourage links by making it easy for folks to link to your site, too.

• Make your page URLs easy. This link

www.harrisonsbikes.com

is better than

www.harrisonsbikes.com/index.aspx?category=1&products=2&special= no&catid=234&productid=12312

• Consider providing an easy way to bookmark each page on your site. See Book VII for more information.

• Provide an easy way for customers to forward links to friends. You never know when a tool such as the one shown in Figure 7-4 will prompt a visitor to forward your page to her friend, the top-100 blogger.

Using absolute URLs

When you link to one page of your site from another, use an absolute URL:

www.harrisonsbikes.com/products.html

instead of a relative URL:

/products.html

An absolute URL contains within it all information necessary to find that web page, no matter where you are on the Internet. A relative URL contains only enough information to help you find that web page from within the same website.

Although the latter is easier from a development standpoint, the former means that if someone steals your copy (it happens), he will inadvertently link back to you, too.

These links won’t be worth much, but they can help, and you might as well get the benefit.

Saying thanks

A simple thank you can go a long way. If folks link to you, send them a note to say you appreciate it. Remember, they just voted for you. They might vote again, too.

Getting Easy Links

Some links are no-brainers. Although they’re not the highest-value votes on the Internet, your competitors have them. Go get them because they’re easy and because they level the playing field.

Submitting to directories

Thousands of directories are out there. Search engines track a sizable chunk of them and count links to you from those sites as votes.

Many of these directories are free. Start with the following:

• DMOZ.org: It’ll take a long time to get into this directory, but submit your site, check back every few months, and if you haven’t showed up, try again. A link from DMOZ is worth it.

• Any and all local business directories in your area: The Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and neighborhood associations are all a good start.

• Industry associations: If you belong to any industry associations, be sure that you’re in their directories, too.

Some pay directories that are worth the investment include the following:

• Best of the Web at botw.org

• The Yahoo! Directory at http://dir.yahoo.com

• joeant.com

As a rule, only submit to directories that fit your business. They should be industry-specific to you. Or they should be general-purpose directories designed to help folks find different kinds of resources.

Never submit to a directory that requires you to link back!

Submitting to design galleries

If you have a site that’s 100 percent XHTML-compliant, you can submit it to one of the many galleries that feature standards-compliant sites.

You can also submit to galleries that feature particularly striking designs. Clearly, though, your website must be particularly striking.

Be honest in both cases! If you spam every directory site hoping they won’t check for standards compliance or design quality, you’ll be disappointed.

Commenting on blogs

When you leave a comment on a blog, the blog author usually asks for your web address, as shown Figure 7-5. Enter your web address, and the blog typically adds a link back to your website from the post.

Before you go to every blog on the web and start entering comments (such as “Interesting!”) just to get a link, understand that the search engines long ago closed this loophole: Most blogs include nofollow links from comments (see the section “Understanding nofollow,” earlier in this chapter). Some, however, have stopped doing this because blog software has gotten better at filtering out short, useless messages entered strictly to create links. Remember: nofollow does pass some value — just not as much as a regular link. Comment because you want to, not to grub for links.

Comment when it makes sense and when you really have a comment. You might get the additional benefit of a link.

Leveraging Your Partners for Links

If you own a large company and you have distribution partners or local retailers, ask them to link to you. You might want to provide an incentive, such as a discount on merchandise or additional training. Regardless, links from partners are often an untapped resource.

If your company sells or distributes products from another, larger company, ask the company to include a link to you in its distributor directory (assuming that it has one).

Asking for Links

You’ll rarely actually need to ask for links. Most webmasters receive at least ten e-mails a day begging for links, and most of those requests end up in the trash bin.

However, some link builders report success using this technique. The math does make sense: If you ask 1,000 sites for links, and only 1 percent listen, you still gain ten links. If you have the time, it can work.

Building a contact list

First, you need a contact list so that you can work on building a relationship with these folks that goes beyond begging for links. Send them an occasional helpful note about a new article they might find useful. Wish them a happy holiday. Remember their birthday. If you ask people who know you for a link, they’re more likely to help out. Follow these recommendations to help you get started:

• Start with folks you know. If you have a relationship with other website owners, start by contacting them. You have a far better chance.

• Find sites related to your industry, and see whether they allow you to contact the webmaster. If they do, add them to your list, too.

• Find blogs related to your industry. Add them to a separate list, because you want to market to them via social media, not by sending e-mail. See Book VII for more information.

• Pick up the phone. Don’t just call and say, “Gimme a link.” Instead, research the site owner a bit, figure out what they may need, and offer to help with some phone advice or a little development time. Then ask for a link at the end of the work.

Don’t spam. If the site doesn’t have a webmaster contact address on it, don’t contact the site. You’re already interrupting people who likely don’t know you.

Being polite

Send an e-mail to each webmaster. Send it once. If you don’t hear back, cross the webmaster off your list. You tried. Maybe you ended up in his spam folder, or maybe he just ignored you. In either case, contacting him repeatedly will, at best, annoy him.

Make your e-mail very brief — no more than four or five sentences. Get right to the point, with a message like this:

I’m the owner of Harrisonsbikes.com. You wrote a fantastic review of our RoadBike2000. We have it hanging in our store! If possible, could you link to our site from your review? Thank you!

That’s it. You’ve taken but a few seconds of the webmaster’s time. She’ll appreciate your brevity.

Building a Widget

You can also build links by giving people a tool to put on their own websites. Widgets are fairly commonplace now and can serve a wide variety of purposes. Widgets can

• Provide the latest headlines from another website

• Show weather information for your area

• Show information about the site on which the widget is placed

• Play video

YouTube and other services use widget-style code if you embed their video in your site.

If you include a link back to your own website as part of the widget, as shown in Figure 7-6, every person who uses your widget gives you a link.

Follow these rules for widget link building:

• Don’t overdo it. Google, in particular, is sensitive to widgetbait link-building tactics. If this is your sole link-building strategy, you’re headed for trouble.

• Make it original. Avoid using weather-prediction widgets, fortune-telling widgets, and random photo widgets that are available. Make yours very relevant to your business. Harrison’s Bikes, for example, might have a widget showing results from local bike races.

• Make it simple. Provide a single chunk of code that webmasters can cut and paste into their own websites. It must be a one-step process. If it isn’t, they won’t use it.

• Make it fast. If your widget grabs information from your website before loading, make sure that it’s fast. Nothing drives webmasters crazier than a widget that slows the load time of their own website.

• Include a link. Make sure that the widget includes a link back to your website, and make sure that it’s a direct link.

Some companies do nothing but develop widgets. Get in touch with them if you have an idea you’d like to see come to life. Elance.com is a good place to start.

Creating Quality Links

If you have control over links made back to your website, you can do a few things to maximize the quality of the votes they provide. The following sections cover how to get quality links.

Including keywords

A link with relevant keywords in it provides a much better boost to your SEO efforts around that key phrase. For example:

<a href=”http://www.harrisonsbikes.com”>Seattle Bicycle Repair</a>

is far better than:

<a href=”http://www.harrisonsbikes.com”>Harrison’s Bikes</a>

When search engines see a link with Seattle Bicycle Repair as the link text, they will assume that the website to which it points is about Seattle bicycle repair and count that link vote toward relevance for that phrase.

Don’t turn down a branded link — they’re still helpful. Even an image link with no text can help. But a keyword-rich link is pure gold.

If all the a href stuff made your head swim, don’t worry. It’s just HTML. Pay attention to the bolded text — that’s what matters for this section.

Varying link text

Here’s the flip side of keyword-rich links: You don’t want dozens of identically worded links. Ideally, you want some variation in link text.

The main time to worry about this is if you’re reaching out to a partner network or using a widget to get a lot of links using one strategy. If you do that, try to use at least five different versions of link text. Variety gets you more votes.

Getting relevant links

A link from a relevant site is far more useful than a link from a site that has nothing to do with your business.

If you happen to get links from irrelevant sites, don’t worry about it, but do focus your efforts on relevant sites.

Staying Out of Trouble

You can get into trouble when link building because for years, link building has been abused as an SEO strategy. So, search engines have put automatic filters and whole teams of engineers and editors in place to check for

• Sudden, unexplained link growth

• Links from bad neighborhoods

That’s SEO shorthand for a group of sites known to be sleazy. If you go out and acquire 100 links from sites selling suspicious pharmaceuticals or get-rich-quick schemes, you might end up associated with them in the search engines. That will hurt your ability to get a high ranking.

• Signs that you’re selling links

• Any other sign that you’re getting links purely to improve your ranking

Yes, they know we’re out there doing just that. They just don’t want us to go too far in the process. And no, they won’t tell us what too far is. Fun, huh?

You can get yourself into trouble in a few classic ways, though. Steer clear of the topics in the next few sections.

Link buying and selling

At one point, anyone with a budget could go out and buy dozens of links from quality websites, thereby helping his or her rankings. Ah, the good old days.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. In 2007, Google cracked down hard on websites that were selling links. As a result, those sites either dropped out of the Google index or fell so low in the rankings that they might as well have.

If you sell links, you risk severe penalties from search engines. They really don’t like that. Yes, you’ll find all sorts of ridiculous double standards. It doesn’t matter. Shaking your fist because you got dumped from the rankings but another site didn’t won’t help you after you’re penalized.

Don’t sell links. And, if you buy links, you risk

• Acquiring a lot of links suddenly and tripping the search engines’ spam alarms

That can result in a temporary but automatic drop in the rankings — that’s no fun at all.

• Getting caught up in the mess if a link broker is discovered and his websites are banned

• Spending a lot of money on links that end up worthless

Don’t buy links.

Link exchanges

Exchanging links with another website probably won’t hurt you, but it won’t help, either. Search engines figured out this trick years ago and ignore any reciprocal links.

Link trading can hurt if you end up in a bad neighborhood. If you’re linking to those sites and they link back to you, they may take you down with them if they get penalized.

Link networks

Never, ever, join a link network. Most of these networks ask you to provide link text and a URL. Then they seed your URL among many other sites, in exchange for you posting a few links from their network.

It sounds good, but it makes inclusion in a bad neighborhood even more likely than a link trade. Plus, you give up all control over who links to you and how. And, these networks are known as the worst offenders when it comes to SEO cheating.

Don’t use link networks, link “wheels,” or whatever folks name them to try to get you to buy. Ever.

Creating Great Link Bait

Link bait is currently the most misunderstood, worst-employed link-building strategy. Few people are good at using it.

By definition, link bait is any piece of content written or created in such a way that it’s going to attract a lot of links. You need to understand the following about link baiting:

• The most common link bait is in the form of a list.

“Top 10 ways to . . .” is a formula that just seems to work.

• Great link bait typically includes images.

• Great link bait is easy to scan.

Brainstorming link bait

This kind of link building starts with a really compelling idea. You can use a few strategies. The following sections discuss the more popular strategies.

Cracking up the readers

If you take a look at Digg.com — Digg often shows some of the most successful link bait pieces — note that at least half the front-page pieces at any one time are funny, or at least ironic.

Humor can work very well. Just be sure you don’t cross the boundary between funny and tasteless, unless you really mean to.

The Guinea Pig Olympics, shown in Figure 7-7, collected links faster than guinea pigs make baby guinea pigs.

Making the reader angry

Making readers angry is risky. If you can make a controversial statement that generates discussion on other websites, you can attract a lot of links from blogs, discussion forums, and online groups. That’s great link building. Go too far, though, and you could end up alienating your audience.

Controversial link bait works only after you have a few other successes, and you have a dedicated audience. They’re more likely to forgive and more likely to defend you — which, of course, generates more discussion and more links.

Puzzling your readers

If you’re a top-notch writer, you can write something to get your readers buzzing about what you meant. For this to work, though, you need a large audience (for the buzz) that is pretty patient with you. Most folks go online for answers, not questions.

Examples include famous bloggers saying they’re quitting blogging (they never do), pundits apparently reversing their opinion (they’re actually not), and really bizarre April Fools’ Day announcements (see the section “Cracking up the readers,” earlier in this chapter).

Offering great content

Obviously, if you can offer great information, you can attract links in short order. Examples of informative link bait include the following:

The 30-second T-shirt fold

Step-by-step instructions on using Photoshop to do any number of things

Instructions for fixing a common problem in a popular car

The best way to enjoy a popular theme park

Ten bizarre facts about an animal, invention, country, or famous person

Some of these might seem silly. But if you think about it, they’d be a lot of fun to write.

And that might be the single most important item to keep in mind: Great link bait should be fun to write. If you don’t enjoy writing it, most folks won’t enjoy reading it — and you won’t make much progress.

Using images in link bait

Images are the core of just about any successful link bait piece. Sometimes the images are directly involved, as in the Guinea Pig Olympics in Figure 7-7. Sometimes they’re just supporting material, as shown in Figure 7-8.

Note how these images have all been modified in somewhat silly ways. Both of these examples are humorous link bait posts — in this type of article, it makes sense to use images as props for the joke.

Host these images on your website, not by using a service such as Flickr. It’s possible that an image will become stand-alone link bait. If it does, you want the links pointing at your web address, not at Flickr.

Using video in link bait

Video might seem like the perfect link bait, and using video can be very effective. However, it typically requires a lot of work, or a lucky break — say, you’re the first person to capture a particular event on video, or you happen to film something very funny happening in everyday life.

The more likely route is that you carefully prepare and produce a fantastic video. That’s not easy: A high-quality, 30-second YouTube video can take ten hours to create.

Videos you might want to prepare include the following:

• A how-to piece around one of your products or services

• An interview with a leader in your industry

• Ten ridiculous things you can do with your products

Other possibilities exist. For example, an ad agency in San Francisco did a video of its entire team lip-syncing a popular song.

Embed the video on your website. It’s fine to use a hosting service like YouTube or Vimeo, but be sure folks can find the video on your site. Otherwise, you end up helping YouTube build links, which won’t really do much for your website.

Managing expectations

Link bait is not magic! It takes a lot of work and a long time. Manage your expectations for success by knowing that

• If you create ten top-notch link-bait pieces, you can expect one to succeed. If you’re expecting 100 percent success, you’re being very unrealistic.

• Link bait, by definition, needs to be attention-getting. Writing something about how wonderful your product or company is does not work.

• Link bait is a long-term investment. Sometimes it can be months, even a year or two, before a piece of link bait really starts attracting links.

Researching Your Competitors’ Links

One easy way to find good links is to see who links to your competitors. You can simply search for links to a competitor’s website by typing link:www.competitorsite.com into Google. Google will then show you a portion of the site’s links. But the operative word here is portion. Google shows what Google wants. So, you can’t get a great competitive link list using the link: operator.

Use the following strategies to research competitors’ links:

• Use OpenSiteExplorer.org, by SEOMOZ. SEOMOZ’s toolset uses a huge links database that it builds and updates every month. It’s a great resource. OpenSiteExplorer has a free version that offers limited data and a paid version that provides more data than you can shake a stick at.

• Do a blog search on Google or Bing for your competitors’ brand names. The results might show blogs that reviewed their products. Those blogs might be willing to review yours, too — in which case, you might get a link.

• Use MajesticSEO. MajesticSEO offers another links database. Combine it with OpenSiteExplorer, because they each provide different crawl results and because they offer slightly different ways to slice the data. Like OpenSiteExplorer, Majestic has a free version that you can test drive.

• Do a Google News search to find out which newswires your competitors use.

After you build a list, check each link. Politely contact the bloggers, buy space in the same website directories, and figure out how you can attract links from the other websites. Something made those sites decide to link to your competitor. Read what the competitor wrote on the page that attracted the link and look at what the linking site said about it. That should give you a clue as to what will attract similar links in the future.

Understanding the New Value of Links

Links have evolved from the single dominant authority-passer to one part of a far more complex formula.

Google and Bing treat links very differently than they have in the past. Some major differences are as follows:

• Link position matters more. Google now applies a “rational surfer” model to links. The more likely it is that a normal person would click a link, given its location and style, the more value it passes. So, those tiny links at the bottom of the page aren’t going to do much for you.

• Link text matters less. It used to be that if you wanted to rank for running shoes, a link with the text running shoes was the most valuable. That’s not necessarily true anymore. Exact link text doesn’t help as much as it used to. In fact, too many links with the same text may trigger penalties. Don’t obsess about link text as much.

• Artificial change is bad. Search engines are far better at detecting “fake” link acquisition. If you go out and buy 1,000 links in a week and that triples your link count and authority, you’ll likely end up with worthless links. You’ll get a nice, temporary jump in the rankings. Then you’ll plunge.

Links are now one form of citation. All forms of citation matter: brand mentions that don’t link to you, nofollowed links, social media votes and “likes,” and whatever else the web gurus come up with.

Links are still a big, big deal. Ignore them and you have very little chance of improving your rankings. Just be aware that social media and smart overall marketing can help, too. Be sure to read Book VII, and make that part of your SEO campaign, too.