Getting Links to your Website

Optimising the code of your web pages and writing quality relevant content (with some choice use of selected keyphrases!) is only half the battle of getting ranked in search engines - the other half is generating lots (and I mean lots!) of links to your site from other relevant web pages. All else being equal, a site with more links to it will outrank the other.

While many SEO advice will quite rightly emphasise that writing lots of good content will ensure links to your pages will flow naturally from users - for many commercial websites this is not a reality, and much of this could be construed as writing content for contents sake (which is no bad thing ... if the content is of a high quality).

Long Term Link Building

Link building is laborious and long-term - you do not want to suddenly get hundreds of links to your site as this is not natural growth and sophisticated search engines like Google can flag this. A steady increase is preferable. Link Ageing is also a factor, the longer a link to your site has been in existence the better.

Directories

Directories are essentially categorised pages of relevant links so are a good place to start - see our List of Directories page to find hundreds of directories you can sumbit too. Avoid the automated services that promise to submit your site to 10,000 search engines!

Swapping Links

Link pages on websites have been around for many years - the internet is essentially links from page to page and website to website and helps users find the information they want. While reciprocal links have been abused over the years and the benefit to SEO reduced, linking to relevant sites is still a good thing to do (IMHO), both for SEO and for your site visitors. If you trade in the UK you can swap links with websites in your sector that do not (eg: the USA or Europe).

To find websites that will accept links you need to search for them - enter the search term you are targetting (in our case this will be "website design" then add onto the end of that search phrase "add url", "submit website" or "add site", etc.
Click here to see the results. Its then a case of going through all the results and finding sites that meet your requirements.

Write courteous emails to the website owners and check that their links pages are not crammed with links to just any (non-relevant) websites. Also check their links pages and approach the relevant sites they link to, as these site owners are obviosuly open to the concept of swapping links.

Writing Articles

You can write articles about your company, product, sector or service and submit the articles to various websites or article distribution services. These will give you a credit at the end and a link back to your site.

Be sure to write original content on anything your publish on the web (especially on your own website) - never copy someone else's work - this will be penalised as duplicate content.

Create a Blog

Essentially the same as just creating another website and writing lots of content and linking back to your primary website - the benefit of creating a blog is that i) they are free to start, ii) they are hosted on another server to your website, iii) visitors can comment on your entries thereby generating more content.

Post to Forums

Forums are a good resource - perform a search for your primary keyphrases and add the term "forum" (you could also add "phpbb" or "vbulletin" - popular forum applications). Most forums allow you to add links in your posts or create a signature to each post to include links to your site using anchor text of your choice.

Be sure to write good quality posts and help users in the forum with any questions - do not spam the forums with rubbish content just to create a link. Good forum participation will not only help you with SEO but users of the forum may eventually contact you for services too.

It's so Boring!

Yes - it is laborious, time consuming and there is not really an automated process. If you want reciprocal link building and directory registrations done for you please contact us for a quote.

For further reading on getting links click here.

All links are not Equal

Some links to your site are better than others - ideally you want:

• A web page that is relevant to yours
  Even if the focus of the website is not relevant, they may have a page that is on-topic for your own site (eg: a news website is very general, but a news page about your specific type of product/service is relevant)
• Optimised Anchor Text
  Anchor text is the words that form the link, eg: Website Design Company - this tells the search engine spider that the site I am linking to is a website design company. For you beginners, here is the code:
  <b><a href="http://www.4w.co.uk/" title="Website Design Company">Website Design Company</a></b>
  It is also better (IMHO) to have the link in the middle of a sentence, eg: "4W Web Design is a Website Design Company in Bristol, UK." Also, wrapping your links in bold, italic, emphasis or strong tags gives your link a little bit extra emphasis as well.
  Many sites (eg: Directories) will only link to you using the anchor text of your company name, so on your homepage try to include your primary keywords in the name. For existing names this can still be done, eg: a company of solicitors may be 'officially' named "Taylor & Taylor" but you can dress this up on your homepage as "Taylor & Taylor Legal Services" so when a human reviewer checks your website all is well and you have included the keywords 'Legal Services'.
• Vary your Anchor Text
  Links to your site should not all be the same - create 4-6 variants of your anchor text using different keyphrases, eg: "Website Design Company", "Web Design Company", "Website Designers", Website Design Agency", etc. Identify your primary keyphrases using a Keyword Selection tool (see our SEO Resources page).
• Higher PageRank
  The higher the Pagerank of the page linking to you the better - download the Google toolbar to display the PageRank of any page you are viewing.
• Less Links on the Page
  The less links on the page linking to you the better, as the PageRank is split up between all the links on the page (85% is passed on), also - the higher up the source code your link appears above others the better (it gives it a higher priority). Pages with hundreds of links are generally to be avoided.