Yesterday while I was talking with head of SEO for Yahoo! Canada Darryl Peddle, he stressed how important links are to the search engine ranking of your site. The more links there are coming into your site, the higher you get ranked.
But how do you get those incoming links? It’s actually not that hard.
Online Directories
Listing your website or blog in key online directories is important. Two of the most important ones are Yahoo Directory and Dmoz. In both directories new listings are proofed by a real person to rule out spam sites so they both are considered very authoritative by search engine.
Demoz is free and may take you six months to a year to actually appear. Yahoo Directory will get you in faster but costs $299 per year. For some that’s a steep price, but the search engine ranking you’ll gain is well worth the cost.
Article directories
Submitting high quality, original articles using your important keywords to the main article directories really helps your SEO. At the bottom of each article you have a resource box which includes some info about you and your url.
How does this help? Whenever someone uses your article on their blog or website, they must include the resource box with the live link to your site. Assuming they used your article because it matches the subject of their site, these incoming links can really increase your ranking.
Darryl suggests writing 12 unique articles of 250 to 300 words and posting them to the article directories over the course of a couple of months.
Where do you submit articles? If you do nothing else, submit to ezinearticles.com. They are the most important article directory. If you have the time, you should also submit to goarticles.com, buzzle.com, articlealley.com and articledashboard.com.
Reciprocal Link Building
This suggestion by Darryl surprised me because everyone I know has been saying this is a big no-no. However, Darryl assures me this still has a positive effect, if done correctly.
You don’t want to trade links with just anyone. You must only link with people who are in your niche. If incoming and outgoing links are from sites on a related topic, the search engines see this as more authoritative. So if you are selling computers on your site, you would want to link with someone who sells computer software, not someone who sells cosmetics.
An even better way to exchange links is to trade articles or blog posts. Write an original article for the other person’s site and include a link to your own site. This is more powerful than being part of a list of links because search engines look at the total number of links on a page when calculating their worth. So a single link from a blog post is more valuable than a link on a page of fifty other links.
It’s also better from a reader point of view. A reader from the other website or blog is more likely to click the link after your article than if it’s just one link in a long line of links. And after all, getting people to your site is why you’re worried about SEO anyway.
Internal Links
Creating links within your site is also important. When you write an article, create links back to other related articles you’ve previously written. This makes it easier for the search engine spiders to crawl your site. It also makes it easier for readers to locate related content which may make them spend more time on your site.
Clearly building incoming links and therefore improving your search engine ranking is not all that hard or mysterious. It just takes a little planning and some time.
Andrea J. Stenberg
