Building incoming links for SEO

Links to your website from other websites are known as “incoming links” and they’re very important when it comes to determining your place in search results.

Google considers incoming links to be like ‘recommendations’. The more good quality recommendations your website has, the more important your site is deemed to be. The emphasis is on “good quality” though – the websites linking to you must have content that is relevant to your own content and must be reputable websites in themselves.

You can gauge a website’s reputation in Google’s eyes by checking its PageRank – the higher the PageRank, the more reputable the site. To check a website's Pagerank, download Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com), navigate to the site in question then look at its Page Rank in the toolbar:

There are several ways to build incoming links:

• Write good content: If you write something interesting and relevant, other website owners will link to you - simple as that!
• Write & submit articles: Write an interesting and relevant article and submit to various article repositories. You can add an "About the author" paragraph in a resource box that links back to your website.
  
• Directory submissions: There are a range of free and paid directories available which you can submit your website to. You should check the PageRank of the directory in question to ensure that you are submitting to high quality directories.
  
• Reciprocal link building: This is when you place a link on your website to another website and they do the same for you. This is probably the most straighforward and popular way to build your incoming links and it's the method I'm going to focus on next.

Partners Page

The first step is to create a page where you'll place your reciprocal links. The most professional way to do this is to create a page called "Partners" and link to it from the footer of your website.

Your partners page should be split into "Featured Partners" followed by links to partner sub-pages. Some websites and directories insist that their link is placed no more than one click from your homepage - these sites should sit under "Featured Partners".

Other links should be categorised as appropriate, with a sub partners page for each.

Stick to 25 links MAXIMUM per page.

Finding Link Exchange Partners

You should aim for 250-500 good quality incoming links, built gradually over time (20 per month is a good steady rate). Building too many incoming links too quickly looks 'spammy' to search engines.

There's an interesting page here showing many many incoming links of certain PageRanks you'd need to increase your own PageRank. It nicely illustrates the difference that quality (i.e. high PageRank) links can make. For example, if you are aiming to make your website a PR 6, you'd need 92,414 PR1 websites linking to you in order to achieve it! But, if you have your incoming links from PR4 websites, you'd only need 555 of them to achieve your goal.

There are two main ways to set up reciprocal link exchanges with other websites:

1. Search for suitable websites, find the contact email address for each site and send them an email.
   This is not only time consuming, but it's awfully hard to send a link request email that doesn't seem spammy. I have to admit that I receive several link exchange requests each day and I tend not to even read them.
   My tips are:
   * Try to find out who you're writing to and address them personally.
   * Make sure your email talks specifically about their website and why you'd like to exchange links
   * Explain why you think your website would be of interest to their readers, without it sounding like you're trying to sell something!
   * Add a link to their site on your Partners page (or a sub-page) first.
   
   
2. Use a reciprocal link exchange website.
   These websites are setup as directories of website owners who are looking to exchange links. You sign up (some are free, some charge membership) and give details of your website. Then you can either sit back and wait for link exchange requests to come in, or you can search the directory and send requests directly to the owners of websites that interest you. Make sure you visit the websites you are looking to exchange links with to ensure that the content complements your own website content and that the websites have a reasonable PageRank (ideally 3 or above).

Whichever method you choose, you MUST take care to choose good quality link partners. Your partners should be indexed in Google, with ideally a PageRank of 3 or above.

Anchor Text

We've already established that the source of incoming links is very important but there's another factor that rates highly: the anchor text.

Anchor text is the part of the link that you click on. For example, in the follow link:

CMS installation & setup from Train Or Maintain.

the anchor text is "CMS installation and setup". Google looks at websites that link to you when it's evaluating how relevant your website is to a keyword that's being searched for. The anchor text used in these incoming links describes the content of the page/website being linking to, so you should always try to include your keywords. In the example above, if someone was searching for "CMS installation", my incoming links would be relevant therefore Google would consider my website to be relevant. However, if I'd requested my incoming links to be written as:

Train or Maintain offers CMS installation & setup and more

then my anchor text would have been "Train or Maintain" which would have been LESS relevant for this search.

Sometimes it isn't possible to control the anchor text on your incoming links - e.g. in most link directories, you need to use your business or website name as the anchor - but it's usually possible in reciprocal link exchanges.

Use your list of keywords and try to optimise your incoming links whenever you can!

REMEMBER: The first word in the anchor text is given the most importance. The level of importance falls for each subsequent word, so keep that in mind when considering your anchor words/phrase.

The author is a web developer and consultant at http://www.trainormaintain.co.uk, offering website services to small and medium enterprises.