Now that we have an understanding of what links are and why you need them, we need to get about acquiring some! It’s just basic internet math that he with the most relevant, keyword optimized and authoritative links wins. Let’s look at ten ways you can easily acquire some great inbound links, but first, a few Do’s and Don’ts!

* DO – vary your anchor text. Use your primary keywords first in anchor text links as much as you can, but also use the naked www URL, as well as a few “click here”. It’s only natural.

* DO - deeplink to your inner pages. Not every link needs to go to your home page. Have links go to the pages where it makes the most sense. This will help your overall site performance, if more than the home page ranks.

* DO – Keep at it. Your empire won’t be built in a day, so make this an ongoing task that is just part of site maintenance, because it is!

* DON’T – buy links from link sellers, especially sitewide links. Nothing screams phony as much as links to your site from every page of a 400 page directory site. Would that occur naturally? Google says no, and I agree.

* DON’T - acquire links form “bad neighborhoods.” This means from gambling, adult, or pharmaceutical sites. Your link profile will suffer for this.

* DON’T – collect only do-follow links. Yes, those are the ones we want, but it’s not natural to have exclusively those.  Besides, a link from an authoritative site could bring enough direct traffic to make it worthwhile.

And now, without further aDO or aDON’ts, Ten Great Ways to Get Backlinks!

1. Submit Articles – Links from articles you write that are published in highly trafficked and authoritative article directories can bring double benefits: high-quality, one way anchor text links, and very likely some direct traffic as well!

2. Directory Submissions – Links from web directories that have been around for a bit, have a lot of authority, pagerank, and site listings can be very worthwhile backlinks.

3. RSS Feeds – Utilizing as many RSS feeds as you can from your site, submitted to the RSS feed aggregators can significantly pump up not only inbound links, but traffic as well!

4. Videos – A video that is hosted on some of the more popular video sharing sites (especially YouTube), and that is getting a lot of views can spread all over the Web, taking links to your site with it!

5. Social Profiles – Some of the more valuable inbound backlinks these days are coming from social profile pages you set up on various social networking sites. Make sure you utilize this as much as possible. This one is drop dead easy to accomplish!

6. Social Bookmarking – Bookmarking your posts and pages as well as any content with links pointing to your site is a very good way to garner many incoming links, as well as promoting your promoters!

7. Blog Commenting and TrackBacks – While blog commenting is getting harder to do, as more blogs employ nofollow in their comments, it can still come through with some good linkage. TrackBacks have a special place, and once you master this, you won’t bother too much with commenting again.

8. Guest Posting – Posting on a highly trafficked blog with great content will not only reward you with a good link or two, but also a very distinct possibility of a major traffic spike.

9. Web 2.0 Sites – Putting up content with links pointing to your pages on various Web 2.0 sites, like Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger, Weebly, Multiply, and others are easy ways to collect some incoming backlinks.

10. Press Releases – A well distributed press release on a newsworthy topic involving your site can bring a number of links, as well as direct traffic, and the links last.

There you have it, ten ways to keep yourself (or your outsourcers!) busy for weeks to come!

Links are the currency of the Web. Get a good number of them pointing to your web pages, and you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings and consequently, more of what you’re after, whether that be sales, opt-ins, or any other results.

There are basically three different types of links when it comes to your site:

1. External links – Links that are leaving your website.

2. Incoming links – Links coming into your site.

3. Internal links – Links from one page to another in your website (or blog)

All three are very important and play a big part in how well you rank. Let’s look at each one more in depth.

External Links – These links leaving your site serve several purposes. First and foremost, they should be of value to visitors on your site. If every link leaving your site is an affiliate link, Google and the other search engines see this as particularly self-serving, and not of any particular value. The best practice is to mix in truly useful links to authority sites in your market. This can be done naturally in the course of your content, especially blog posts. Something as simple as “I saw this great article on WebMD today, and it was very enlightening” can not only deliver value, but satisfy the search engines as well. Some people are of the mind to limit the number of links leaving theirsite, and there is some validity to this. You also will want to, in most cases, append the “nofollow” tag to these links, to avoid bleeding link juice. There are other cases in which you’ll want to pass link love along.

Incoming Links – This part is the most important. Incoming links to your pages are considered “votes” for your pages, and thus help them rank higher in the eyes of the search engines. There should be a variety of keywords used as incoming links; not only your primary keywords, but also a smattering of your site’s naked www. URL, and a few “click here” as well. This is viewed as a natural linking pattern. Nobody naturally ranks for only one keyword phrase, and if you were to try and structure it thus, it may be seen as keyword spamming and you will be penalized. Go for a variety, and not thousands of them at once, and you’ll be fine.

Internal Links - Links within your site pointing to other pages have taken on a greater significance, and value. Try to link from the text if possible, and not only from a navigation bar. Google prizes contextual links more highly and these links will be seen as aids to your visitors in getting around your site, and thus rewarded. Don’t leave all your site links in the NavBar!

How to Create A Live HTML link

Here is the code necessary to make a link live on your pages. This also works in blog posts, though you can also often use the WYSIWYG (what you see if what you get) editor to put a link in. Make sure to use this exact code, with no additional spaces or characters; it DOES make a difference!

<a href=”http://www.contentdivas.com”>Article Marketing</a>

This will show on the page as Article Marketing, and will be credited to your site profile as a vote for your site with that keyword, giving the search engines an idea of what you’re about. Get enough incoming backlinks with that keyword, and pretty soon you’ll be ranking for it. The part that shows up on the web page is called “anchor text.”

Many times simply inserting your naked URL http://www.contentdivas.com will make that link operational. If you like to “pretty” it up a bit, you can use the previous format and change the anchor text part to this:

<a href=”http://www.contentdivas.com”>www.ContentDivas.com</a>

and it will show as www.ContentDivas.com

Next time we’ll go into some link building strategies and how you can use content marketing to enhance your site’s link profile.

Just when we thought our favorite social bookmarking tool couldn’t get any better, it did! SocialAdr now pings each social bookmark that is done for you, at no extra charge and with no input or work from you at all! (I like that!)

For those of you who don’t understand why this is a good thing many times over, let me explain what a ping is, and why you want this done. A ping is little more than an electronic notification of various ping services that there is new content here worth taking a look at. This notifies the search engines, which, in turn, come around a lot quicker than they normally might, thus getting your pages spidered and  hopefully indexed a lot faster! That’s why this is a good thing!

And to have it done free, with no labor or tools to buy or implement on your part, that makes SocialAdr even more of a no-brainer!

And on top if this, they are currently running a 5-day $1 trial for their paid,  do it all for you service!

What in the world are you waiting for?

Hey everyone!

I ran across this article that has more awesome information regarding Google’s May Day Update! Check it out and let us know what you think! This is just another GREAT example how what we’re doing for our clients is surviving Google’s test of time!

http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/view-from-the-other-side-of-the-may-day-update/

See you soon!

~Shelby

Most likely, nothing. Whenever Google comes out with some algorithm change (and that’s what this is), hysteria hits the streets, and even site owners whose pages haven’t been impacted in any meaningful way get skittish.

This is an algorithmic change aimed at improving the search results returned for longtail search queries. Large sites that have product pages with scant, unique content within them and precious few links are the most impacted. Many times they contain only a manufacturer’s product description and very little more. To complicate this, they are several tiers removed from the home page, internal linking is suspect, and not enough deep linking is to be found. The days of popping in a manufacturer’s product description and perhaps changing a few words are likely gone.

This would seem to make a case for flatter site architecture, as well as the need to pump more original content into “thin” product pages. Much like when Google targeted “thin affiliate pages,” this seems to be along the same lines.

Here at ContentDivas, this has been our mantra all along: put quality content first, and then more of it!

Let’s let Google’s Matt Cutts have the last word!