Optimize My Search

Make Backlinks Count

There is one thing you will need to learn fast as a new webmaster and understand as a seasoned webmaster, backlinks are important for search engine ranking success. (Backlinks: links on other web sites that point to yours) How you get those backlinks, naturally, link exchanges, buying or whatever is for another article. This one will explain ways to make them count the most and to do that, you have to use backlinks relative to your site.

Some backlinks can hurt, so there has to be some investigative work done before you except that exchange. The whole point of having backlinks is to benefit each others visitors and then your site.

Here are a few items to help you with the link exchange and to see if it would be beneficial to you to do the exchange at all. You should check these items on three pages of the site you want to link with: Home Page, Directory Page and Backlink Page.

You want to check the Home Page to find out some vital statistics of the whole site. The Directory Page, some sites may or may not have this page; it is where they categorize all their links, if they do not just skip this. Finally the Backlink Page is where your actually link will come from.

Before we get started I would like to state Google is not the last word in all things relating to search, but for right now it is real close .

With that in mind we need to check and see what Google thinks of the site we want a link from and check these items on the three pages from above.

1) Type in site:www.thedomain.com (where “thedomain” is the site you want to link from) This will show how many pages are indexed by Google. I good indication of how long the site has been active.

2) Type in links:www.thesite.com (where “thedomain” is the site you want to link from) This will give you an approximation of links Google has for that site. Typing same in Yahoo will give you a better indication.

3) Type in type in domain name in Google and see if it is listed.

4) What is PR of Home Page. (Can use Google Toolbar or your favorite Pang Rank site)

You have to look at all four of these in a group to decide if it is a match for you. Some musts for me are it has to be listed in Google and it has to have some pages indexed, especially the page I am directly getting link from. PR is not a must for me if the site looks great and is just getting started. My link can grow in importance as the site gains PR. Now if the PR is low and they have 1,000’s of links then that also is a red flag and I may not want to link.

The other items I like to look at to make sure I am getting backlinks from sites that are similar to mine and relevant to my content are:

5) Title Tag

6) Description Tag

7) Keyword tag

Since Google puts heavy weight on backlinks from sites that are the same theme as yours, you want to make sure these tags relate to your site. No need for exact matches but have to similar. You can check these most of the time by right clicking on the home page and choosing view source, this information is usually close to the top in a title or meta tag. You will want to check the same tag information on the particular page you are getting the link from also if it is different than the home page.

Only after I feel the site as passed all 7 items will I consider accepting a link from that site. Good, clean relative backlinks can do wonders for a site’s ranking; make sure you are doing everything to keep your backlinks in order.

It is only when the target web site passes the 3 steps that you should feel confident about exchanging links with them in that the link exchange will be to your advantage. Needless to say that the target web site will also need to conduct a similar 3-step analysis of your site prior to wanting to exchange links with you.

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Monday ~ August 08, 2007 by OMS Posted in General SEO |

 

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