Optimize your Search in 3 Easy Steps (and this is Step 3)

Publishers' approach has changed a lot since the early days when everyone was out there scrounging, pretty randomly, for anyone, just anyone to link to their sites.

Anyone just anyone doesn’t work anymore. There is a degree to which it never really did; but as the search engines get better and better, the random indiscriminate linking works worse and worse.

But linking is still integral to search. The concept that in fact made Google a success was that sites that were valuable to searchers are sites recognized by other quality sites as important—sites with links from other quality sites.

The quality of a site is measured, by Google, as Page Rank. Page rank, by the way, refers to Larry Page, the guy who thought it up—it doesn’t mean the ranking of the listing on the search results page. Although to be sure the two do go hand in hand.

Google is on to the SEO tricks. They know that people are out there gaming the system in any way they can to get placement high on the top page of search results. And they know how the games work. So link farms don’t work. Link swaps don’t work. Reciprocal linking hardly works at all. And linking with a site whose content is not relevant to yours is an exercise in futility.

Paid links or sponsored links are useless as well, unless they are embedded in relevant text and not obviously sponsored.

So what does work? Well, here’s your best link: a one-way link from a site with high page rank whose content is relevant to yours.

But there are lots of other ways to get links! Internal linking is one; the links from one page of your site to another are important and they count! Also all the constantly updated content you put on your blogs and in your articles will include internal links to other articles in your site: all good.

The great big world of content sharing and social media offers lots of opportunities for links; much of what you put out there can be linked back to your site.

And of course creating and distributing videos is a really great way of getting links to your site. If you put out one video through Tube Mogul or Traffic Geyser, it can result in dozens or hundreds of backlinks to your site.
In fact the power of content sharing is such that where it once took days or even weeks to get ranked through submitting your site to the search engines, now you can appear in minutes.

Getting directory listings can be helpful. Getting press releases out through PR Web and other online press release sites can be really helpful. Getting links from non-profit sites and .edu sites can be powerful as well.

When setting up your links, both internal and external, pay attention to your anchor text. Anchor text is just the visible, clickable text in your link; and in search, anchor text matters.

To get an idea of the importance of anchor text, search “click here” in google. What do you get? Result #1 is Adobe—the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Why? Because thousands of sites offer the link with the words: to download the Adobe Acrobat Reader, click here. The link is the click here. And so click here becomes a top search phrase for Adobe.

You need to use your top keywords and search phrases in your links. Doing so will make you rank higher for those terms. Linking with a random term like “click here” is a waste of a link. You get some “link juice” for it, but not for your important keyword phrases. Use those keyword phrases in your blog links, your video links, and everywhere you are setting up content that links back to your site.

Have relevant descriptive text surrounding your link.

And provide what is called “linkbait”—good content that gets people talking, that is seen as valuable to other sites, and that people want to link to.