The number of links from other web sites linking to yours, is a very important factor today in getting your site to rank highly in search engine results. In fact, Google, the number one search engine with a 49% market share, has this to say about it:
"PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives." (emphasis mine)
"PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results.?
So finding out how many links you have coming to your web site from other sites, is very important. How do you find out?
Go to Google. First of all, Google has a so-called "link" tool (link:yourwebsite.com), but it has been broken for over a year, so don't use it. In fact, if you go to the web site for the White House,http://www.whitehouse.gov, Google's link tool will show it to have 1,000 links to it. Not very likely (the correct number is over a million).
The way to find out how many links you have is to enter, at Google: yourwebsite.com -site:yourwebsite.com
Of course you put your URL or web address into the above string, instead of "yourwebsite.com."
What this does is to show how many sites have your web site address on them, linking to you, but it subtracts the pages from your own web site. If you have multiple sites, do this procedure for all of them.
It is also interesting to do the same thing for several of your competitors' web sites.
Also, at Google, type in one of the top keywords for your type of business. Take the top few web sites for that keyword, and do the process above for that web address (the root domain name, not the individual page), and see how many links those sites have to them. Typically the number will be pretty high for the sites appearing high in the Google results.
If you have not consciously done any sort of link building campaign, chances are that the number of links to your site will not be very high. 10-150 links would qualify as not very high. 400-500 is getting better. But you will probably see in doing the exercise above that it is necessary to get anywhere from 1,000 to over 20,000 links, to be competitive in the search engines, depending on how competitive your given keyword is.
Link Building
The above exercise will show you where your site stands in terms of links. If the number is high, congratulations. You have probably engaged in a successful link building campaign of some kind. But if the number is low, then you need to consider some sort of link building campaign.
Reciprocal Links: Getting reciprocal links, where you and the owner of another web site both link to each other, used to be the hot way to build links to your site. It still can be of some use, but the search engines have begun to discount these links. So that is not the way to go today.
Content Hubs/Article Directories: Content Hubs, also called Article Directories, are large sites with thousands of informational articles on them. The way these work is that you write an article, put the name of your company along with your web address somewhere in the article, and also include a "bio box" at the bottom where you say who you are, and include again your web address and company name. You submit the article to a number of article directories, and once they put the article up, each one of these counts as a link to your site, because of the web address in the article and in the bio box. It will usually take a week or two before you see your links count go up from this.
Plus, if you write good articles that appeal to people who go to the content hubs, they will download your articles and put them up on their own web sites. By submitting the article you are giving the readers permission to do that. So if you write an article that becomes popular, it will get put up on other sites and each one of these will count as an inbound link to your site as well.
There are currently over 1,000 of these content hubs on the Net. Most of them have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of articles, and many are highly ranked by the search engines. So submitting articles to the content hubs is one of the best ways to build links to your site. Plus there are ways to "supercharge" the number of links you get from this activity.
RSS Feeds: RSS stands for "really simple syndication" or "rich site summary," depending on who you talk to. This is a new and effective way to syndicate content from your site, meaning to get it out to lots of other sites on the web.
The way this is done is first of all to have some articles up on your site, usually with a table of contents page linking to other pages that each have one article on them. Then you build what is called an "XML" file, which is a file that allows for the easy transfer of information from one web site to another. This XML file contains information on all of your articles, including their title, a short blurb on each, and the web address of each article.
Then you go to each of the big RSS search engines. These are search engines that allow people to search for specific information that is being syndicated through an RSS feed or a blog, so that they can subscribe to it.
So you go to all those RSS search engines, and register your RSS feed. Now, information on your RSS feed will be contained in those search engines, and people who search for the keywords contained in your RSS feeds will see the blurbs on your feed and your articles.
Now those people searching for those keywords can subscribe to your RSS feed. That means that if they get some kind of RSS feed reader software (There are some that you put on your computer and use, sort of like an email program, to read RSS feeds, plus there are some that work online), they can subscribe to your feed. Now, every time you put out new content, such as a press release or a new article of some kind, it will appear in their RSS feed reader software. People receiving this information from your RSS feed will often put it up on their own web sites or blogs, and talk about it, thus building links to your web site.
RSS feeds are the cutting edge of link building, and there are indications that the search engines like the links that result from this activity better than some other activities. These RSS feeds are definitely in the "early adopter" phase, but it is growing rapidly.
Summary
Whatever you do to build links to your web site, whether article directory submissions or RSS feeds, having an ongoing link building campaign is a vital necessity for any commercial web site today. And the key to success with either one of these techniques is to continue to submit new content regularly, at least twice a month.
About the Author
John Eberhard is President of RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), an Internet marketing and web design firm located in Los Angeles. To subscribe to his newsletter, go to http://www.realwebmarketing.net/freenewsletter.html
