Website Traffic Strategies Gazette

How to Use Links to Optimize Your Site for Google

Google as well as other major search engines such as yahoo and MSN all look at how many links your site has in order to determine its importance. This is also what determines your ranking.

Not all links have an equal value. What determines the value of the link is its relevancy to the page it is linked to. The more relevant the page is the greater the value of the link. If not just the page, but the whole site is relevant the link is even more valuable.

Here are some ways to get quality links to your site:

Reciprocal Links.

Once upon a time they were considered very good, today they don’t have the value they once did but they are still useful. It is important that the links you get in this way are very relevant to the content in your site. This way reciprocal links will still increase your ranking.

Article Writing.

This is one of the best ways of creating links back to your site. This can have a viral effect as webmasters take up your article and post it on their site or send it out in a newsletter. Articles you submit must have a link back to your site. Most article directories allow you to place a link in your bio section. There are hundreds of these article directories that you can post to. Here are some you must make sure to include: EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, and GoArticles.com.

Link Farms

If you come across a link farm go the other way. A link farm is a site of scrolling pages with countless links. These links are bad. They can actually kill your rankings. They are really part of a spammer’s network. Never link to any of these sites as it can downgrade your ranking with Google.

Directories

Links from directories can be very helpful in upgrading your ranking. This is especially so from such directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo. You can also look for other respected directories. Try to get your site listed with DMOZ. It can be very difficult but if you keep submitting it every 4 - 6 months. Search for the best category and keep trying for it.

It is easier to get listed with Yahoo. Easier in one way and that is you don’t need to keep trying. Not so easy in another way and that is it will cost you $299. Google sees Yahoo directory as somewhat of an authority. Your link will be valuable because of this.

Another link that is important is anchor text. Anchor text is the text in the hyperlink. An example of anchor text is this: For the very best in web hosting you can’t go past LinksParadise. The words “web hosting” is hyperlinked. This is anchor text. I used “web hosting” as this would be a keyword my site is optimized for. If you did a search with Google for the words “Click Here” you will find that the #1 site for that search term is Adobe. This is because many sites link to Adobe Acrobat Reader, and use the anchor text “Click Here”

An anchor text link that uses the keyword or key phrase is far better. For example if you were targeting the keyword phrase; “low cost web hosting” You would anchor it this way: “to really benefit from our low cost web hosting here are some pointers” The keyword phrase we are targeting is our anchor text.

These are just a few of the many things you can do to increase your ranking with Google.

By Lucas Heijn

About the Author:
Lucas Heijn is CEO of LinksParadise Hosting. We have created a web hosting package for the internet business. There is also an easy to use Drag & Drop site creator. We provide a follow-up autoresponder free.