Article: How to get inbound links to your site (part 2)

[paolo]

Article:
How to get quality inbound links to your site (part 2)

The two most important factors in determining your position in the search engine rankings are:

a) the content of your site;
b) the number and quality of inbound links to your site.

You can see part 1 of this article, covering a basic linking strategy, here:
viewtopic.php?t=100

In part 2 we are looking at how to get links from around the internet.


1. Directories
Directories organize the internet into categories. Some of them are edited by humans – you submit your site and they (eventually) have a look at it and decide whether to include it or not.

The best free directory is the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org). It takes months to be considered for entry but once you are in the search engines take note because it means a picky human has looked at your site and it is OK.

Submit your site to as many free directories as you can, especially ones that are travel-related, like http://www.aardvarktravel.net/. These may not bring you much human traffic but they will give you a relevant inbound link, and some of these will give your site a boost in the search engines.

For a list of online directories and search engines see the web directories lists at www.isedb.com.

Submitting to directories takes a little time because you have to do it by hand. The fields you have to fill in are very similar across all of them so prepare a Word document with the relevant text to copy and paste from. The description of your site and the keywords relevant to it are the longest fields to fill in.


2. Cheat!
Find your local competitors that are outperforming you in the rankings and check their inbound links by typing into Google:
link:www.domain.com
substituting the name of the site for ‘domain’. This will return a list of sites linking to theirs – go through the list and see which sites might also link to yours.

Note: this search on Google only reveals some links, typically from sites with a Google PageRank of 4 or more. If you want to see all sites that link to a site you have to do a search like this:
www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com
inserting the address of the site you are interested in. This asks Google to return every mention of a particular url, excluding those on that url.


3. Find link submits
Some sites encourage you to exchange links with them, for instance some rental listing sites. They will usually have a links page with instructions on how to submit your link.

The way to find these instantly is to type into Google a phrase relating to your field, e.g. “holiday rentals� or “vacation rentals�, in double quotation marks to signify that exact phrase. And add a phrase that always appears on these links pages: “submit a url�, “add a url�, or “submit a link�.

So your Google search would look like this:
“vacation rental� AND “submit a link�

The ‘AND’ stipulates you only want pages that include both these phrases.

This search will return either the links page of sites or the homepages where there is a link to the links page.


4. Namedrop
Make a point of posting on forums, newsgroups, online guestbooks, chatrooms with your url in your signature, especially if they are related to the business of rentals. Start with the Lay My Hat forum! YahooGroups have discussions on every subject under the sun: http://groups.yahoo.com/.

Some of these links will be picked up by search engines and improve your ranking. All may bring some targeted human traffic.

Copyright Paolo De Paolis 2005

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