Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Three easy steps to optimize your existing links

Link building is one of the hardest and one of the most important things that you have to do if you want to get high rankings on Google. As it takes so much time to get inbound links, it is very important to make sure that the links to your website contain the right keywords. 

         

The basics about keywords in text links and link bombs

Google tries to find a relation between the words that are used to link to your site and the content of your website. If many websites link to your website with the word “tomatoes” then Google’s algorithm will come to the conclusion that your website should be listed in the search results for the keyword “tomatoes”.

The keywords in the links to a website have been so important for Google that people managed to get websites to the top of Google’s search results for very obscure keywords. For example, some people started a scheme in which they asked their friends to link to the official website of George W. Bush with the keyword “miserable failure”.

The result was that George W. Bush’s website was #1 on Google for that keyword. In the meantime, Google has learned to deal with these so-called Google bombs and it’s not as easy to manipulate the results with the links as it has been.

What you should do if your website has no links

When you try to get links from other websites, you should make sure that they help you to increase your rankings for your keywords. That means that you must make sure that the links to your website contain your keywords.

At the same time, you must make sure that the links to your site don’t look like a Google bomb. You need links to your website that use keywords that are related to your site. If many websites link to you with a special keyword, that will increase your chances to be listed for that keyword. However, the keyword should be varied.

For example, if you want to be listed for “tomatoes”, the other websites should link to your site with link texts such as “tomatoes”, “delicious tomatoes”, “great tomatoes”, “tomatoes and other vegetables”, etc.

In addition, the web page to which the links point should also contain content about tomatoes. If the linked page contains the same keywords as the link texts then it is less likely that the links are part of a Google bomb.

A good way to start link building is to contact the websites that link to your competitors. To find the websites that link to your competitors, select “Add sites > Find websites that link to your competitors” in IBP’s link manager. IBP will find these websites for you and it will also help you to contact these sites.

What you should do if your website already has some links
If your website already has some links then you should make sure that the other websites link with the right link texts to your site.

Three easy steps to optimize your existing links
Do the following to optimize the links to your website:

  1. Select “Add sites > Find websites that already link to your site“ in IBP’s link manager. IBP will import all websites that link to your site and that have been indexed by search engines.
  2. IBP will show the text that the other websites use to link to your website in a clearly arranged list. (By the way, the list also contains other information such as Google PageRank, IP address, Alexa TrafficRank, number of outbound links on the page, total number of links on the page, etc.)
  3. If the other website links to you with a unrelated words such as “click here” or “more information” then use the built-in contact tools in IBP’s link manager to quickly contact the webmaster of the other site and politely ask them to change the link text.

By optimizing your existing link texts, you’ll greatly increase the chances to be listed for the keywords that are relevant to your website.

Optimizing the links to your website is not enough. You must also optimize the content of your web pages to show Google that your website is relevant to your keywords. The links that point to your website should confirm that your website is really relevant for the keywords for which you optimized your pages.

Click here to find out if the content of your website matches the links that point to your site »