On Day 10 we went over how to optimize your site. Today we'll look at ways to get quality backlinks to improve your search engine rankings.
For Day Eleven, refer to pages 28-30 in the
31 Day Guide to Growing Your List
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Search Engines look for "votes" from third-party sites. The more "votes" a page gets, and the more votes from high quality sites, the better a page will rank for its keywords. What are these "votes"? They're links from other sites that are pointing to your pages...
The Truth About PageRank
Page 29 in the guide we're following mentions Google PageRank. This is a good opportunity to go over a few points that we've discussed before, but everyone may not be aware of.
I highly recommend you read this post from my archives: Google PageRank: Took or Marketing Gimmick? That will give you a lot of insight into what PageRank is, and what it is not. More importantly, the difference between Toolbar PageRank and Actual PageRank.
What most people know as PageRank is really only Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) and is not actual PageRank. Oddly, it’s still common practice to use the toolbar to get inbound links from pages with “more green” or higher PageRank...
Once you read the post above you'll have a better understanding of PR vs TBPR. My advice is to pay more attention to the quality and relevance of pages you want to link to, and get links from, than any other tool (or vanity metric).
Getting Quality Inbound Links
I recently did an entire series on link building which will make good study material for you in this phase of the challenge. Even if you followed the series live, you'll want to revisit these top posts in the series:
- Link Building 101: What is a Backlink?
- Effective Link Building: One Major Ingredient
- Analyzing Backlinks: How Many Do You Need?
- Link Marketing: Pingbacks vs Blog Comments
- Getting High Quality Inbound Links
- Link Building Strategies & Content Marketing
- 7 Simple One Way Link Building Strategies
- Link Building with Blog Interviews & Guest Blogging
Our guide also mentions Anchor Text, which is an important part of link building. See the Anchor Text section in the Link Building 101 post for more details on that.
Your Task For Today:
Start building links to the pages you optimized with specific keywords. Remember to get a variety of link types, from a variety of relevant sources, and to do this as naturally (organically) as you possibly can.
Your goal is not to spam the search engines. Your goal is to get relevant information in front of your target market - both on other websites where they are, and in the search results where they're looking.
Best,
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About Lynn Terry
Something that is also important to let your readers know is to think in terms of quality not quantity when it comes to inbound links. You can have a hundred links to your page but if they are not related to your page somehow, search engines will notice and this won’t do much for your page rank. Always go after relatable links from quality websites.
Good points. I covered that in detail in the series I linked to above, but good to state it here as well. Thanks!
I can vouch for this from my own linkbuilding experience . A hundred inbound links from known spam sites or low quality sites can actually have a negative effect on your pagerank.
I used to think that LinkDiagnosis was the best way to track in-bound links and to spy on the competition. But at the last Affiliate Summit, I learned about the Open Site Explorer from SEOMoz and their system is just as good if not better. I love the speed of the results.
Thanks for the tip with 'Open Site Explorer'. Good tool and the information the free version gives you is sufficient for starting on spying on oyur competitors (and gives you also good infos on your own site)
Hi Lynn,
I've been following the 31GYL and all of this information is great. I have been implementing what is appropriate as I go along and I will keep referring back to these posts as my business progresses. I was just wondering how long it takes for google to index and rank your site once you have built a good list of quality backlinks?
Thanks