Sheara Wilensky . com

Arguably one of the most important factors in increasing your website’s visibility in the search engines is the quality and quantity of incoming links to your site. Search engine crawlers find you by following links leading to your site, and if these links carry authority, it will deem your site important and push you up in the rankings.

There are many ways of acquiring links. You can swap links with another site (I’ll give you a link to your site if you give me a link to mine), although this practice is antiquated and not effective like it use to be, and it may hurt you if you link to sites in the wrong “neighborhoods”. Nothing beats creating the most amazing website ever that will entice the “linkerati” to naturally link to you. For example, if you sell digital cameras, than you want to have detailed descriptions of all your products, reviews, discussion forums, photos, videos, etc. The more compelling and accurate information you provide to the users, the more people will want to read your site, participate, and link to you so others can find you. A more controversial method of acquiring links is purchasing them through a link broker such as Text Link Ads. Acquiring powerful links, or “link baiting”, is an important aspect of SEO.

Be careful when purchasing links. A “bad” or “shady” link may hurt your site more than help it. Think about it like this. If you have are selling digital cameras, you want links from sites like PC Magazine, the Wikipedia digital camera page, the How Stuff Works camera article, electronics blogs, even travel sites because tourists use cameras. Buying links from beauty products sites, swimming pool equipment, medical websites etc. have absolutely no relevance to your site. If you purchase a link on a medical site, someone who is reading it will probably ignore your text link ad because they are focused on getting medical information and not in a shopping frame of mind. But if someone is reading an electronics article or review, they are arming themselves with the knowledge to make an informed purchase. They are considered a qualified lead and will be more likely to follow the link to your digital camera store and perhaps even buy one.

Now, say you are about to purchase a link on an electronics blog. This may be relevant to your own site, but you also need to consider the quality of the blog. If this electronics blog is two months old, and gets maybe 10 page views a day, and has only 5 or so incoming links itself, well that site is not exactly going to send traffic your way, is it? So just because the topic is relevant to your own does not necessary mean you should invest in buying a text link.

There are several ways to determine the quality of a website. One way is to do a Yahoo Link Domain check. Go to Yahoo.com and type in linkdomain:www.yoursite.com. It will provide you with a list of indexed pages and a list of sites linking to your website.

Another way is through Google Page Rank in the Google toolbar. You might already have this installed in your browser. The PR tool ranks pages on a scale of 1 to 10. Toolbar data is often misleading, so be sure to understand the cons of using toolbar PR data when making a text link purchase decision. What Google puts on its Page Rank toolbar tends to be a quarterly (often less) update of what that webpage was at one point in time. A PR of 1 – 3 maybe just tells you that the site is indexed. A PR of 5 – 8 maybe tells you the page is better. But new pages take time to develop Page Rank, no matter how good they are, and no matter how many links they get. So Google Page Rank is misleading as well. But in your link buying process, if you see a PR of 5 or better, it may be a cue to dig deeper into buying a link from that page.

A third way is through the Alexa toolbar. Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that prepares web rankings based on statistics. Their toolbar ranks sites in numerical order so the lower the rank, the more trafficked the site (theoretically).

There is controversy over the accuracy of Alexa based on typical internet behavior. First off, Alexa can only gather data from sites that have the Alexa toolbar installed, and so the data is skewed. Alexa users tend to be in the internet industry and more web-savvy than the average user. Additionally, the higher the Alexa rank, the less accurate it is, because there are billions of web pages so at certain point the rankings tend to be all over the place. There are ongoing debates on whether Alexa is good or bad so you need to take it with a grain of salt. It’s the best data that’s available for free. Another similar free product is compete.com.

Now if you are prepared to pay tens of thousands of dollars for data, you can use Hitwise. Hitwise collects their data from ISPs, but is also skewed. The big-name internet service providers like Roadrunner, Comcast etc. don’t allow Hitwise to collect data from their customers due to privacy issues. So Hitwise is mostly accurate in areas that are not monopolized by broadband providers.

Google also has a tool similar to Yahoo Linkdomain, link:www.yoursite.com. But this tool is terrible. Don’t use it. Google is more protective of SEO’s messing with their algorithms so the tool is not accurate. It’s garbage data for beginner SEOs. That’s how dubious Google is.

So always do a Linkdomain on Yahoo. Yahoo also tends to generate results based on order of importance of the sites, so you can find a lot of other quality sites through this tool from which to acquire more links.

One more thing to know about purchasing links. Pace yourself. Don’t purchase say 100 in one day over the course of a year, because it appears unnatural to the search engine (they know all) and it may trigger a red flag. Set yourself a time line for purchasing links.