Somet Basic Tools for Your Link Program - Part 4

CREATING A SUCCESSFUL LINK PROGRAM -Part 4

SOME BASIC TOOLS FOR YOUR LINK PROGRAM

by Rick Hendershot,
Linknet Publishing Network - http://www.sbo-linknet.com

GETTING READY TO START

Before you start your link acquisition program, you will need a few tools. These will help you get going in the correct direction, right from the beginning.

1. GET THE GOOGLE TOOLBAR at http://toolbar.google.com.

This will help you do Google searches, see the Page Rank of
possible link partners, and check on "back links" of various pages.I will explain these things further in a future lesson. For now,just download and install the Google Tool Bar.

Follow up:

2. GET THE ALEXA TOOLBAR

For a short description of what it is and how it works go to

http://www.small-business-online.com/articles/article-alexa.shtml

One of the features of the toolbar is to give you what are called
"Alexa rankings." These are traffic rankings which are primarily
based on surfing stats derived from Alexa's installed base of
toolbar users. Yes, it is true that Alexa rankings are skewed
towards Alexa users, and can be manipulated by almost anyone caring to do it. Still, the Alexa ranking is becoming one of the most important tools we webmasters have for watching the progress of our sites as we develop and try to drive traffic to them.

3. KEEP A PEN AND NOTEBOOK HANDY

As you begin your search for link partners you will find yourself overwhelmed by all the possible candidates. You will stumble on a beautifully rich list of relevant sites. Then you will follow one of those links, and find another incredibly broad range of possibilities. Meanwhile,the first list will be gone. The best advice is to make a note of possible link partners as you come across them. When you see an interesting looking list of prospects, write it down.

4. CREATE YOUR LINK PAGES

The fourth thing you should do is organize a series of pages where you can post links to your link partners. While many webmasters use a "directory" to hold links to link partners, these pages do NOT have to be in a "directory" form. They can be a series of pages created specifically to hold links from link partners. Or they can just be "ordinary" pages within your site.

Many webmasters place links on "ordinary" high traffic pages within their sites - even on the home page of the site. You should be prepared to do this, because it may be the only way you can get links from certain high value partners.

The important thing is to try to give your pages some focus.
For instance, you may want to have a page for "pet care" partners, and another for "online shopping" partners. Try to "optimize" these pages by giving them a title and main headline that contains the most important keyword ("pet care" or "online shopping"), and you may even want to place a small article on the page that focuses on the theme of the page. All of this will enhance the value of the links you give to your partners, and increase the chances of you getting high quality links in the future.

A good rule of thumb is to put only about 50 links on a given page. If you target to have between 200 and 500 links, that
means you should end up with somewhere between 4 and 10 pages where you place links.

5. CREATE YOUR LINK TEXT

Your "link text" is the text you're going to ask your link partners to place on their site. Don't be shy about this. Remember, a link is essentially a free advertisement on someone else's site pointing back to yours. So give it some ad-like features.

For starters, make sure your "anchor text" includes your
most important keyword. Google considers this quite important.

For example here is the text link I use for one of my clients:

Free Card business card
displays - The Free Card business card display system is a
unique small business opportunity. Free Card displays are located
in high traffic areas and loaded with full color business cards on behalf of advertisers. Cards are automatically dispensed to
interested consumers.

Notice that the anchor text is not simply "www.freecard.com"
(the URL) or even FreeCard.com (what some might consider the
"site name") but rather a description of the product, including the most important keyword, "business card displays". Further, I have built more of this client's most important keywords into the description accompanying the anchor text. This enhances the
"relevance" of the link page where your link appears.

Create more than one version of this link text. A "long" one
should be roughly 200 characters. A short one might be less than
100 characters. Having two or three different versions and lengths of your link text ready to go will make your life a lot easier when it comes to actually exchanging links.

Finally, you should vary your "anchor text". Google is looking for "natural" linking pattersn, and expects to see different anchor text used. Sometimes you will want to use "pet care", and other times "pet care resources", "products for pets", and sometimes even the URL is good: "www.mypetproducts.com".

And now that we have all that out of the way, in the next few
lessons I will tell you how to actually go out and get those 200
or so valuable link partners.

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Rick Hendershot publishes the Linknet Network of websites.
http://www.sbo-linknet.com

Kick start your linking program with as many as 150 quality links
http://www.sbo-linknet.com/products