Divine Write Copywriting Blog

One of the best ways to build the link popularity of your site (thereby increasing your search engine rank) is to check where your competitors’ links are coming from, and try to get links from those sites yourself. (You’ll be surprised where some of their links come from.)

Yes, it’s a simple idea, but when you actually try to do it, it takes time and you need to be organised. Below is a guide that’ll help you complete the task efficiently and effectively.

To check on the links of your competitors:

STEP 1) Go to Google and search for your target keyword.
STEP 2) Make a note of the top 5 competitors who appear (write down their domain name).
STEP 3) Return to Google and search for the first domain name in the list (i.e. type “www.competitorsdomainname.com” in the search field, including the quotes).
STEP 4) Google will display all the pages it can find that contain the string, www.competitorsdomainname.com. In most cases, these instances will be actual links to your competitor’s website. (TIP: If there are many results, bookmark the search results page as this process will take a long time – possibly months.)
STEP 5) Visit each page (TIP: Right click on the first result and select “Open in New Window”. By opening a separate window to see the page, you won’t lose your search results page.)
STEP 6) Try to think of a way to get a link to your website on the same page (TIP: Avoid sending them an email as webmaster receive a lot of SPAM and your email will likely go unnoticed. Try calling them instead.)
STEP 7) Repeat for each of your top 5 ranking competitors.

TIP: In the list of results, the sites which appear high up in the list of results are likely to have a higher Google PageRank (PR – see Glossary) than the sites which appear toward the end of the list. You should be more interested in obtaining links to sites with a high PR (assuming they’re also relevant).

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Probably the most well known method of generating inbound links is to look for link partners. This is done in a variety of ways:

• ask customers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• ask suppliers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• look for relevant high ranking sites and ask them to link to you (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• buy SEO software which locates high ranking sites and automatically emails their owners asking them to link to you (possibly in return for a link to theirs)

In my opinion, though, link partners is one of the least effective method of increasing your search engine ranking because:

1. It’s normally done via email and, unfortunately, webmasters of high ranking sites receive many link partner requests each day (not to mention hundreds of other SPAM emails). They’re normally automated and irrelevant. As a result, most email-initiated link partner requests are deleted.
2. Most link partner requests are sent by webmasters of low PR sites to webmasters of high PR sites. Although the link would be very beneficial to the low PR site, it wouldn’t help the high PR site at all.
3. Even if you offer a reciprocal link (a link back to their website), most webmasters of high PR sites will not be interested because it’s extra work. What’s more, they won’t want to obscure the purpose of their site with hundreds of links (relevant or not, they don’t want to look like a directory to their customers).
4. Reciprocal links are of questionable value, unless the sites are closely related.

TIP: If you decide to manually look for link partners, one way of assessing a site’s importance is to look at their Google PageRank (PR). PR is how Google scores importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. Any site with a PR of 4 or above is generally considered a worthy link partner. By downloading the Google Toolbar, you can view the PR of any site you visit.

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There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won’t be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate.

NOTE: Link generation is an ongoing (often tedious) task. You need to be dedicated and systematic. In other words, you need a strategy. Take a look through the link generation alternatives discussed below to see what suits you best. Then put your thinking cap on and get creative. It’s a new and very exciting field; there are undoubtedly many undiscovered ways to generate links. This chapter is just a starting point.

The six main ways to generate inbound links these days are:

1. Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories
2. Get your business partners to link to you
3. Swap links
4. Find out who links to your competitors
5. Article PR
6. Simply have great content on your site

Over the coming days, I’ll cover each of these methods in a little more detail. Today, I’ll address just the first.

Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories

The search engines regularly crawl these directories in search of new links, and they value these links quite highly (largely because the directories are human-edited).

Here’s how you add your site:

• DMOZ Open Directory Project – “…the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” DMOZ does not charge for submissions. NOTE: This is the same as the Google Directory.
• Yahoo Directory – Yahoo charges for submissions (last time I checked, the submission fee was USD$299).

Stay tuned for further details on the other link generation methods.

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Sorry for my long delay in posting. For the first time in history, I had a long break over Christmas. Only fully back on board today. Now back to business…

What gives you a high ranking in the search engine? Well, assuming you’ve completed step one (i.e. you’ve optimized your website for your target keywords), there’s really only one thing left to do: Get lots of links pointing to your site.

Links are the single most important aspect of SEO. Generally speaking, the more links you have back to your site, the higher your ranking will be.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. There are links, and there are links. Before launching into a discussion about the best ways to generate links (I’ll address that issue in a post in the near future), let’s first discuss what kind of links you should be trying to generate.

When deciding whether to display your site in its search results, a search engine looks to see if you’re part of a credible network of related sites. This means that the ideal kind of links are those that:

• come from relevant sites (sites which use the same keywords);
• come from important sites (have a high ranking);
• include your keyword as part of the visible link text;
• include varying link text (not the same link text each time); and
• come from a page that links to few other sites.

When a search engine sees a link which satisfies most or all of these conditions, it says, “Hey, this site must be credible and important, because others in the same industry are pointing to it.”

So now that you know what kind of links you’re after, you just need to figure out how to get them. Stay tuned for more info on this…

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As mentioned in my previous entry on using links in SEO copy, keywords in the links within your copy are particularly important in SEO.

Unfortunately, however, search engines and humans like different things when it comes to links. Search engines like to see your keywords used toward the top of the page. So if you’re using keywords in your links, it makes sense that you put the links at the top of the page.

Humans, on the other hand, tend to find this distracting. And because they start clicking on links before they’ve finished reading the whole page, they become easily lost and don’t grasp the intended message (or worse, don’t continue with the purchase). In most cases, visitors prefer a text link at the bottom of the page.

But there is a solution; if you have links within the main body of your copy, simply make them unmarked (i.e. remove the blue font colour and the underlining). To do this, include the following in your CSS file:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
a {text-decoration: none;}
-->
</style>