There are really only three different places you can linkbuild for your website in order to get high quality links. By providing really high quality content on your website, you can attract links naturally. But that is not what this article is about. That is not linkbuilding. That is link baiting. This article is about three types of high quality links that you can create yourself. You can build more links within your own site that will boost the ranking on certain pages. You can go find a great existing page online somewhere to try and get a link from. Or, you can build a page on another website and try to develop that page into a powerful source of link juice. Those are really the only ways you can do it.
Building More Links Within Your Current Website
Remember that each page is ranked on its own merits as well as the merits of the domain it is located on. People focus a lot on the domain and neglect the individual pages themselves. You will see lots of people who only focus on getting links from external sites instead of maximizing what they already have on their own site. Don’t overlook this. Google reps like Matt Cutts have stated time and time again that you need to point links within your site at the pages that you want ranked the highest. (He words it slightly differently – but that is what he is saying.)
You can accomplish this by increasing the number of new pages on your website and using those new pages to point to existing higher value ones on there. You could also just go around your website and add more links to the existing pages in places where it makes sense to.
Regardless of how you do it, make sure that you use proper anchor text to link to those pages. Your own website allows you the ability to link to that page using the absolutely perfect anchor text. Don’t waste the opportunity to do so.
If you run a blog, you can use a plugin called SEO Smart links to do this. That will help you automatically link to the right internal page on your website using perfect anchor text.
Go Find Existing Pages Already Online To Get High Quality Links From
This is probably the most common way of trying to get high quality links. You just go look for them at other places online. With enough effort, you can find some higher value places that you might be able to get a link from.
You probably already know that you should be getting links from relevant sources online and not just buying links because of their page’s Google PR rating. Pages with good PR are valuable even if they aren’t perfectly relevant, but you are far better off targeting pages on sites where your potential customers already are. Those links will drive some traffic to your site too if they are properly constructed.
You are far better off taking your time to carefully handpick just a few places where you could get really high value, high PageRank, well trusted links from instead of just going for massive numbers of low value links. The links that you have to work hard to get are going to be the ones that will help your site the most. Trust me. You will not regret it once you get one of those links.
You can judge the quality of a site using various standards. One obvious way is to see how well the website ranks for one of the keywords you are targeting. Sites that rank higher are generally better places to get links from than sites that rank lower. Websites with high PageRank homepages and high PageRank deep pages are also good sources. Websites that cater to the same customer that you are seeking are generally very good sources for links even if those links are nofollow.
Creating Your Own High Value Link Sources
The third way to build links for your website is to create new pages on other websites in an effort to make them high value sources of links. Two common ways to do this are through article marketing and through guest blogging. Both of those methods can be very effective if done properly.
If you choose to do this, it works best if you can get your material published on a website that is considered one of the more prominent in your niche. Sites like that are going to deliver the customers and visitors as well as love from the search engines. That is an all around win for you. Regardless of how prominent the site is that you get your material published on, you are still going to want to get that material noticed.
You should direct traffic to it from any means at your disposal. A common way to do this is by letting your Twitter followers know about that article. If you partake in other social networks, it would be in your best interest to let those people know about it. You should also make sure you bookmark the spots using your social bookmarking accounts so that you can find it months down the road. You should encourage your circle of friends to talk about it and link to it also.
One of the best strategies for doing this is to harness the power of multiple public locations where you publish. If you have accounts at various article directory websites, then you should use those to publish articles about similar topics and link back to the article on the best website out of the bunch. In fact, you should link back to the best article and the page on your own website that you are trying to promote. Then you will get more visitors to your better material and get more search engine link juice to your better material simultaneously.
So remember the three ways to get quality links are:
1) Get the links from your own website, from other internal pages.
2) Get the links from another website you find online that is already very valuable to your topic.
3) Create a new page on some other website and build it up into a valuable link source by increasing the amount of other pages that link to it.
Are you using all three ways? Or, are you just constantly looking for other existing websites to get links from? People forget that their own website is a great source of link juice to pass to other internal pages. Are you taking the time to build up the pages that you have published on other blogs as a guest? Those pages already have the perfect anchor text you are looking for. Don’t just seek out new places to get a link from. You should also be working to increase the value of your existing links.
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Kathy, Once again, you’ve written a very valuable post. I already link to articles within my site but I should be doing more. What I haven’t been doing is using the “perfect anchor text”. I tend to always use the original post article instead. I’ll have to make a conscious effort to use more keyword intensive anchor text.
I’m checking out the “SEO Smart links” plugin now. Thanks so much for sharing that tip and all the rest! This article is chock full of info that I want to remember and act on.
I am not using the SEO smart links on this blog just yet, but I will be. Once I have enough posts on here and start getting a decent amount of organic traffic to them, I will go back and optimize them better. One of the ways I do that is by using internal links.
Good post Kathy. Most of us have multiple websites or have clients, and it might be worthwhile to consider using existing high ranking sites (that we control) to build links.
Using your own sites is a great method Aaron. I didn’t think most people would have more than one site though. I thought we were in the minority on that one. But, definitely yes. If you have have more than one website and the circumstance is right, then I would definitely use the link power of one to help promote another one.
I don’t think you should get carried away though, and I don’t think you should crosslink all of your sites. If you do that and you are found guilty of violating any company’s terms of service, then you risk losing every website instead of just the one. If you take appropriate precautions and limit the amount of it that you do, then by all means, use it to your advantage.
Thanks so much for this great article. I will be sharing it and checking out SEO Smart Links right away :)
Hello Julie,
Thanks for stopping by. Glad you liked the article. That was a pretty thoughtful post you had written on your website as well. I enjoyed it.
This is excellent advice from someone who knows (thanks for sharing your knowledge)!
I have done a bit of strategic linking internally but need to do more. There are too many links all over the place on my site, and I would rather the juice flow to certain pages. I think I will need to carefully look at that over the next couple of days.
I’m also really good at building my own links from various external sites and have been learning to increase their page rank so they become great high quality sources.
What I am not good at is your second one – getting links from existing high PR pages. I have no idea how to do that except to (1) ask – send an email, perhaps, or (2) buy.
Let me know if you know of any other way to do it. It seems like directories and such are high ranking but the individual page that links a site is not always high ranking.
Thanks for your comments Tia and for the kind words.
The method you use to get the higher value links depends on the type of link you are after. If you want to get a contextual link that is in the main block of text on a page, then it is probably going to involve you being a contributor to another website in one way shape or form. That means you will probably need to build a relationship with the person who runs that site. It doesn’t have to be a long term well developed relationship though. It can be a short mutually beneficial one. I can talk about this more in an upcoming post.
Directories are very powerful. (At least certain ones are.) You cannot judge a directory page on its Google PageRank alone. You are correct in saying that most directories have lower PageRank inner pages. This is especially true of dofollow directories. They lose the benefit of PageRank feedback that stays on a site. They lose all that PageRank through their external links.
I may talk about this in another upcoming post because it will take a whole post to explain it.
Great points! Many people forget that it’s absolutely important to linkbuild to internal pages. I always do that for my sites because it’s important to give your internal pages page rank if possible, too. If you have too many links towards your main homepage google bots will definitely ignore your internal pages.
Mandy you are right. As your site grows and gets to be several years old, you can keep those old pages indexed and showing up in the SERPs by making sure some Google PageRank flows to them.
Your pages should not be more than a couple clicks away from the most important page on your website, which is usually your homepage.
So what do you think about trackbacks to your own blog?
Sometimes I’ll link to one of my own pages, then I’ll get a trackback comment on the page I linked to. It always seems kind of silly to have a trackback from my own site so I always delete it.
There’s probably a way to turn this off but I haven’t got around to it.
I don’t use trackbacks from one post to another within my own blog. I only use them to link back to other websites that have linked to mine. The internal trackbacks would accomplish the inter-linking of the deep web pages though. I guess it is simply a matter of choice. I prefer to use SEO Smart Links as well as other plugins like YARP or Related posts by category. I also use a plugin for adjusting the number of posts that will show one when page when browsing by category.
Thanks for such an informative post Kathy. I don’t understand it all but will be coming back here to check I am doing the right things. Will also try the plugin you suggested. Can I ask a question? If someone does incoming links to my site is that good for my blog? It comes from bloggers I am getting to know whose sites I regularly visit and comment on. Sometimes I see on these sites the bloggers asking to link their sites to mine but don’t know how to do that either. Thanks
Patricia Perth Australia
Yes Patricia, incoming links to your site are good for it. Those links are helping your blog build authority. Each link counts as a vote for the page it points at. Google counts these votes and rewards pages with more votes by pushing them higher in the SERPs. That is the goal.
Thanks for the explanation Kathy. I have got so much to learn. I just got the URL (from a follower on twitter) that lets me check who I get backlinks from. Got a couple of surprises as at least one site I thought was dofollow shows up as nofollow for me!
Patricia Perth Australia
Hi Kathy- I am fairly new to link building and have been working on creating them for my Corporate photographer London blog for about 2 months. I have gained a good google ranking from link building, but confused about nofollow and dofollow links?
Hello Grant,
Use Google to research the difference between nofollow and dofollow until you fully understand the two. It is too long of an explanation for me to go into here. Maybe I will do a future post about it. This is an important concept to learn if you want good rankings in Google.
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Hey Kathy,
I totally agree with you. When I started blogging I completely underestimated the importance of interlinking articles using the keyword you want the page to rank for. Now that I am building mini sites I use interlinking mostly in order to get my websites to rank well. And they rank extremely well (without any backlinks).
Once you have been doing it for a while it gets easy to get stuck in a routine. Then you forget that there are other ways of doing things.
Good post Kathy. You forgot the most important tip. Write content people will want to link to.
Good advice Rose.
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@Kathy: After reading your post twice, I have one small question here:
“You can accomplish this by increasing the number of new pages on your website and using those new pages to point to existing higher value ones on there.”
You say that each new post/page you create on a website starts with “power” just from being created? I thought that this “power” comes from external and/or internal links pointing to that page…