Quality Linking Strategies
I recently posted on how linking doesn’t affect ranking in Google’s engine. My research shows that there exists no correlation between quantity of links and rank position for any given keyphrase. However, in this post, I’d like to pick up where I left off and discuss quality linking strategy.
Quality of links is vital to your site’s rank in Google’s search engine. Here’s how you can tell quality of other sites’ links. Wikipedia has an article on how Google’s PageRank system works. In general, Google considers links from other websites like we’d consider votes; when I link to a site, I’m casting a vote in favor of that site. The more that legitimate human beings with intelligence and know-how vote on a particular site, the more relevance is assigned to it, therefore pushing the ranking higher. This understanding of Google’s algorithm has led many to believe that all you have to do is run around gaining links from people.
I don’t discourage that. Links drive traffic and they are always a good idea. But nine times out of ten, you will have limited resources: budget, manpower, expertise, etc. You will have to make trade-offs. When a trade-off appears, don’t sacrifice quality of links for quantity.
My rule of thumb: put together your marketing strategy for your organization using sound principles. Think of things you would do offline to drive traffic. Once there’s a coherent marketing strategy in place, it’s much easier to adapt that strategy to the internet. For example, one strategy would be to create a newsletter on a bi-monthly basis. Okay, well, just find a way to publish that newsletter on the web as well. Another idea is to build a large network of contacts. Have you heard of LinkedIn? What if direct mail is your promotional strategy? Well, reference your site in the ad and run some online ads with the same message. You’ll find that as you participate on the internet as a live citizen, the links will come. And as your site builds and grows and is able to offer a legitimate online contribution, visitors will find value and link back to it in one way or another.
There are some other targeted linking strategies. If you’ve run into a wall, give me a buzz.
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