Getting The Kinks Out Of Links

Links to and from your site can make a big difference in your business. The "Buying and Selling Links" session gave a lot of great information with an informative Q&A session at the end. The chairs were full and the crowd was quiet at the masters of SEO bequeathed their wisdom to eager students.

This session had a lot of good information and allowed people to pick the brains of these experts in the field. Eric Ward had some of the best comments and he would know as he helped promote Amazon when they first launched. Danny Sullivan calls him the definitive link building guru. He discussed the importance of 301 redirects when changing a site domain name or a directory structure. Make sure you reclaim links by using server logs (when sites change domains, you can reclaim the links pointing to the old site). Use refer data and site logs to determine which old link was clicked and implement a 301 redirect.

Sometimes search engines may not find all the links on a site so you won't get credit. He mentioned a great description of undiscovered links at www.scrup.com. Non-web based links like email newsletters and forum posts can drive traffic. Search doesn't necessarily recognize it but they do DRIVE TRAFFIC.
Search engines benefits aren't the only reason to get links. Traffic is important but they go hand-in-hand really. Much of what Eric focused on was link are really more for traffic as opposed to search benefits.

Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link had a lot of great information too. Just like she stressed in yesterday's "Link Building Basics" session, today she stressed anchor text as extremely important. She suggested using it in any link you have, both onpage and outbound.

Make sure you optimize the site keyword-wise before you go on a link building campaign. Links embedded in content with the proper anchor text get more weight than navigation links.

Optimize links on pages with keywords, emulate natural linking patterns and stagger the link text throughout the copy. A wide variety (pagerank-wise) of inbound link are good but stay within your niche.

Linking out is a great way to build trust among sites and it can help you get links pointing to you. Cross-linking, if you own lots of sites, can be great but don't over do it. Make sure you have some other links besides ones to your sites.

Finally, make yourself an authority on your topic and this will attract the inbound links. Content development is important to linking because no one want to link to a poorly done site. Also, directory links are still valuable but shouldn't be the only focus. She also suggested finding a list of journalists to send out your press releases to. Include bloggers and more journalists so this should be easier to accomplish.

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