The links that point to your website are one of the most important factors that influence the position of your website in Google’s search results. The better the links to your website, the higher the position of your website in Google’s results.

High rankings without good inbound links?

It is possible to get high rankings with only a few links if you want to be listed for keywords that don’t have much competition. As soon as more than one website competes with you for the same keywords, the website with the best inbound links will outrank the other websites.

If you want to get high rankings for competitive keywords, you have to go out and encourage people to link to your website. It’s not necessary to get as many links as possible. It’s necessary to get better links than your competitors.

Relatively easy: finding the right websites for link building

The Internet has plenty of websites for every category. The following websites can be good link partners:

1. Websites that are listed for the keywords that you are targeting can be good link partners. If a website has high positions for the keywords that you are targeting and if the website is not a competitor, you should contact the owner of that website.
2. Some websites have content that is related to your keyword. If these websites have no examples or references, they could link to your website.
3. There can be many websites that contain a review or a comment about your company without linking to your site. These websites will often link to your website if you ask.
4. If another website links to your website and only uses your domain name to link to your website, ask the owner of the other website to link to your website with your keyword.
5. Blogs that deal with the topic of your websites are often willing to link to your website.
6. If a website links to one of your competitors, it is likely that they will also link to your website if you offer a similar product or service.

Easy to screw up: asking for a link

Finding websites that could link to you is the easy part. The difficult part is to convince the owners of the other websites that they should link to your site.

Contact the right person and use a personal salutation. Be polite and professional in your email message. Use a non-freemail email address and include your full contact information in the email message.

Focus on the benefits of the recipient (for example, that the webmaster will offer his website visitors a good resource if he links to your site and explain why).

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Trust is a major factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Some websites can get high rankings on Google for nearly any content they publish while other websites cannot get high rankings at all although they have optimized web page content.

A high trust level is crucial if you want to get high Google rankings

The reason why some websites do better than others is trust. Some websites have managed to reach a very high trust level with Google. That helps them to get higher rankings on search engines than you do.

Google doesn’t want to list spam sites in the search results. For that reason, it is important to show Google that your website is for real, that you’re not a spammer and that you plan to stay in business for a long time.

Here are some things you can do to show Google’s algorithm that it can trust your website.

1. Things you should consider about your domain name

The age of a domain is important to Google. When you start a new online business, consider buying an old domain name if a suitable name is available.

If you start with a new domain, buy it with a renewal period of two years and more. You show Google that your domain is not a throwaway domain by doing so.

Check your WHOIS records and make sure that the contact information is correct. Do not use exotic top level domains. If you are in the USA, use .com, .net or .org. If you’re in another country, use the official top level domain of your country.

Don’t overuse hyphens in your URL. For example, www.keyword-keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4-keyword5.com might look spammy.

2. Things you should consider about your website content

Make your contact information easy to find on your website. List a full address and not only your email address on your website. The more information about your company can be found on your website, the more likely it is that it will be considered a real business.

Your website should have a privacy policy and terms and conditions (if applicable). Both should be linked from your sitemap.

Don’t use doorway pages. They annoy search engine spiders and website visitors. Doorway pages are a clear indicator of a low quality website.

If possible, keep the HTML code of your web pages below 100 KB so that search engine spiders can crawl it easily. Regularly update your web pages to show Google that your website is alive.

3. Things you should consider about your links

Do not participate in automated linking schemes. If your website gets 2000 inbound links on a single day then Google might think that you try to game the algorithm with a link system.

The links to your website should contain your keywords but they should not all contain exactly the same link text. If all links to your website used exactly the same link text then this would be a red flag for Google.

Do not use paid links. Google does not like paid links and they might penalize your website if use them.

If Google trusts your website then it will be much easier to get high rankings. Of course, your website still needs optimized web page content and good inbound links.

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What makes SEO so difficult is that the search engines, apart from all having different criteria in ranking websites, keep moving the goal posts. What worked well a few months ago for good ranking may not necessarily be true today. This means that you cannot just sit back and rest on your laurels. SEO (and SEM) is all about constant tweaking of websites and building a strong inbound link campaign.

This is very tough! Getting links to your site, which is what you need to rank well particularly in Google, is not easy these days. Google are clamping down on people who purchase links, press release links don’t seem to count for much, article links aren’t worth all that much either…and I could go on. The goal posts have been moved and carrying out a thorough SEO/ SEM campaign is hugely time consuming and results can take months to show up.

So when I start a new website today what do I do differently?

Apart from kicking off my SEO/ SEM campaign I also spend a bit of money on pay-per-click advertising. These are the “sponsored link” ads that appear in search engine results and as “Ads by Google” on third-party websites.

Pay-per-click (PPC) enables you to generate instant traffic to your website without waiting for the search engines to index and rank your website. In fact, after setting up your PPC campaign you can start generating traffic to it pretty much instantly. Some cynics would say that the search engines have made SEO harder for us so that we spend some money on their PPC campaigns. Not me, any proper business would do well to focus efforts on both as both have their individual merits.

One of the main benefits of a PPC campaign is that Google, for example, provides you with some truly excellent tools to monitor and fine tune your traffic and expenditure. It’s a fantastic system for generating traffic, for example, to affiliate products. If you’re not sure what this means, as an affiliate you basically promote someone else’s product and you get a commission if you make a sale. It’s actually one of the oldest and still one of the best systems for generating an income online.

In fact, if you’re just starting out, or have been marketing online for some time, I guarantee you that there is no better way of making a great income than by setting up a PPC campaign to sell other people’s products.

Think about it…..millions are made every day by people using this very system.

Want to be the next cyberspace millionaire?

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