Getting a search engine first place is a bit of an art form, but sometimes you just get lucky, like I did here with my Google first place website, which believe it or not gets hundreds of hits every month. Personally I wouldn't have thought that so many people type in that phrase but as the site contains a substantial amount of quality content that is in context it also gets traffic from many other keyword searches such as "first place listing" "yahoo first place", "msn first place", "how to get listed at first place in google" and all manner of interesting phrases.
To find out what keywords people use to find your site, you only have to get Google Analytics from your Google AdWords account and install the code onto all your web pages and it magically records all of that information for you. You don't even have to be paying for AdWords campaigns to use the Analytics on your website, you can just open an account by paying the £5 activation fee (or equivalent in your local currency) and the Analytics code is yours to use for free.
Anyway, I digress, this site links to a fair few places, all of them websites that I own and operate, for profit, no secret about that, but how does all this linking help my business? WII-FM Everyone's favourite radio station: What's In It For Me?
Inbound links
Google and other search engines like to provide a quality user experience by supplying only the most relevant information in their search results. They use various algorithms to review the content but they like to go with the masses, and if 50 sites link back to your website then this speaks volumes about the site.
Not all links are equal however!
The secrets of an effective inbound link campaign are:
- The link must be on a page that has a Google Page Rank of 3/10 or higher
- The link is really only of value if the link text is the phrase you want to be found under
- Increase the effectiveness of the inbound link campaign by only using the same link text on each inbound link
So what is Google Page Rank?
Google Page Rank or 'PR' is a simple 'marks out of ten' importance rating as determined by Google. If the page you put your link on has a rank of less the 3/10 then it is not going to help your ranking by placing your link on this page, as Google will not attach any value to that link.
To find out your Google PR simply download and install the Google Toolbar by going to http://toolbar.google.com (you can pay me later Google!) The web page that I am writing this post on, for example, is 7/10 yowza, how great would it be to be able to put my links on this page?!
What is Link Text?
Link text is the 'clickable bit' in a hyperlink. For example in the link above to Google Toolbar I have not done anything to help improve their search engine ranking (as if they need it anyway!) merely provided a means of generating direct linked traffic from people like you reading this article who don't have Google Toolbar. However in the following example where I am putting a link to my day job company where I run a website development agency the clickable bit of the link is the phrase that i want to promote the company under in the search engines.
Increase the Effectiveness of Inbound Link Campaigns
So we now know about inbound links and how to use them to help your website ranking in the search engines, but here as an old DJ friend of mine used to say 'less is more'. By this I mean, don't use a whole load of keywords, that is one of the newbie internet marketeers' biggest mistakes. If you find somewhere that qualifies as a suitable host page for an inbound link make sure you use the same keyword phrase for your link as you did on the previous page and as you will do on the next page (within a single campaign).
It's no good putting website development on one inbound link and then putting web design on another thinking that a single link will magically rocket you to a search engine first place over night, it just doesn't work like that. Let's face it, if it was that easy everyone would be doing it and there would be no need for people like me and articles like this :-)
In order for your inbound link campaign to be effective you need to have at least 50 inbound links all using the same link text. These links must also be on sites that do not share the same IP address. For example I have seven web servers for hosting my my various client websites and each of these servers has a different IP address, but can host several websites on each machine. So even though I have the means to setup as many websites as i like on potentially hundreds of websites because there are only seven different IP addresses hosting these hundreds of sites I only link once from each server I own personally and the rest of my inbound links are sourced from other hosts on the net such as the wonderful blogger site here and as many other blogging and social networking websites that i can find.
If you do attempt to spam or reverse engineer inbound links multiple times from the same host IP address it will likely have the reverse affect, although I have no experience of this as i haven't tried it, I just try to follow the rules as this is the best practise and what is known as white-hat marketing as opposed to black-hat marketing
How Do You Know What Link Text To Use?
Simple, research. There are a lot of really great keyword research tools available on the internet today, one of my favourites is Keyword Spy as it will actually tell you which keywords your direct competitors are using, or for any domain name you put in, it also tells you the amount of searches for that phrase and also the competitiveness based on the number of advertisers it has, truly a powerful tool.
OK well that's all from me for today, please get in touch if I can help you with marketing your website in the search engines
All the best!
Rog
