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Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine
Positioning
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By Dave Davies
[Hits: 959]
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Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search EnginePositioning By Dave Davies, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning,Inc.
It¡¯s no SEO secret that inbound links to your site are animportant part of any complete search engine positioningstrategy. You¡¯ve undoubtedly received numerous emails toutingthe benefits of exchanging links with other websites. Providedthat the sites are related, reciprocal linking can definitelyhelp you in your quest for higher rankings however, establishingquality non-reciprocal links to your website will provide addedweight and many of the tactics used in developing these linkshave built-in relevancy.
There are two main advantages to non-reciprocal links as opposedto reciprocal links. The first is that these links will holdmore weight, as they aren¡¯t reciprocated (the search engines candetect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage isthat they don¡¯t have to be monitored as closely as reciprocallinks. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethicalwebmasters who will take links down or use other tactics toinsure that the search engines don¡¯t see the links pages. Youhave to be aware of these events so that you can remove theirlinks from your site if warranted however with non-reciprocallinks you don¡¯t have to be as concerned as you¡¯re not linking tothem.
These are far from the only benefits of non-reciprocal linkbuilding but they are two of the most beneficial for your siteand for you as its webmaster. But how do you get something fornothing? Why would someone want to link to you in exchange forno links back? Keep in mind the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain¡¯tNo Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In short, you¡¯re not going toget something for nothing but it¡¯s well worth the ¡°something¡±you¡¯ll have to put in.
So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search enginepositioning campaign ¡ but how do you do it? There are a numberof tactics that will work. Here are a few of the more successful:
Write Good Content It¡¯s shocking but some people will actuallylink to your site because it is a valuable resource that theirvisitors may find interesting or useful. The search enginesinitially gave incoming links value based on the belief thatsites with incoming links tended to be sites that others findworth linking to. People actually linked to sites simply becausethey found the content useful. Believe it or not this practicestill exists today.
If you have a quality site with great content, preferablyupdated regularly, others in your industry should naturally linkto you. It¡¯s also appropriate to ask other webmasters to link toyour site either through direct contact or by posting a page onyour site, which provides images and/or link details. If you geteven one link out of your efforts it was worth the 5 or sominutes it should take to put up the page.
Directory Listings Provided that you¡¯re willing to invest a bitof time and money, directory listings are probably the easiestway to get non-reciprocal links. Provided that you¡¯re site hassome value to it and is not offensive, most directories willlist it though usually there is a ¡°review fee¡± involved.
There are the well know directories such as the Yahoo! Directory(http://dir.yahoo.com/) however you may find that the price tagfor a guaranteed review from Yahoo! at $299 to be a bit morethan you wanted to spend for a single listing. Another ¡°majorplayer¡± in the directory world is the Open Directory Project (orDMOZ) (http://www.dmoz.org/) however you may find that withvolunteer editors, your site can take many months to get listed,if at all.
Fortunately there are many ¡°secondary¡± directories and there arealso literally thousands of topic-specific directories that canprovide valuable listings. In fact, topic-specific directorylistings can in many ways be considered more valuable in thatthe link to your site is entirely relevant and also, you shouldget some quality targeted traffic from your listing providedthat the directory itself ranks well.
How much you should pay for a specific listing is debatabledepending on the industry, the value of the link, etc. howevertopical directory listings are usually somewhere around$30-$100/yr in the majority of cases. If your link will beplaced on a page with a good PageRank and will fewer than 50 orso other sites it is worth considering.
Article Submissions As you¡¯re reading this article you shouldcertainly be able to infer that I personally am a fan of writingarticles as a form of non-reciprocal link building. Articlesprovide perhaps the best of all worlds in that they providevaluable and entirely relevant links and also can be a greatsource of targeted traffic.
That said, articles are also the most time consuming of linkbuilding efforts. One must consider the time it takes to writethe article, find sites to publish it and also the submission ofthe articles to all these sites. As a tip, when you find sitesyou wish to submit your article to add them to a folder in your¡°Favorites¡± (or ¡°Bookmarks¡± for those of us using Firefox). Ifyou decide to publish more articles in the future (and youprobably will) it¡¯s certainly helpful to start with a list ofthe places you¡¯re submitting to rather than having to find themall again down the road.
When you¡¯re writing your article there are a few considerationsthat you should make. One of the biggest benefits of articles asa link building measure is that the links are relevant in thatthey are about the topic of your site. Why not insure that yourtitles and content are written such that they add further weightfor your targeted keywords. If you look at the title of thisarticle ¡°Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search EnginePositioning¡± you¡¯ll notice that the phrase ¡°search enginepositioning¡± (our main targeted phrase) is present. Additionallythe phrase is repeated periodically in the content area. Thiswill add relevancy to this article and our targeted phrase. Ifyou look in the credits below you¡¯ll notice that the anchor textlinking to our site is ¡°Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning¡±(assuming that the site on which you are reading this articleallowed for HTML submissions otherwise the link should simply bethe http format). This will add additional relevancy tying thatphrase to our site.
Because the Beanstalk website is still in the sandbox on Googleit is unable to rank for this highly competitive phrase howeveryou may notice that currently the #11 ranking page is one of ourarticles. This alone should demonstrate that these articles canpick up relevancy. Once Beanstalk is out of the sandbox onGoogle we will have many highly relevancy links that are strongenough to rank #11 on their own. You can do the same providedthat you treat writing your articles the same as your content.It must contain your targeted keywords and it must read well.
Additionally, you are going to want to search for many relatedwebsites to submit to. You can visit the search enginesthemselves to find related sites (in our case we would run asearch such as ¡°search engine positioning articles submit¡±) oryou can use a program like PR Prowler(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/pr-prowler.htm) to find the links and also insure a minimum PageRank on thesites you are submitting to.
If you decide to publish more than one article I would furtherrecommend that you add to your list with each submission. Take afew minutes before you submit and find an additional 5+ sites tosubmit your articles to. You¡¯ll find your link popularity andrankings will reward you for it.
Summary Of course there are many additional tactics you can useto get non-reciprocal links including paid links, pressreleases, etc. however those noted above are the ones which willproduce the most consistently over time and while they can betime consuming, are well worth the effort.
I wish you the very best of luck in developing yournon-reciprocal links and in increasing your search enginepositioning. It will take time; it will take energy; but doneright it will be very rewarding.
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing andranking websites for over three years and has a solid history ofsuccess. Dave is available to answer any questions that you mayhave about your website and how to get it into the top positionson the major search engines. To keep informed about what goingon in the SEO world you may also want to visit the newly createdSEO blog (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/) on the Beanstalkwebsite.
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