Do It Yourself
Search Engine Optimisation Guide

Section 3 - Getting Your Site Known

It is all very well and good knowing what search engines want and how they work. To get people to your site, you need to make it known. You make your site known by building incoming links to your site. This works in two ways. One, people will find links to your site and follow them. Two, search engines will find those links and follow them.

The Importance of Building Incoming Links

If you want to rank for anything more competitive than 'My Service in My Town', you have to have incoming links. The theory is that quality web sites have more and better quality incoming links than poor quality web sites. It's not as simple as the site that has the most incoming links has the highest rankings. There are number of other factors, such as:

1. The value of the page linking to you. The higher the PageRank is of a page linking to you, the more valuable the link is likely to be. Use your common sense. If the page looks like a page that provides quality content (particularly if it is related to your site) it is probably a good site to be linked from. Avoid getting incoming links from web pages you deem to be low quality or of a questionable nature, such as link farms, Viagra sites, pornography sites etc.
2. Link text is very important. You can rank on page one for terms that are not even on your page if you have a good number of incoming links that contain those terms in the link text. One very useful way of getting relevant link text is if your URL and/or company name have your keywords in them. When other people link to your site it is likely they will link to you with your company name or domain name. When obtaining links it is a good idea to vary your link text, so it appears more natural. If Google currently implement any algorithm based on repetitive link text it doesn't have much effect on rankings. It would be hard for them to distinguish between people who are excessively spamming and links that contain a company name. However, variation in link text is something Google have stated they would like take into account more.
3. Pages with large numbers of hyperlinks will not provide as much weight as pages with only a handful. This is because each link is given a slice of the page's value. Additionally, if you are linked to from a page with a large number of links the search engines may not follow your link, particularly if your link is near the bottom of the HTML document and/or the page is not highly ranked.
4. There are also links that do not provide any weight in search engines. Both JavaScript and flash links cannot be followed. They do not provide any benefits in search engine rankings and additionally they cannot be indexed. The other type of link that does not provide any weight is a type of hyperlink known as nofollow. These are normal hyperlinks with the addition of the value 'nofollow' in the rel attribute - <a href="http://www.mutinydesign.co.uk" rel="nofollow">Mutiny Design</a>. Nofollow links are very common on blogs, forum and other community based websites. So if you were thinking all you needed to do was post a couple of thousand forum posts to get the rankings you want, think again.

25 Ways To Build Incoming Links

Now you know you need to build the number of incoming links to your site, you need to know where to get them. This can be a tough one, but there are many methods you can use to get links. Most people are not cut out for link building and result to buying all their links and have no talent, ideas or time to establish an avenue for natural link growth. There are good ways of building links and bad ways. Below I have listed some of the good ways.

1. Reciprocal Links - The oldest of all link building methods is to simply contact another web site and try and get them to link to yours. Anyone who has had a website that gets a fair bit of traffic will probably be familiar with these requests. If you are going to use reciprocal linking as a link building method, it is best if you come up with more of an interesting way of doing it than having a links page full of miscellaneous sites. Try to come up with something imaginative that oozes a bit of quality. If you can trade articles or testimonials about each other, it will give you a bit more link quality than a load of links on a page with no content. If you want to set up a reciprocal link you are going to have to give the person a reason to link to you. See if there is anything on your site that might interest them and tell them about it. You can try finding something on their website and compliment them on it. Try putting a link on your site to theirs and show them it. Do not mention anything about PageRank and search engine rankings, the chances are they will not even reply.
2. Link Me - Rather than establishing a two way link you can always try and get someone to link to you. This is obviously much harder. You will need something special to convince them it is worth the effort of putting a link on their site. If your site is purely commercial there is absolutely no point in trying to get links this way. You will need some content on your site that will interest the person/company so much that they will feature it on their site. If you have something you think people might want to link to, see if you can find similar products and see who is linking to them.
3. Bookmark Me - Adding buttons that allow people to easily bookmark your pages are a good way of increasing return visitors to your site. Someone may have come across your site and intended to come back later and then forgot your site. If they can't remember your site, there is no chance they will link to it. Don't go nuts and put bookmark buttons all over your site, it will add extra distraction points. Only add them on quality pages that people may want to bookmark.
4. Directories - Submitting your web site to directories is another old school SEO tactic. It involves very little talent and is not something you really want to spend much time on. You can spend a whole day submitting your site to endless pointless directories most of whom will not add you anyway, just to get a weak link. The only directory I think it is worth submitting to is DMOZ. It is the directory that will provide you with the best link and it's free. There is also the added benefit of DMOZ being regurgitated on numerous other sites. So a link on DMOZ will probably land you about fifty other links. The only problem is that it can take a long time to get listed on DMOZ. If you really want to get into DMOZ your best course of action is to submit your site once a week until they accept you. There are a number of 'SEO gurus' whose sole link building method is to submit sites to free and paid directories. This will cost you a few thousand pounds and will only get you ranked for mildly competitive search terms. It would be better to spend your money elsewhere. As well as general directories such as DMOZ, there may also be a specialist directory for your industry. To find these, simply Google 'keyword direcotiry' or 'keyword submit site'. If you are going to pay for a directory listing, I would recommend avoiding paying more than a few notes for a listing and don't even waste your time with ones with no web presence.
5. Friends - Find out if any of your friends have websites or blogs. If they do, try and blag a link from them. If necessary put a link to their site on yours. The benefit of having friends with websites or blogs is that they will probably let you do what you want, so you will be able to choose your link text. Again, try and bring some relevancy to the link.
6. Testimonials - Create a list of all the companies you deal with and all the products you use. Find out if any of the companies have a testimonials page and if so send them a testimonial that includes a hyperlink to your site. The advantage of sending a company a testimonial is that they think you are actually trying to help them out, but you are really just after a fat juicy link. Even if the company doesn't have a testimonials page it may still be worthwhile sending them a testimonial. If you are lucky they may put your testimonial in their news section or even better on the homepage! If you fancy being a bit cheeky, you can always submit testimonials to companies you don't have any dealings with.
7. Blogs - Blogs have become one of the biggest aids in search engine optimisation. A whole industry has sprung up just around blog marketing. Some of the largest companies such as Microsoft and Cnet have harnessed the power of the blog by giving their own staff blogs (particularly developers). This has resulted in a huge number of incoming links for the companies. There are a lot of blogs out on the internet; many of them are filled with drivel or information that is only of interest to a small number of people. If you think that you are able to write authoritative articles about your industry, it may well be worth attaching a blog to your site. Alternatively you might think that your staff could raise your company's web presence by providing interesting content. Depending on the type and volume of traffic to your site, creating a quality blog may not be enough. To make a blog work for your site, you need to build a community around it. This involves visiting blogs (preferably of a similar nature) and posting quality comments. The more quality comments you post on related blogs, the more likely you will get people going over to your site. If your blog has interesting articles, commentary and freebies it you should quickly build incoming links. The more you work on it and the more quality content you post the more you will get back. If it goes well, it should get to a point where your blog alone does your linking for you - your readers are constantly linking to you. There are also plenty of directories specifically for blogs that you can easily get listed in.
8. Writing Articles - Writing articles (which may be for a blog) is more or less covered in the section above. You can get extra link credit by distributing your articles to various industry websites. Some industries, particularly web and SEO have websites that are wholly devoted to user submitted articles. There are also a great number of general article directories. The best of these, in my opinion is Buzzle. Remember that it is the quality that counts. If you are just going to write articles titled 'My Company Offers This Service' and 'My Company is Doing a Website for A plumber Round the Block' you might as well forget link building altogether.
9. Distributing Geekery - If you or someone in your company spends half their days looking at a text editor, creating a slick bit of web geekery is a great idea. The best option for creating a bit of programming for free distribution is to create some easy to install JavaScript. Most web people don't know JavaScript, but have enough knowledge to fudge a script into the head and add a few HTML attributes here and there. The success of the lightbox script is based on its simplicity to install. If you create a monstrous piece of JavaScript, it doesn't matter how good it is, you will only get links from the most hardened of web geeks. Developing something in a server-side language will be less likely to bring in traffic, as the 'wow-factor' is considerably less. You would need to put in much more work to make a great library such as phpThumb or even a full blow PHP framework. Another area you could harness would be the HTML and CSS community. Markup and stylesheet languages are easier than JavaScript and PHP, so more people can produce them. If you can put together an article about a fancy use of CSS or document one of the many undocumented Internet Explorer bugs (there are new ones in IE7) you could get some decent linkage and even submit your article to an authority site such as A List Apart. A slightly different method of link building is icon design. Probably the most linked to free icon set is famfamfam's silk icon set. If you check out the famfamfam domain, you will find he has over 600,000 links and a PageRank of 7/8. This one guy has more links and a better web presence than many international corporations who spend thousands on SEO - simply because he has created a set of 700 free icons. Web geeks go absolutely nuts for free web icons. You could probably get more easy links manually by posting a quality icon set round the net than any other method.
10. Free Designs - Distributing free web designs can be a good way of getting some incoming links. There are a number of sites where you can post your design templates, such as the Open Design Community. If you establish a section on your site for free design and keep the quality high, you should get a few links. You can also provide free blog templates. This method does not have as much potential as distributing programming or web icons, but if you are a good web design company, you probably have a few abandoned or rejected designs lying around. Next time someone in your company doesn't have anything to do, you could always get them to build a free designs section on your site and post them around the internet at the same time.
11. Provide Content Not Available Online - This is a great one. A long time ago I created a subscription website that provided a lot of content that was not available elsewhere. The site had a complete index of the contents, which was indexed by the search engines. Even thought the site only had a few incoming links it got a fair amount of traffic and because the information was not available elsewhere people were subscribing. The best content, you can provide is probably historical documents such as rare genealogy almanacs, information on countries that are not well documented online, pre-European African histories. These will appeal to the online genealogical and historical communities, who can leave quite a link trail. This could be as simple as creating a company history. If your company has been established for many years, include information on its founders and give genealogical information on them if possible. Information like this will be very easy to get links from historical and genealogical societies.
12. Pay Per Click - If you can't get your website to rank yourself or don't want to pay an SEO, try a pay per click (PPC) campaign. This can also be a good way of finding out whether a keyword is worth optimising for. If you have a high quality website, people who find you via PPC may link to your site and you may end up ranking anyway.
13. Press Releases - My own personal advice with press releases is to avoid them. They can take a lot of time and return no results. Only submit a press release if you have something that is really interesting, e.g. 'King Arthur's Tomb was Buried under My Office', 'Paul Daniels Opens Our New Office' or 'Five Year Old Chimp Become Our Senior Web Developer'. Don't bother submitting endless press releases such as 'My Company Does a Website for Some Other Company' and 'My Company Offers This Service'. There are plenty of places where you can submit press releases for free online, but you're probably the only person who will ever read them. Your best bet is to submit your press releases to news agencies, national journalists and local newspapers. Submit to journalists who cover your field and specialist publications for your industry for best results.
14. Social Bookmaking - There are plenty of these social bookmaking sites around today, such as Digg and del.icio.us. If you provide quality content on your site, it is a good idea to submit it to these sites and get your friends to add them too. Don't bother submitting low quality information and information that is only of interest to a few people, e.g. 'The Relationship Between Slug Mating Frequency and Light Precipitation during the Summer Equinox' or 'It was My Dog's Birthday Today and I Dressed Him up as Mother Theresa'. If you have a blog or post articles on your site consider adding submit buttons for social bookmaking sites.
15. Government and Educational Links - Government (.gov) and educational (.edu or .ac) links are regarded as having extra weight in search engines due to perceived 'trustworthiness'. Some industries will find it much easier to get links on government sites than others. Government sites are much more likely to link to Uncle Sam's Recycling Centre than they are to Seedy Mike's Smut Shop and educational institutions are more likely to link to Herbert's Textbooks Online than they are to the Pinky and the Brain Modelling Agency. Have a look round your local government sites. Check if they have a section on the site for your industry. See if you can find anyway you might be able to convince them to give you a link. If you are lucky your local council (or equivalent outside of the UK) will have a directory of local businesses.
16. Trade and Professional Organisations - Trade and professional organisations usually have good rankings and topical authority. If you are a member of any trade or professional organisations, visit their site. Check if they have a directory of members and get yourself listed. If they don't you will need to come up with something a bit more imaginative to get a link.
17. Affiliates - Affiliates programs are an excellent way of increasing your online business. There are plenty of people out there with small websites and blogs trying to make a few coins. Many of them are happy to display your advert on their site for free in the hope it will make them a little extra. The obvious benefit about this kind of advertising is, other than the cost of creating the affiliate program, it is totally free. Also, the sites/blogs that will be hosting your advert for free will probably be related to your industry, so the traffic is targeted. One downfall of all affiliates programs I have seen is that they don't provide any search engine value. This is down to the fact that affiliate links need to pass to your site where the traffic has come from. The affiliate link will be something like http://www.mutinydesign.co.uk?aff=123aff. There are two methods you could use to get around this:
    1. Every time someone visits your site from another site, create a session that stores their URL. When someone buys your product, check if the referring site is one of your affiliates, if so credit them for their referral. The problem with this method is you need to have affiliates who trust that you will actually count their referrals. It may be enough to give them a login area where they can check how many click they have given you and how many of them have bought your products.
    2. Give them a link which has you actual page in the href attribute, but also has an onclick event to direct them to the same page, but with a query string to recognise who the affiliate is.
18. Similar Businesses Abroad - If you are not an international company, find a business that is similar to yours in another country and try to establish a linking relationship. If you are going to use this method, it is best to do it with a company who you already know. Otherwise you don't know who you are jumping into bed with. This method can provide some fairly good results.
19. Wikipedia - Wikipedia uses nofollow on external links, so it wont provide you any search engine value. However, if you can embed legitimate links within articles, you may be able to get some 'second-hand links'.
20. Forums - Not one to spend too much time on in my opinion. Even if the forum doesn't use nofollow, links to your site will not provide much weight. Forums tend to have a lot of links on each page, so there is not much for it to dish out your way. If you are going to post in forums, only post links to quality content on your site, Make sure your posts are of a high quality and don't just start a thread, post a link to your site and never return to the forum. The best bet is to find one or two quality forums related to your industry and post on them fairly regularly. If you can embed yourself within a forum community, other members may visit your site and in turn link to you.
21. Community Sites - Join community websites (DeviantArt, ePinions) or websites that have communities attached to them (Amazon). Many of these sites will let you post links to your homepage on your profile. They are also a good way of interacting people in your industry who may link to your site.
22. Having a Fancy Site - There are two aspects of this method: design and development. If you have a well-designed site that has been put together by an apt CSS guru submit your site to every design gallery you can find. This is one of my favourites, because it is so easy. Submitting a small business's site to a few galleries could make the difference between them never being found and getting a decent bit of traffic. On the development side, web geeks love a nice bit of JavaScript. If you have a really unique and eye-catching bit of JS on your site it could very well get 1,000 links or so. You will probably need to start the link train yourself though.
23. Buying Links - If you've tried and tried and just not got anywhere maybe it is time you bought some links from a link broker. The links are temporary and expensive, so in my opinion it would be better hiring a to get your links for you.
24. Sponsor Someone - This one is simple. Sponsor a charity, expedition, sporting team etc. and get them to put a link to your site. Very expensive.
25. Linking to Your Links - If you are linked to by a very reputable site, it may be worth getting links into the page you are linked to from. The aim here is to get a little extra from the reputable site.