Essential SEO Tools & Resources

In my earlier post today, “How To Get Lots Of Reciprocal Links To Your Site” we discussed how to find potential partners using Google, and how to create your own “links page” that will rank well and achieve a good page rank of its own, so that lots of linking partners come in search of you!

To help “would be” link partners further to find you, I also suggest you put an “Add URL” page on your website and make it easy for other sites to exchange links with you!.

After all, if you’re searching for partners using Google with “add url” in your search, others will be to, so make sure they find you!

Place a link to your “Add Url” page on your navigation menu so its visible to all visitors, regardless of what page you bring them in to. Use “Add Url” as the anchor text for the links to the page. Place your main keywords in the page title along with “add url”

“Add Url” is by far the most popular search term people use when searching for link partners.

You could place “submit site” or “add link” in the body of the page’s content if you want to, but stick to “Add Url” in the page title and in the anchor text for your links.

Encourage visitors to link to you before they submit their link request. For example, on your Add Url page, detail the link exchange process step by step, starting with … “First, link to my site”, then provide them with the details of the link you wish them to add to their site, such as:

Your Site Url
Anchor Text (ie: Keyword Text you want to appear in the link)s
Site Description a brief description of your site.

Under the details add the code they can simply copy and paste so that the link appears on their web page with the details above.

Its worth giving them up to 3 different anchor text options so that over time you get a mixture of links pointing back to you, rather than all the same which may devalue them.

Once you’ve provided your visitor with the details they need to place a link on their web pages pointing to your site, you need to provide them with a simple form for them to provide their link request details. Fields required to be populated would be:

Their Site URL
Anchor Text
Description
Category (if you have them)
Email Address
Contact Name

You need their email address to contact them should a link to your site not appear on the their site, or for letting them know that you have placed their link on your site.

There is another benefit to having their contact details. You can contact them in the future to discuss other joint venture opportunities. If your site themes are related, and you have for example your own product, you could contact them and ask them to become an affiliate for it as it would be of interest to their visitors and be an income source for them.

Obviously make the page as SEO friendly as possible.

Another Free way of obtaining “reciprocal links” is to join a link exchange farm. I would warn against joining most link sites as they’re poor quality and can actually damage your sites ranking.

One site in particular though is worth using, www.linkmetro.com. It’s a legitimate site owned by Brad Callen, the guy who developed Keyword Elite, my favourite software!

The beauty of Link Metro (apart from being Free) is that you choose which sites you link to, and can therefore ensure that you only link with good quality related sites. You can also choose to display your sites only to other sites in related niches.

As I say I don’t recommend link exchange sites generally, other than www.linkmetro.com.

Finally, if you can afford to purchase SEO Elite it’s a pretty good product, I actually bought it before Keyword Elite. And yes it is another product from Brad Callen.

SEO Elite automates the process of finding and contacting potential link partners. You simply type in a keyword and SEO Elite will find you related sites and their contact email addresses, so that with one email you can contact lots of potential partners asking for a link exchange.

Alternatively you can type in the url of a a top ranking site for a particular keyword phrase (ie: one of your leading competitors) and let SEO Elite return you all the sites that are linking to it. Again with one email you can quickly set about mirroring the linking strategies of the highest ranking sites in your niche. And it can all be done in minutes!

Here’s how I use SEO Elite:

In the results that SEO Elite produces, it displays the Google Page Rank for each url returned. This is great information. Until my site has its own page rank, I tend to only select sites with a Page Rank of 3 or less to send a request to. I don’t want to waste an email at this early stage on high page rank sites who won’t want to exchange with a site with no page rank, I wait until I have page rank and then email them.

Using SEO Elite in this way can produce great results over a period of a few months. As I’ve said before, forget the get rich quick attitude, you need to put the foundations in place before you start to worry about making serious cash. Follow my blueprint linking strategy and over time you’ll build high ranking sites that will generate the traffic you need.

You can also use SEO Elite to find potential joint venture sites. Type in your main keywords and look for the high page rank sites that are returned. If you’ve got a product that you own (or a product with master resell rights) that you have an affiliate scheme for, you can email the sites SEO Elite returns, suggesting that they promote the product on their sites to their customer lists for a percentage of the sale. The simplest way to set up an affiliate scheme for your products is by signing up as a merchant with Clickbank.com.

So there you have it … how to find reciprocal link partners and how to make sure they find you!

Tomorrow we’ll move on to getting inbound links using “Article Marketing” and “RSS Feeds”, before we explore “blog commenting” …

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In Part 1 we discussed Directory Submissions and Forum Posting as ways of getting free backlinks to your web pages.

In Part 2 I was going to teach you about the following techniques for getting lots of inbound links to your site:

- reciprocal linking
- rss feeds
- article marketing

But, I’ve written so much about reciprocal linking (had to split this in to two parts), you’re going to have to wait until tomorrow to find out about RSS Feeds and Article Marketing!!! This 3 Part series on Getting Inbound Links suddenly became a 4 or 5 part series

So let’s get started with today’s technique …

Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is a method whereby you put a link from your site to someone else’s site, and in return they link back to your site. Traditionally that is why you see “links pages” on a lot of sites, it’s the site where they place their outbound links to other sites, usually in return for a link back.

Reciprocal Linking should be an integral part of your linking strategy, but not the most important component. When it comes to inbound links, one way links are better, and for that reason, the techniques in my next 2 or 3 posts are superior. But reciprocal linking still has a part to play in getting high search engine rankings (serps).

initially it can be a struggle to find linking partners who are willing to reciprocate. It’s a “chicken and the egg” scenario.

It’ll be rare that you’ll find another site that has decent page rank willing to trade links with you if you have a new site with zero page rank because there is nothing in it for them!

So in effect you need to have inbound links to get inbound links!

I therefore suggest that you concentrate on attracting reciprocal links only from other related sites that have a Page Rank of 3 or less, until you have at least a page rank of 3 yourself, or at the very minimum you have decent traffic numbers to your site to entice potential partners with!

Leave contacting the higher ranking sites until you have PR yourself.

So how do you find potential link partners?

A simple free way to find potential sites to exchange links with is to simply search Google. Type in one of your keywords into the search box along with the words “add url” or “add link”, for example:

Keyword phrase add url or keyword add link

The results returned will show related sites that are willing to exchange links.

Usually the returned pages will show you exactly what you need to do to exchange links with that site. Normally, it’s as simple as adding your site details to the fields on the returned page, and then copying the code they provide and adding it to your own links page.

Now, when you create a links page on your site so that you can paste the other site’s code, or add their link details manually, I really suggest you do the following. Make your page more than just a “links” page. Don’t just simply display a lot of links on the page. Add some relevant content as well to make the page more attractive to the Search Engines. Don’t call it Links Page, call it “sites of interest” or something more inventive and keyword friendly. Ensure it links directly off your homepage. Make the page a directory page that includes descriptions of the sites you’re linking to and add some related content. Split the site links into sections with good Keyword headings. Get some inbound links to it.

Why do all this?

If you do all these things, your “links” page will earn a decent Page Rank. If it earns a decent page rank, more sites will request to link with you, saving you the leg work. Plus, remember the chicken and egg scenario? If you get good page rank for your links page, better ranking sites will reciprocate links with you!

So don’t just throw up a links page, put some work into it. Remember the more related incoming links you get from quality sites, the further up the search engine rankings you’ll go!

The rest of the article is continued here …

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