How to get links to your website – relevant backlinks are best

Visitor J.A. says:

I’m interested in some SEO consulting from you.

My dream words are ’email lists’

I’m on page 4 now, what will it take — backlinking?

Hi, J.A. –

There are only 37 mentions of your site that Google knows about. That’s a pretty small number.

If you run this search for backlinks on my site www.wordsinarow.com, it will find about 1010 such links. It’s one reason my optin email lists page does so well in a search at Google, where it is has been #1 for about 3 years now in a search for “optin email lists”. Insert your own domain and you’ll find the actual number of backlinks Google knows about. Don’t use the “link:” command, as it has been broken for years now and does not actually report all the links Google knows about.

There are several ways to get really good relevant links to your site that will help your Google rankings:

1. We can do a directory submission process through the top 30 directories online. This costs $500 (our fee) and about $800-to-$1700 in “hard costs”. The hard costs are listed here: https://www.wordsinarow.com/hardcosts.html. You can pick and choose which ones you want us to submit, but to do it right, pay the $1700 (minus anything you’ve already paid, such as possibly the $299 for Yahoo Directory which many people have already paid. Here’s our current list of directories where we register the site: How to Register a Site with the Directories.

2. We farm out a service of registering a site with about 900 little “free” directories. Although we register with 900 of them, only about 500-600 will actually list the site, and many of them are slow to do so. This builds a lot of little links from directories.

The good thing about both 1 and 2 is that your site is usually hand-entered into the directories, so it is “human-reviewed” and thus Google pays attention to the categories in which your site is listed. This creates relevant links.

Completely aside from directories, there are two good ways to get links:

3. Go to this site: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

enter in “email lists” including the quotes.

See what comes up. (You may have to download a Java applet to do this — go ahead, I believe it’s safe — I downloaded it with no ill effect).

You’ll see there various groupings of sites. Bigger circles are the sites that are doing well at Google because they have links from the smaller sites. The trick is to use the list of links on the left of the page and contact the website owners directly (by phone works best) asking for a link specifically from those pages. Try to get links from the exact same pages of the smaller sites that are linking to the larger sites. You can usually get contact info (phone number) from the website. If not, go to the whois info:

http://whois.domaintools.com/wordsinarow.com – for example – you’ll find our phone number there.

4. I can run a report that gives a list of what Google considers to be the “authority” sites for any keyword phrase. (Using software for which I paid a bundle.) “Authority sites” are sites that link to two or more of the top 10 sites at Google for any particular keyword phrase. Once you know who those are (and many of them will be the same sites as in step 3 above) you can contact them asking for links from the same pages. This is best done by phone — emails requesting links are generally ignored in the flood of spam that people are receiving. (Personally I get over 2000 emails a day, 98% of which are spam. I delete most link requests without even looking at them and I’m sure the majority of site owners do the same.) I charge $100 for the report.

So those are ALL good methods of getting relevant links to your site.

Not as good but still sometimes effective:

5. Text link ads can be bought from Text Link Ads and others. Google is filtering these out wherever possible, but while Google is omnipresent, they are not yet omniscient and they will count many of these paid text links toward your ranking. The problem is that not all such links are relevant, so are somewhat wasted. Still, this system works for many companies.

An excellent source of high-quality links is article marketing (although these are short-lived and require constant campaigns to be effective):

6. Article publishing — this is a service offered by several companies — both Expansion Plus (Doug Hay and Sally Falkow) and Studio 98 Design(Rafferty Pendery) offer this service. Feel free to contact them directly.

Best regards,

Jeré Matlock
SEO Consultant
Website Design & Marketing / SEO