How valuable is a single backlink?

Well, I think that depends very much on the site this backlink is on. Would you pay 15$ for a single backlink to your site? I would say that is rather much. Would you take a 15$ discount if all you had to do is put a link to the shop on your page?
That is exactly where this story starts. Today I purchased a SSD Harddrive for my little home server at MemorySuppliers.com and was quite surprised when the offer for a 15$ cash-back in return for a single link came along with the shipping notice. Not only had they shipped my order just a few hours later, had the best bargain SSD drive and seem to have almost everything you could think of when it comes to computer memory – on top of that they value a backlink at 15$ ! And even without demanding a special keyword in the anchor text. Maybe they don’t know how important the link anchor is for ranking in google?

Dear staff at Memorysuppliers.com:

The keywords in the anchor are the most important thing because they determine for which keywords you rank well! And because of that I will reward you with an extra link: the best and cheapest memory can be found at memorysuppliers.com…

And for the rest of my readers: This is an excellent idea for getting backlinks to your business: Offer a rebate in exchange for a backlink from your customer’s web sites… And don’t forget to ask them to link with your favourite keywords as anchor text 😉

And by the way: They asked me to link to memorysuppliers.com but this link is redirected to www.memorysuppliers.com …Is this good or bad for SEO?

Post a comment right here below this article with your opinion on this topic!
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NeuroLinker: an automated link building system

NeuroLinker is a system for building automated backlinks. If you have followed my blog for some time, you know that I am a big fan of Jonathan Leger’s link programs, (see my article Getting backlinks with the “Leger Backlink Family” for an overview on 3waylinks, 1waylinks and mywaylinks)
Now that does not mean that I am blind to everything else, in fact there are other excellent programs out there, too, and one of them is NeuroLinker:
Neurolinker has not only has become a serious rival to 3waylinks.net, it incorporates most of the functionality of many other SEO services, which makes it a one stop SEO solution.

When neurolinker started, it was basically the same as 3waylinks, but they constantly added very useful features, and by now neurolinker is something like 3waylinks combined with 1waylinks plus a social bookmarking service + article marketing.

Let’s have a closer look on neurolinker:

Links from relevant sites
Neurolinker has an option to choose whether you want only backlinks from related sites. That will lead to much fewer backlinks, but you do not have to worry that you might get visitors from sites that don’t have anything to do with yours. There once was a category listing in 3waylinks, too, but is has no relevance.
If it is sheer quantity of backlinks that you are after, you can choose to get links from unrelated sites, too.
In 3waylinks there is no way to choose.

Deep links
In 3waylinks all links are links to your homepage. In neurolinker, you can create backlinks to any page on your website.
That is great for supporting inner pages of your site.

Number of Backlinks
Neurolinker states you get unlimited backlinks – of course that is only half the truth: The number of links is only limited by the number of members in the system, but it is definitely higher than with 3waylinks (250 backlinks per domain).

Amount of domains
3waylinks allows you to put up to 50 domains in the system – under certain circumstances, namely if you have domains with a PR of 4 or higher, you can put more than 50 domains in the system. Neurolinker has a quota of 100 domains from start…

Other Services
Neurolinker has a much broader portfolio of link types, they introduced an reciprocal social bookmarking service(digg and stumble). In Exchange to diggs and stumbles for your sites, you bookmark, digg and stumble other peoples sites…
Neurolinker also sports an article service. You can submit articles that will be published on other member websites – basically what 1waylinks does, too.

Now for all the extra functionality I would have expected a hefty price tag, but in fact neurolinker is even cheaper than 3waylinks.
Now if you asked me: Mike, do you abandon 3waylinks and use neurolinker instead?
My answer is easy: Of course not! 3waylinks is much too valuable to abandon it and contrary to neurolinker they accept my non english web sites, too. But neurolinker is far too powerful to ignore, so I use both, sometimes even for the same site, and what can I say: it is double the power than only one linking service 😉

Is Pagerank really important?

To make it short: Yes and No!

Yes, because it determines a few aspects of the quality of your links.
No, because it doesn’t tell anything about your ranking for the keywords that will give you the most traffic…

For example, one of my very new sites, www.naturfotokalender.de, has a Pagerank of 0, not surprisingly…

But the ranking at the time of writing this for one of the main keyphrases (“Fotokalender Gimp”) is number one on the german google SERP…

But what is Pagerank, actually? If you have the google toolbar, then you will notice the Pagerank bar and will see that it shows a green bar. More green, higher pagerank, more important site. If it only was this easy…

Ian Rogers has written a comprehensive post on what pagerank really is and how it is calculated and so on:

Ian Rogers article on PageRank

Do I really need to know this?

In my opinion, not really. What you need to know is: If I get links from sites with high pagerank (or pagerank at all, e.g. a minimum of 1) then that is good. Is it good because it help you rank higher? Not exactly – it helps you rank faster, if, and only if, the links have the right anchor text. It helps you rank faster because sites with higher pagerank are spidered more often. That means your link will be found soon by google and can be taken into account. If you have a link on a Pagerank 0 site (grey Pagerank bar) then it takes maybe a month or longer until the site is spidered again (if at all) and it will take ages before this paricular link can contribute to your ranking.

So if you got a blog list from the blog search on seo-traffic-guide.de, look for the dofollow blogs with higher pagerank first…

I know that Pagerank is a controversial topic and I am fully aware that this was only a simplified way of looking at pagerank, so feel free to comment and tell me what you think about PR!

Get backlinks from social bookmarking sites

Jonathan Leger, in my eyes a real expert when it comes to getting links, wrote about getting backlinks from social bookmarking sites on his Internet Marketing Blog . He points out exactly what to do and why it works – and all in plain English and easy to understand. I recommend reading his post for everyone who does not want to rely only on blog comment links(that is what www.seo-traffic-guide.de is about), article submission or networks like 3Waylinks.

Tap into the keyword potiential of your site

I am often asked how to choose keywords. If you unsure of what keywords could bring more traffic to your site or what you should write about more, then you should determine the potential of keywords that are found on your site, but did not lead to any search engine clicks up to now. If you just used your web server logs or tools like google analytics to determine for which keywords your site was actually found, then you are missing out on a huge potential – the keywords that your site could be found for. There are many searches in google that would show your site in the results, but nobody ever clicked on it. The reason for that could be that your site is just on page 2344 of the SERPs or that the search result doesn’t look attractive enough. In both cases, you should do something. If the result does not look attractive, use a short descriptive meta description for your page (72 characters), and if you want to rise in the SERPs use backlink building techniques like do follow blog comments.

So but how can you find out what those keywords are that you are found for but nobody clicks on?

Use google webmaster tools! The search statics in google webmaster tools will show you the top 20 last searches that your site was found for. Take those and consider optimizing for those keywords and see your traffic rise!
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Getting backlinks with the “Leger Backlink Family”

When it comes to building links automatically or semi-automatically Jonathan Leger is the guy to look at.
When I first heard of him he just had developed a product called 3WayLinks.net.

With 3WayLinks.net. you get a minimum of 250 backlinks to your domain’s homepage with three keyphrases split 60%, 30% and 10% per website entered, for up to 50 websites. These links come from sites with all types of themes and relevancies, with a wide range of page ranks (PR, my highest incoming link is from a PR5 site, but I guess there might be pages with even higher PR in the system). Backlinks are all targeted at the website in general, not to inner pages. If your site is PR 4+, it doesn’t  count in the quota, so you can actually have more than 50 domains.

It is quite easy to use if you are running wordpress, because you can then use the 3waylinks wordpress plugin I wrote.

With MyWaylinks.net you get to choose which sites send you backlinks. At least, you get to ask for, and generally get backlinks from sites of your choosing, with PR’s of at least 1. That means that your links are of high relevancy and higher PR (in general, compared to 3waylinks or 1waylinks).

You can direct these links to any website you choose, including subdomains and inner pages. Your links are not limited to the sites you submit and register with MyWaylinks.net. (Great for getting new sites indexed fast!)

You also control the sites to which you give backlinks. They apply, you review, then approve or reject.

3WayLinks.net is a more highly automated process; you set it and forget it, until you add another website. It is also more broad and less specific in its linking. You get a lot of links but of generally low to medium quality.

MyWaylinks.net requires more setup time in that you will need to search the database of participants to find sites that you would like to receive backlinks from. Once the links are set up there is no more to be done. At that point it is set and forget also. The same for backlinks you give to other sites. In fact, you do not have to give backlinks to anyone if you don’t want to. There is a marketplace among members where quota needed to “pay” for backlinks to your site can be bought and sold on a member-to-member auction bid basis.

Currently you get 25 quota points upon signup. Getting backlinks costs 1 quota point per PR point (PR 1 links cost you 1 quota point, Pr4 links cost you 4 quota points, etc.) You receive 3 quota points per PR point of your site. If someone asks for a link from your PR3 website and you accept, you get 3×3=9 quota points.

So far, this has proven to be very worthwhile. One good thing is that links get crawled quickly (since all sites registered are PR1 or higher) and you see results in 2-5 days. Another is that those links from relevant sites REALLY move you up the ranking scale fast in Google… It’s nice to see those large jumps!

O.k. now we have covered the oldest child of the Leger Backlink Family(3WayLinks.net) and the youngest (MyWaylinks.net) – but there are two more:

There is DirLinks.net, which is actually some sort of completely different looking twin of 3WayLinks.net, that means it is part of the package.

It creates a directory with links to up to 1000 of the participating sites, again in a 3waylinks style. It gives you more links than 3waylinks and allows for links to inner pages – so it is the perfect addition to 3waylinks although it lives a little bit under the shadow of 3WL.

And last but not least, there is 1WayLinks.net:

A system that allows to post up to 250 blog articles with 3  in content links each, has the capability of spinning text and links and that makes it the most versatile tool Jon has ever created. For every new helper blog you add to the system you get an additional 50 post each month. That makes it an endless supply of high quality links. You can point your links to any site you like (given it adheres to the somewhat strict content rules of all Leger systems)

1WayLinks.net has become one of my main work horses because of it’s reliability and and endless supply of quality links!

In summary:

3WL – 240 or so basic links per website entered, up to 50 websites.
MWL– high quality links on a link exchange basis
1WL – Lots and lots of low quality links. Great for Google, Yahoo not so much.
DirLinks – Lots of links of med. to low quality. Works well as “Steroids” for 3WL; kicks backlink counts way up beyond 3WL’s 250 or so count.

So if you you are looking to expand your linking efforts, have a look at one of these – or do it like I do and use all of them in the field where each of them has it’s specific strengths.

Link Popularity Pitfalls

Link popularity is an important factor in the promotion of your website. Without it you will find success hard to find. Many entrepreneurs devote a great deal of time, energy and expense into the quest for more links to their website, some gain success while others fail terribly. What are the reasons for this?

The most common pitfall that link traders find themselves falling into is, what I refer to as, “Link Greed”. The most common way in which webmasters increase their link popularity is to gain reciprocal links, a reciprocal link is the placement of a link to another site placed on your own reciprocated by a link to your own site on theirs. However not all link exchanges are equal, some are fair while others are actually dangerous to your site. Those webmasters suffering from link greed eagerly accept every link exchange offered to them and fail to take the time to make a few simple investigations to ensure that the link partner is being fair. Also, link greed can lead to the acceptance of links that are either on an unsuitable site or in an unsuitable directory.

Link popularity is not the most important factor, yes, to do well you will need a reasonable number of links to your site but, for most search engines, it is the quality of the link that is most important. If you have a site about “wrinkle treatments” it would be beneficial to exchange reciprocal links with other wrinkle treatment sites, furthermore any other site about skin care, and even the wider scope of health, would also be most suitable. However trading links with a site about deep sea fishing would hardly be suitable – can you see an Alaskan fisherman worried about his wrinkles? This analogy may be a little amusing but it is very much how the search engines attempt to view the Internet and the relationships between websites. So remember sites that increase their link popularity by trading links with relevant sites do far better than those that exchange links with any site.

Common Dangers

Now here is some important information about trading links:

1. Ensure that the search engines can find your links page and that they can find the links page of the other site. Usually this is easy to check by going to the homepage and finding the route to the links directory.

2. Try to place their link on your site on a page that matches the number of clicks from the homepage. The best links pages are those that are only 1 click from the homepage or 2 clicks. 3 clicks and beyond can be problematic.

3. Check to see if the link partner is using any tricks or immoral tactics to hide your link on their site. There are a number of tricks an unscrupulous webmaster can employ to his advantage and to your disadvantage so spend some time familiarizing yourself with the common ones.

4. Consider purchasing software to check your reciprocal links. Software such as LinkAssistant (www.link-assistant.com) will enable you to check that your link is still on the other site plus it can do many other things to help you promote your site and increase your link popularity.

Link Text/Anchor Text

Your choice of anchor text (the words that are actually linked to your site) are incredibly important. With a little research you will be able to discover what people actually search for and these are the words you should include in your anchor text. However it is not always wise to go with the terms most popularly searched for. Say you had a site about hotels in London, England in the United Kingdom, well the most popular search may be “London Hotels” but other terms are also searched for such as “boutique hotels London” or “cheap hotels London UK“. Therefore you should change your text from time to time selecting one of the lesser searched for terms (you will stand a better chance of featuring on the top page for such searches) but occasionally selecting the main search, which, in this case, would be “London Hotels”. As your link popularity increases you should widen the variety of phrases used in your anchor text. You should also include a short description below the link to describe your site, include a few keywords here also and change that often too, mixing and matching various combinations. If you stick with the same link text and description you might well find your site blacklisted for over optimization.

Andrew Kelly has lived in the Hebrides of Scotland for 16 years. Initially concentrating on accommodation in the Hebrides he began writing for the Internet he began writing about vacations in Scotland in general and has now published tens of thousands of pages and articles across many popular sites.

Is Google aware of comment spam?

I wrote a lot about gaining backlinks by commenting on blogs, and I always warn people that if you use this technique for link building, you have to deleiver real value as otherwise you are nothing but a spammer.
So what – a few people might think, then I am a spammer as long as google does not notice I am fine with that.
My opinion on those: You are wasting other people’s time and most probably your own time, too.
Read here what Google has to say about comment spam:
Google on comment spam

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How does KeywordLuv work

Many people know about blog commenting as a way to build backlinks – not many know that on some blogs it even gets better. I am talking about KeywordLuv blogs. They are the SEO-guy’s dream come true. A KeywordLuv blog gives you free backlinks with keywords that you can choose freely!

But what is a Keywordluv blog and how does it work?
There is a WordPress plugin called KeywordLuv and it’s purpose is to let you choose your keywords for your link anchor freely. There are more and more blogs on the WWW that have KeywordLuv installed.

How does it work, what do you have to do to benefit from KeywordLuv blogs?
All you have to do is comment on a KeywordLuv blog and in the field for your name use the following syntax: name@keywords.
An easy example: Mike@find dofollow blogs
This will show your name in the comment and then a link to your website with your chosen keywords as anchor text. That means it will be translated to
Mike from find dofollow blogs
Notice that it has built a link to my homepage with “find dofollow blogs” as anchor text.

Do you need to install KeywordLuv to benefit from it?
No – you just have to find blogs which have it installed already. But if you want to get more comments on your blog, it might be a good idea to install it on your own blog, too.
You can find the Plugin and a very good explanation here: KeywordLuv Plugin on wordpress.org

And if you wonder how to find KeyowordLuv blogs, you might already have guessed… If you use the blogsearch on www.seo-traffic-guide.de, you will get a list of KeywordLuv-Blogs as well.

But the shortest way to a KeywordLuv blog is actually down this page…
www.seo-traffic-guide.de is a KeywordLuv blog, too. You can use the KeywordLuv option on my blog, too, just tell me what you think about this article right now…

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Suggestions about Keyword Anchor Text

By Dave Kelly, CEO of Arundel Net Marketing

We all know how we name many of our pages. I’m referring to pages we create to do well for a specific keyword.

Let’s say our keyphrase is..

Buy Microvaves Indiana

Let say you have a page name www.domain.com/buy-microwaves-indiana.html

Many people would simply try to construct blog posts using “Buy Microwaves Indiana” as their anchor text (the text that is underlined in your blog post).

Now what is wrong with that? Well a couple of things. If you use any of the popular keyword research tools you often see many keyphrases such as this, and I’m referring to phrases that really aren’t correct English.

Now here’s the problem. If you were to outsource the above post or even if you write it yourself. you are trying to work a grammatically incorrect phrase into a post. You may say, “But the keyword research tools tell me this is how people are searching”, and while there may be truth in that statement, what that tool is not telling you is that this is not what Google’s spiders are looking for.

Google tries to detect natural language patterns. If you are using the above phrase in a blog post, it simply is not going to look natural.

People are so fixated on having keyword anchor text match exactly what keyword tools tell them they should be using that they are in fact leaving a giant footprint for Google and other search engines that you are ‘over optimizing’. If you ever read any of the SEO forums, I’m sure you’ve seen people discuss this.

What I’m trying to say is that whether you have other people write your blog posts for you or you are writing the posts yourself, make certain the keywords are used naturally.

For example, the above phrase should be ‘buy microwaves IN Indiana’ or ‘where to buy microwaves in Indiana’

What you perceive you are losing by not using the exact keyphrase you are more than making up for by using text that appeals to Google’s LSI (Latent Symatenc Indexing) technology.

I’m sure you’ve seen sites generated where the navigation menu down the side has tons of these phrases. None of them are natural. These will stand out like a sore thumb to Google! As long as the main words you want to use as your keyword anchor text are PART of the actual anchor text you use you will be fine.

Not only will the blogs look more natural, your post will look more natural.

The key to success today with link campaigns is to make everything look as real and as natural as possible.

If you do that, Google will like you, and anyone who writes posts for you will be able to write a much better, more natural sounding post for you. While this might go against the grain of what you’ve been told to do or have been doing, I can assure you that it works.

About the Author:

Dave Kelly also maintains a great service at Linkvana.com which is devoted to helping you get great, high-quality, one-way backlinks for your websites. We at BFB recommend them highly, and encourage you to visit their site for more information.

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