If you
don't know how many other sites are linking to yours, go
to any search engine and type this in: link:http://www.yourdomain.com
... you should get a pretty good idea of your
"popularity." Keep in mind that Google never shows all
sites linking to yours, so what you see in the results
will not be an accurate presentation of those linking to
you. Why they do this is not clear (it's one of those
"Google Secrets"), but a possible explanation is that
it's one of the methods they use to keep their ranking
algorithms private.
When
considering a link purchase, only buy from sites that
are related to your theme and use the Google Toolbar to
check their page rank. You can download it here:
http://toolbar.google.com.
A page
rank of 4 or above is pretty good but a 7 or 8 is
excellent. Never buy a link based on page rank alone. If
the site doesn't relate to your site's content, don't do
it.
Here
are some things to keep in mind before making any
purchases:
There
are two types of links: one-way and reciprocal. A
reciprocal link is when two sites agree to link to each
other, a one-way link is just one site linking to
another without linking back. Purchasing a text link is
an example of a one-way link. One-way links are counted
higher by most search engines and therefore are more
valuable then reciprocal.
When
supplying your text link to other sites, make sure to
include your keywords in your anchor text. The anchor
text is the part of the link that is clickable. Use a
variety of key phrases so as not to raise any red flags
with the search engines.
You
also want to be consistent with your url. Use the "www."
part in all incoming links, as links to "yourdomain.com"
and "www.yourdomain.com" could be treated as two
different websites by the search engines.
Another
tip when buying links is to do it slowly. Don't buy too
many at one time. You want it to look natural to the
search engines. Hundreds of sites deciding to link to
yours in a week is not "natural" and may catch unwanted
attention from the powers that be.
Stay
away from link farms when choosing link partners. Just
associating with "bad sites" can be enough to get you
banned by the search engines. You'll also want to make
sure you're getting links from different IP addresses.
Search engines will give the links more weight if they
don't all come from the same IP.
So now
that you have the basics, where do you buy the text
links? I thought you'd never ask.
