Urmil and I had a another very interesting 2-on-1 consultancy call with one of the Mastermind Program Members recently, which covered a lot of great insights into how to get high rankings for a website!

And I thought you’d also like to share some of the ‘insider’ tips on linking strategies that emerged – so here goes…

As I mentioned in my recent blog post Linking Tips To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking, you can’t just put up a single website and expect customers to find it amongst all the other billions of websites out there! You need to build you own little net of interlinked websites to catch the traffic you seek – and with billions of searches a day there’s lots of traffic out there to catch!

The linked Hub and satellite Mini-Sites model is about catching free highly motivated and targeted search traffic from Google and the other search engines and driving it to niche product mini-sites and then channelling this traffic through affiliate links on your Hub sites to merchants such as Amazon, collecting a commission on all purchases.

Bear in mind also that there are two types of buyer that you’re looking to capture:
•    Those that know exactly the product they want to buy (eg a Samsung Digital Media Centre – YPK-5JZB)
•    Those that are still looking generically for a ‘Media Centre’

So you’re trying to get the first group to click through the links on your Mini-Site dedicated to a specific product and shepherd the latter group to your Hub Site, where they can compare various models and make a buying decision.

Now, your Hub Site is going to be positioned in a fairly competitive market – I looked at Google search and competition criteria for your Mini-Sites in an earlier Blog Post – Niche Product Strategies For Your Hub And Mini-Sites.

So your ‘web’ of Mini-Sites is there to trawl for traffic from lower-competition keyword searches and send this to your Hub-Site, as well as creating a ‘net’ of inbound links to your Hub sites to improve their ranking.

The major purpose of your Mini-Sites is thus to get high ranking in Google as ‘content-rich’ traffic-catching web pages. Each Mini-Site should thus focus on one product and each Mini-Site page should be focussed on, and optimised for, one keyword (or ‘long-tail’ keyword string) relating to that product.

The primary links on your Mini-Site pages should be contextual (keyword-based) and should link to the relevant product page on your Hub Site, providing in-bound links to your Hub site.

You should also include links on the bottom of your Mini-site pages to other Mini-sites, to spread your ‘web’ and get Google ranking ‘credit’. But make sure your links aren’t ‘reciprocal’ – site A should link to Site B, B to C, and C to A, etc – no two sites should just ‘swap’ links back to each other, as Google discounts these.

Your Hub Site is the portal to your suppliers, so the primary links on your individual Hub Site pages should link to your suppliers, through your affiliate links. Your Hub sites can also carry page-bottom links to other Hub sites, but should not link back to your Mini-Sites.

Other linking strategies you should use include:
•    your internal links between pages – you should particularly make sure that your ‘Site Map’ is properly set up and all the links work properly, so that the spiders can crawl through every page of your site and onward to your other sites using the links discussed above.
•    Your Useful Links page can be used to boost your search engine ranking by linking to other, unrelated websites. Again, the Useful Links on your Mini-site should link to other Mini-sites; those on your Hub-site should link to other Hub-sites. The linked sites need not be on related topics – your ‘media centre’ site can link to your ‘freezer’ site, etc – all you’re seeking to do is provide the conduit for the spiders to find each of your sites and to improve your search engine score by providing in-bound links. Again, no two sites should link reciprocally to each other – always link A to B to C, etc.

This can all get to sound a bit complicated but the underlying principle is Keep It Simple – think like your prospects when writing the text and setting up the purchasing process and think like a search engine when setting up the linking strategy.

Happy linking!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

The more visitors you get to come to your website the better your business will do – that’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?

But I’m sure you appreciate that you can’t just put up a single website and expect customers to find it amongst all the other billions of websites out there! Unless you can afford high-budget advertising, you’ll need to be optimize your website for both visitors and search engines and use a variety of lower-cost methods to direct traffic to your site – much as you would do for traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses.

And your Linking strategy is a vital element in this.

To maximize the number of visitors to your site, you need your site to rank well with search engines – and make them use-friendly for the ‘spiders’ and ‘bots’ the search engines use to analyse your web pages.

Tip #1: Build your Net to catch Traffic and your Web to catch Spiders!

So – continuing the ‘Spider’, ‘Web’, ‘Net’ and ‘Fishing’ similes – you need a net to catch fish (traffic) and you’re trying to build a sticky ‘web’ to catch the SE ‘spiders’!

As a friend of mine said – “Don’t try to create traffic – just go and stand in the way of the traffic that’s already out there!” – and with billions of searches a day there’s lots of traffic out there to catch!

What you’re trying to do is to build your own little net of interlinked websites to catch the traffic you seek and to make it all attractive and easy to follow for the SE spiders.

Your Linking Strategy should be about catching free highly motivated and targeted search traffic from Google and the other search engines, driving it to your niche sites and then channelling this traffic to your sales pages.

Now, free traffic rarely comes quickly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a waiting game… you need to put in the work then wait for your traffic and rankings to increase, tweaking things along the way and adding extra links to help things along.

Tip #2: Create lots of Links

There are three types of links: incoming links, outgoing links, and internal links. You need all three to build your ‘net’.

You want to create as many incoming links (also known as ‘backlinks’) as possible, as these ‘count’ highest in the eyes of the search engines.

When a SE ‘spider’ sees lots of inbound links to your site, it says “this must be an interesting site if so many other sites link to it” and gives you higher ranking – so your website is displayed higher up the ‘natural’ search results pages.

Backlinks are particularly helpful to search engine ranking, so you should try to get other relevant websites to link to yours, if possible. And you can use links from your other websites to do this too – more about this in upcoming posts.

Tip #3: Help the Spiders!

Now when the SE spider is looking around your website, you want it to find all the ‘goodies’ you’ve put on your website, and to visit every page – and then to go on and follow your links to your other websites.

So, make it easy for the spiders – put links on each page of your site pointing to other pages of your site, so that the spiders can find their way around easily!

Tip #4: Don’t use Reciprocal Links or Link Farms

Now, the more incoming links and internal links you have, and the easier it is for the spiders to follow out-bound links to your other websites, the better your sites will rank with the search engines.

But there are two traps to avoid here!

Reciprocal links don’t work. If you think about it, it’s a bit like you lending me $100 and me lending you $100 – neither of us is actually better off, we just exchanged $100.

And that’s just how the search engines see it too – there is no ‘added value’ in reciprocal links, so they don’t help your ranking.

And stay away from link farms. Don’t pay to have thousands of incoming links created for you. The search engines will see this as link spamming and they’ll stop ranking your site altogether.

So there you have 4 tips on using links to improve your search engine rankings. Follow these tips you will get a higher ranking for your site, bringing more traffic to your site and more money for you…

You can read more in my article Linking Strategies For Your Niche Sites.

Watch out for further linking tips in future blog articles.

Happy linking!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons