Setting up a link campaign is a great search engine optimization strategy for getting more visitors to your website. But, there are many dubious websites looking to take advantage of you. So when setting up the campaign you need to know what to look for and how to spot a potential bad situation. This is the second article designed to educate you about both inbound and outbound links. The first article had four tips on linking, below are three more tips to creating an effective relationship with a honest website.
1. Make sure there are no more than 100-50 links on one page; the fewer the better. Also, make sure the links on the page are related by subject, topic or industry.
2. Understand if the website has rel=”NOFOLLOW” tag attached to the link. The no follow tag will prevent the search engines from following your link. It will also prevent the search engine from passing PageRank to your website, a major disadvantage if you are linking with expectations of improving your organic rank. To find out if a link has a rel=”nofollow”, a free SEO tool can be added to your browser. Adding this free tool will allow you to spot any nofollow links by turning the nofollow link red. The one I use is for firefox, developed by SEObook.
3. If you are exchanging links with another website, make sure to monitor your link. In the future this will provide two benefits. First, monitoring the linking partner will prevent any outbound, dead links, on your website; which is something Google will penalize your site for. Second, by monitoring a website you will know if the website removes your link. A dubious site will intentionally remove your link whereby creating a one-way link in their favor, which carries more weight with Google. So keep an eye on your external links. You can do this manually, or buy a link management program that will do this automatically.
Technically a link campaign is not difficult, but it takes time. Don’t just add links without understanding how a site is structured. Finally, visit the site that you will link to, making sure they are not up to any tricks that will hurt your chances of getting better results in the search engines.
