Link Building in 2010

Link building is without doubt the most important activity involved in achieving high Google rankings. Scattered throughout the web, there are many theories that seek to guide you through the link building process . When you’re starting out in web marketing, the range of tactics and often conflicting advice available can leave you flummoxed as to exactly where your link building boots should tread first. So, here’s the first of three posts summarising my take on Link Building in 2010. I will cover the three factors that I believe are most important for successful link building, they are:
1. Quantity
2. Quality
3. Diversity

So..were almost set to go, but before we start I’d like to make you aware of the one fact that most new web marketeers often miss when researching link building – that all ‘link building guides’ will are of a moment. The first thing to check when reading any link building webpage is it’s publish date. On average, Google has updated their algorithms every 6 months.  If your reading any page offering link building advice that pre-dates six month’s ago, be careful – the author may say very different things is asked for advice today!

Btw, the date today is January 9th 2010

1. Quantity: Ship Them In…..Steadily

Put simply, the only answer to the question ‘How do I rank high in Google?’ is ‘Get links!’ How many you need depends on the keyword you target and how competitive that keyword is (more on researching keywords in later posts).  Almost everyone who has a website has, at least, an idea as to which keyword they would like to rank well for, let’s call this your ‘wish-word’. So, let’s see how competitive things are for you.

1.1. Browse to Google’s homepage.

1.2. Type in your ‘wish-word’ and search.

1.3. You’ll now see the top ten ranked website for your ‘wish-word’, were going to look at the no 1 and the no 10 in more detail. Note down their url’s.

1.4. Click here to visit Yahoo, http://uk.search.yahoo.com this will open in a 2nd browser window.

1.5. Now type into Yahoo’s search box the following syntax, where ‘yourdomain.co.uk’ is the url for your wish-word no 1 ranked website without the ‘www’:
linkdomain:yourdomain.co.uk -site:yourdomain.co.uk
Now hit search!

1.6. You should see something like the image below. In this example, I’ve queried H2′s website url of www.theh2.co.uk (you can click to make this image bigger).

On the left hand side of this screen, you will see in purple a sentence that reads ’5,010 results for linkdomain:theh2.co.uk…’ – 5010 is the number of links Yahoo reports as pointing to www.theh2.co.uk. If you have followed the above, you should also now have a number of links Yahoo is reporting as linking to your wish-word no 1 Google ranked website.

You’re probably wondering why we’ve used Yahoo to find this information when it’s Google were looking to achieve top ten ranking for? Yahoo is far more open than Google in telling us how many links it has indexed as pointing to our queried url. However, even with Yahoo, all figures are approximate and you’ll probably find they’ll change slightly should you perform the same search everyday.

1.7. Do the same Yahoo query for the no 10 ranked website from your Google wish-word rankings.  And then finally, do the same Yahoo query for your own website.

1.8. You now have link quantity figures for the no 1 and no 10 Google ranked websites for your wish-word. You also have link quantity figures for your own website. The difference between these three figures gives you a quick and rough guide as to how much link building work you need to do in order to catch up with those websites already in top ten, and ultimately top position on Google for your wish-word.

So, you should look to build your website link profile towards a level that at least compares with that of your competitors. From there, other factors will come into play and we’ll go into some of that in the next two posts. But you need to be there in link ‘ball park’ numbers to compete consistently.

One final point on ‘quantity’. Link Building requires consistency. Always remember that link building is something we do in order to give Google the ‘impression’ that our website is growing in popularity/authority and therefore should be ranked higher. If you build 250 links one month and only 4 the next, this doesn’t look very consistent or natural. A growing website will gain more links per month over time. Your link building strategy should do the same, look to achieve your ‘ball park’ link number steadily over time. Keep it consistent and you’ll give the right ‘impression’.

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