Topical SEO

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How to find reciprocal link partners…notes from the Link Building Course by Jerry West course offered by University 2020.

Before You Start

You should know what your “money” keywords are. These are the keywords that actually convert into sales. From the list of money keywords, pick the ones that have the highest PPC cost to target as the ones you want to rank for in organic search.

Build links (matched to the content on your site) with these money keywords in mind.

Go to Google and Enter Your Money Phrase

With the SEO FireFox Toolbar turned on and Google showing 100 results per page, then go to the 3rd page and view results 301 - 400 for your term.

Look for:

• A title tag that is properly optimized for your term
• A .com domain
• A nice clean URL, no dynamic variable names
• An aged article
• An article (and page) without or with few, outbound links

Be picky!

Gather 10 possible exchange partners, as you will only likely get 2 of them to actually complete the exchange. Make notes about the site, page and where you would like your link (the phrase on the page).

Send an Inquiry

Email, or call them by phone. You want text within their articles, to link to one of your articles…deep linking.

“How much would you charge for a link, in that location and text for one year?”

If the price is right, say $50 then purchase it. Otherwise offer to swap links, or whatever deal you can work out.

Search for More Opportunities

Go to Google and enter the following:

• “advertise with us” <your keyword> -cpm
• “rate card” <your keyword> -cpm advertising
• newsletter <your keyword> advertise [or sponsor]

the -cpm gets rid of cost pre thousand or banner impression type ads.

Newsletters get archived, so check archives for the quality.

Scan the results for interesting sites that are a good match for your phrase.

Look to get 2 or 3 solid relationships a week.

Take Back Control

Think of link building as forming relationships with related quality companies. See the form on this page and the requirements for link partners: http://www.webmarketingnow.com/link-exchange.html

You can take any emails received and direct them to a form like this. Use a “captcha” to prevent bots from spamming you.

Related Resources:

How to Win Links and Influence People - Part 1

Before requesting or agreeing to a link on a page make sure of the following:

1. The page is indexed in major search engines

2. The webmaster is not using “no follow” tags on the links.

3. The page is not blocked from search engine spiders via the robots.txt file

4. The link is not actually a CSS link which does not pass page rank (actually not a real link but a CSS class with an on_click event that redirects the browser).

5. The fewer outbound links the better, especially avoid pages that are nothing more than lists of links.

6. No gambling, prescription, sex, hate, spam, link farm, etc. sites (unless, of course, your site matches one of those categories).

7. Ignore all “Spam” reciprocal linking requests. Spotting Spam should be easy for you as the messages sound canned and non-personal.

1. One Way Links

Tools, in depth resources, directory links, hot news, trends and pages already in the SERPs top 10 are best for attracting one way links.

2. Reciprocal Links

It is a falsehood that reciprocal links are discounted by Google. What is discounted is the types of pages that these reciprocal links are usually found on: a long list of links to sites that offer zero value to a reader…these are worthless.

But there is now evidence that quality in content reciprocal links do not have value.

3. Three Way Links

Are to be avoided at all costs. Google considers them “link farms” and as an attempt to game the system.

It makes sense that these link structures are not difficult for Google to detect and usually one or more of the three “partners” is involved heavily in this type of link scheming and is already on Google’s blacklist; making it simple for Google to detect and discount any new links that show up to their sites.

Project level or home page, will link to only the silo or category main pages.

• No off site links on the home page.
• No links to internal pages on the home page.

Silo or category pages will link to the list of articles contained within that silo.

• No off site links on the silo or category home pages

Individual articles will contain links to their category home page, or other category or silo homepages only…

• no links to individual articles in other silos.
• Individual article pages can contain off site links.