Search Engine Optimization – Backlinks and Link Building Guide by Affiliate Project
We have followed the below guide and have had huge success in Search Engine Optimization. We hope this helps others rank well.
Introduction to Backlinks and Link Building
Backlinks and Link Building is a very important factor for ranking well in search engines. The search engines robots scan all indexed sites billions of times a day.
The algorithms compute how many links and the value of those links back to each site. Google will rank your site well if you have backlinks from quality and relevant sites back to your site. They will determine the authority of those sites and the link back to your site.
In simple terms, you will rank well if you have a lot of quality Web sites that link to your site for those keywords based on anchor text links.
Anchor text links is the text you link the address to. So an example is when you see Click here, this is the text but it will be associated to a web address.
Check out the Competition
The first step to building links back to your website is to research the competition and how they are ranking well. Find your keywords that you want to target, see who are listed in the top 3 spots and then evaluate their backlinks using the seo tools below.
Because search engines value the quality of those incoming links, you should then go through the competitions links and try and partner with the same websites.
SEO Tools to Check the Competition
I’d recommend looking for an SEO tool that will check what backlinks the competition has. We have used SEO Spyglass from link-assistant.com. This software is a paid for software but well worth the money. Starting from around $99. You can also use the free version but it does have some limitations. Still the free version can be very useful in finding how many backlinks, the quality of those links via link popularity, anchor text keywords used, number in links, age of site and much more.
Another free tool is Yahoos Site Explorer. This is a very fast tool but is very basic, however it will give you a good idea if its going to be easy or difficult to rank well against your competition. For example if you enter a competitors website and run the search, you could potentially find that they have thousands of links back to their site. This could take a very long time to gain that amount of links unless you are paying for links.
Google does also have a tool, again very basic but it doesn’t seem as up to date as Yahoo. This is simply run by typing link: url of website in the search box.
Another great tool is the SEO for firefox by Aaron Wall from SEObook.com. This firefox plugin will allow you to see in your search results quite detailed information about each result which includes pagerank, age, incoming links and loads more.
Link Partners
Once you have analyzed the competition, you will be able to check out the potential link partners and evaluate the quality of those links. The age of the domain of the potential link partner is an important factor. Google will treat an older domain with a higher priority than a domain that has only been registered recently.
Try and acquire links from domains with .edu and .gov top level domain extensions. Search engines know that these education and government sites are much less likely to link to a low quality site. Also the web was started as a research and education resource so these sites will most likely have been around the longest.
Focus on links from pages that already rank well. If a page has a page rank of 0 or 1 then its likely to be a fairly new page. Additionaly try and get your link placed on a page with has unique and relevant content.
Try and think ‘Quality and not Quantity‘ when link building.
If you have 10 Quality links and 100 low quality links you are likely to rank better, depending on the value of each link. Follow this tip and it will hopefully save time when trying to do any link building campaigns.
Web Directories
Another method of link building is to get one way links from Web Directories. There are many of them out there and some are free and some are paid for directories.
A Web Directory is just a site which is a large page link database categorised.
Some useful Web directories are:
Yahoo – Not free, but could be a worthwhile link
DMOZ – aka Open Directory Project is one of the oldest directories on the Web, you can submit your site for free.
BOTW – aka Best of the Web, another very old site, been around since 1994. This is free for 60 days but after this time will cost you a small fee but could be well worth it
Try and focus on Web Directories that have been around for years and have a good PageRank.
Article Sites
The preferred method of link building over Web Directories is by submitting articles to Article sites. This will allow you to write the content so that its related to the specific theme of your site.
Some useful Article Sites are:
Ezinearticles.com – been around since 1999
Goarticles.com – been around since 2001
ArticleBase.com – not been around as long, since 2005, but has a good ranking
Blogs and Forums
Get networking with communities such as blogs and forums as these often allow you to post a link back to your site.
You can find related blogs by using Googles blogsearch http://blogsearch.google.com.
Another useful tool from Google is the Google alerts. you can set-up alerts for certain keywords and get results e-mailed to you. This is great for being ahead of the game and you can either make articles or post of forums/blogs with some of the results found. This is great for targetting someone either writing content about that theme based on the keywords or possibly even posting a question about where to buy a product that you might offer.
Try and make sure when you post comments onto blogs or forums to make them useful otherwise your link may not be added.
One Way Links
Search Engines value one way links very highly especially if the one way link comes from a authority site and that the link is relevant to your site.
You can contant Webmasters directly asking for a link. This can be time consuming without much response as it will take time out of their day to review your site to see if they would like to add your link. They may even request a link back, but it would be preferred if you can get a one way link.
If you can be sincere when you ask for the link, maybe comment on there site or an article they have done, or even if you spot a mistake on the site, then you are building some trust.
There are many ways you can try and obtain one way links. If you are offering help for someone, such as free advice. You will see here a thread on Affiliates4u forum where this example has paid off – help and advice for newbies who need a kick up the backside in 2009.
If anyone has any other methods or recommendations that could help other affiliates, please comment below.
If anyone would like to offer a backlink or add our site to their blogroll to say thanks for this post, then it would be greatly appreciated.
How to pull product datafeeds using PHP and MYSQL and display into your Webpage
Affiliate Project recently received a comment on this post – Niche site launched using data feeds and decided to create this post to help any other affiliates with displaying product data feeds.
We initially struggled to get product data feeds working. We found it hard to find how to get this to work, so thought we would document this on our blog and this could also help other affiliates.
There was 3 basic steps to get the data feeds to be displayed on the page.
Before you do this, you will need to download your data feeds and then create a new database using phpmyadmin (often from cpanel tools). Create the field names as per your datafeed or merchants datafeed.
1st step:
Create a php page template. So in the php file you will specify template name, pull in the header and title, then when you login to wordpress and add a new page, you can specify this new page template (your_template_name).
EXAMPLE:
<?php
/*
Template Name: your_template_name
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content">
<span class="breadcrumbs">Browse: <strong><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/">Home</a> » Your Template Name</strong></span>
<h2 class="title"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
2nd step:
Put the php code that has the mysql statements that query the database which holds the datafeed
EXAMPLE:
// Connect to Database
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","database_name","database_password");
if (!$con)
{
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
// Select the Database
mysql_select_db("database_name", $con);
// Select the data from table_name
$result = mysql_query("SELECT field_a, field_b, field_c, field_d, field_e FROM table_name WHERE field_f='category_name'");
3rd Step:
Display the data from the database in table format, then loop the products. After that close the connection and display the sidebar and the footer
EXAMPLE:
// Display the table
echo "<table border='0' cellspacing='16'>";
// Put results into table
$counter = 0;
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo "<td WIDTH='112' align='left' valign='top'><a href=\"" .$row['field_c'] . "\">
<span class='producttable'><img width='140' src=\"" . $row['field_d'] . "\" border=1 alt=\"" . $row["field_d"] . "\" title=\"" . $row["field_b"] . "\"></span>
<br><span class='producttext'>$row[field_a]</span></br><br>$row[field_b]</br></span></a>";
echo "<br><span class='producttext'><strong>£$row[field_e]</strong></span></br>";
$counter++; # increment count every iteration
if ( $counter % 3 == 0 )
{
echo "<tr />";
}
}
echo "</td>";
echo "</table>";
// Disconnect from Database
mysql_close($con);
?>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar() ?>
<?php get_footer() ?>
You can style the output how you wish with css styling.
w3schools.com is a great resource for website coding such as html / php / mysql.
Hope this helps other affiliates.
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