How To Get Incoming Links With Authority

“Duncan, what are some ways to get truly authoritative links to your site, those that help with rankings for more competitive search terms? Thanks,” ~ Kris Bickell

Hi Chris,

I’ve talked a lot about this in “The Ultimate Link Building Dossier”.

The most powerful incoming links you can hope to achieve, links that will have maximum impact on your rankings come from the existing websites already ranking for the respective keyword terms in question.

That means that if you’re looking to rank for the term “dog training” – the most powerful incoming link that will have the most positive influence on ranking improvement for your own website – will come from the website (or more specifically web page if not the home page) already ranked at #1 for that term.

The reason is simple.

That is the website / page Google already sees as most relevant on the entire internet for the specific keyword term.

If it links back to your “dog training” related website, you’re going to get more authority passed through it for that theme, niche topic, and more importantly specific keyword term than from any other single link you might hope to achieve.

As a side note, it will also have more impact depending on how the link is structured to link back to your site, and where it actually links back to your website.

We can also work backwards down the list of search engine results, the second result on down to #100+ results to find the next most powerful links. We can also branch out to explore more options – look at the top 100 results for 5 strategic keyword terms that we want to really focus on.

Understand also that Google Page Rank becomes totally irrelevant when you look at things from this perspective. It’s why I try and encourage people away from focusing on Page Rank. It is a very small part of an overall picture. I would turn down a PR9 incoming link to obtain a link from the #1 website already ranked for a specific term I’m targeting (even a website in the top 10-20 results for the term) any day of the week.

The biggest challenge is in securing these links.

You basically have to look at any opportunity that might present itself and think outside the box.

Some ideas include…

• Purchasing text link advertising if opportunities are available. This is generally the easiest and fastest method but obviously requires a regular investment and commitment. Often times it is the only way – particularly in very competitive markets. That’s just life.
• Writing or providing content for the website in question if they accept guest articles / blog posts / or are looking for featured authors. We’re not talking standard “ezinearticles.com” type articles here either in most cases – content needs to be unique and of high quality.
• Strategic linking arrangements – think more along the lines of a true cross promotion / partnership than a basic “reciprocal linking” agreement. Websites that already hold top rankings are generally not interested in basic “reciprocal linking” arrangements. For those people acquiring lower level links isn’t as valuable to them anymore they’re already ranking where they want to be. It’s like trying to offer a duck in exchange for the goose that lays the golden egg. I’ll keep my goose thanks.
• If the website is a blog and has commenting enabled, making a regular and concerted effort to post very valuable blog comments to the blog. Not only will this generate incoming links but you’ll also start to get noticed by the owner of the website and help you to build a relationship.
• Other – I discuss many other methods in the Link Building Dossier (and all of the above in much greater detail) so I wont go into them all here.

…at the end of the day it’s about giving value to get value. You also have to be prepared to make compromises and offer the better hand from the outset to stack the cards in your favor with negotiations.

There is no push button solution here.

As for keyword terms being “competitive” or not the principals don’t change.

The challenge just becomes, well, more challenging.

These business / website owners get hounded every single week by hundreds of people looking to take advantage of the assets they’ve built and it’s pretty clear that 99.9% of the people approaching them are doing it exclusively for their own benefit and agenda.

So again it becomes about what value you can bring to the table other than just a link back to their website from your oversaturated “link directory” – particularly if you don’t even provide any website statistics to back up what sort of real value such a link would hold for the other party.

You also need to realize that if you’re asking these people link back to pure garbage (an auto blog) then you’re going to be pushing you know what uphill from the outset.

An incoming link is not only an endorsement from an SEO perspective – but it means the webmaster is also directly or indirectly endorsing your website and content to their own real human website visitors.

Again I’ve discussed all of this in MUCH greater detail in The Ultimate Link Building Dossier including how to structure your whole link building campaign (on site and off site) around a core focus and approach things correctly for maximum impact.

However I hope this gives you a bit more insight into where you should be focusing.

These links are the hardest to obtain but are without a doubt are going to the most beneficial (obviously why they are the hardest to obtain). Not only will they help your search engine rankings, but remember these are the websites that are already attracting your target audience – so any investment in obtaining such a link has a two pronged benefit.

Improvements in SEO and direct targeted traffic.

Hope this helps.

(6 votes, average: 3.83 out of 5)
 Loading ...