SUBMIT 2.0

In reference to attracting the attention of search engines, one of the buzz phrases tossed around these days is “natural links” as in, “to get the search engines to rank your site well you need to have natural links coming to your site.”

In its purest sense natural linking is linking that occurs naturally. You’re probably thinking that’s rather obvious. Think deeper. This really means that your website has some really great content that is compelling enough that other people want to create links from their site to your site. When the search engines visit those sites they see the links to your site, along with the associated anchor text, and that gives your site a boost in the search results pages.

So, how do you get good natural links? Create really good and/or desirable content! Create content that others want to read and share. If it is amazing enough to stand out among the noise, you’ll likely have a winner that generates natural linking with little of your own effort.

Frankly most website content is not good enough to stand out on its own. When people realize that their web content isn’t all that good, or that no one seems to be interested, or they just want more incoming links, then they start to think about creating more links “naturally.”

Unfortunately, how natural can linking be if it is deliberately planned as an intentional act to get search engine attention? It cannot and therefore “natural linking” as it is often used is an oxymoron.

There are a number of ways that people try to create “natural” links. Let’s quickly take a look at a couple of these.

Link exchanges have been around for years, whether formal or informal. In a link exchange your site links to another site and that site links back to your site. Basically this is just a process of trading links. Search engines can easily see when this is being done. This method appears to have lost some effectiveness.

A newer method involves one-way linking within a group of sites. For example, site A links to site B, site B links to site C, and site C links back to site A. As the number of intermediate sites increase the likelihood of search engines detecting such intentional linking diminishes, especially if each of the sites has one-way, truly natural links to other sites that are not part of the chain.

Consider for a moment what true natural linking would look like. The best type of example may be obtained by looking at a rather popular website such as the Weather Channel’s. As I am writing this article a search at Yahoo reveals that there are more than 12 million pages linking to weather.com. Here is the actual results page for your viewing pleasure. Near the top you will see a button with “Inlinks” shown. That number is the number of pages that Yahoo recognizes as pointing to this website.

So there are, quite literally, millions of incoming links to the Weather Channel website. If you do a search for “weather” you are likely to find the Weather Channel in the top spot, or close to it, every time.

All of those in links create a very broad, high quality, natural linking system. You can be certain that the Weather Channel does not return the favor and link back to all of those sites. No, those sites just create a link to this site simply because doing so adds value to their own site for their own site visitors.

What does this mean for you? If you are trying to create a more natural appearance of links coming to your site just get out there and promote some randomness. Try to get some sites that will link directly to your site without a link in return. If you comment on blogs or have other means to generate links back to your own site, mix up your keywords and don’t always link directly to your homepage as other pages in your site are good too.

Above all, create great content! Then your linking efforts will lead to other people seeing your site and creating their own links. Now that’s natural linking.

Source: ezinearticles

Filed under: Link-Popularity