Interior Page Backlinks: Is It Really Necessary?

Most savvy website owners today understand, at least in general terms, the importance of gaining backlinks for their website — all other things being equal, a site with a large number of quality, relevant (to the theme of the site) backlinks should rank better in search engine results pages (SERP’s) than a site without them. These backlinks may also help to drive some traffic to the site, depending on where the link is found.

But many of these same people make a mistake: they only try to secure backlinks for their “main” or index page — the page that appears, for example, when you type in the general URL for that site (i.e., cnn.com, google.com, ezinearticles.com, etc.). A good question to ask is this: is there a benefit to backlinking to any of the OTHER pages on the site?

My position on this: it is generally very valuable to do this backlinking to interior website pages. Why? For several reasons. First of all, in the “real world” it is very rare to see any authoritative website that just has backlinks to its main page. If you have, let’s say, 200 backlinks for your site, and all 200 of those links point only to the main page, would that not seem very “unnatural” to the search engines? Would not normally at least a few of those links point to some of the other site pages, if they were acquired naturally? So one reason for doing interior page backlinking is to make sure that you do not get into trouble with your friendly neighborhood search engine.

But there is another big reason to do this type of interior backlinking. Consider the last time that you did any type of search using a search engine. When the results of your search were returned to you, what types of web pages came up in the listings? Lists of index pages only? Hardly. Most of the returned results pointed to interior site pages. Remember that — keep in mind that you want people to find your site’s interior pages also — and they need to rank well in the SERP’s — so you want to make sure that you regularly do some interior page linking as well.

Now, you will discover endless discussions taking place in SEO, Internet Marketing and Webmaster forums concerning what percentage of your links should be to interior pages versus index page, etc. Personally I prefer to use the 50-50 rule: 50% (half) of your backlinks should point to your index page, and the other 50% should point to a variety of interior pages.

That means, for example, that if I have a site of 10 pages, and I am going after 200 backlinks for that site, that I make sure that 100 of them will (eventually) point to the index page, and the other 100 point to the other (interior) pages — perhaps evenly distributed (in this case 9-10 per interior page). Normally, in my SEO efforts, I will secure the links to the index page first (just to keep this whole effort organized), then a bit later on secure the interior page links. So far, this strategy has worked well for my sites; I encourage you to try it out with your sites in your market. But however you go about it, make sure that you do regular interior page backlinking.

Link Building With Discussion Forums — An Accidental Discovery

I recently had a question about configuring some software for my website and proceeded to go to a discussion forum about the software. When I was posting my question, I had actually linked to my website to show what I was talking about to the forum for help and I re-discovered a long lost link building tactic that I haven’t used in years.

Some discussion forums are extremely popular, well indexed in search engines and highly relative content to certain businesses or industries. These can make for excellent places to have one-way links to your website established easily and usually at no cost.

In this particular case, I was browsing my web logs and noticed that I was actually getting some direct traffic to my website from this AND I also happened to notice that the page in the form with my questions was ranking well in search engines and it seemed was getting traffic as well.

Some SEO folks argue that search engines devalue links from discussion forums significantly and do not count them toward improving your website’s search engine ranking. That’s fine with me. Some forum’s pages rank extremely well and you can get direct traffic from the links.

Plus, if you are already active in a forum, how much extra work is it to include a link to your website in your signature anyway. If you are already going to be posting, you might just as well get some additional benefit from it.

So, don’t forget to include valid, appropriate participation in related discussion forums to your toolbox for building great quality links back to your website

Link Building by Rewarding People That Link to You

First, I do not presume to know your exact business, but I am going to share with you a strategy I use in my business and I encourage you to adapt it to work within the limitations and differences of your business.

So, here is a great way that you can build lots of people linking back to your website: bribe them. Now, before I get bashed for contradicting myself by many people who may have read my other article on how paying for links to your website is like paying for sex, I want to admit that it may seem similar.

However, I do justify it in my own mind a bit differently. Maybe you see it the same way I do. Maybe you don’t and maybe you do want to throw stones for the contradictory advice.

Here is one thing that I do… I encourage people to link to my website and when they do, I track the number of people that come to me from their link and I reward them with points they can redeem for additional content, audio downloads, courses and other things of that nature. It is more like an affiliate program that doesn’t pay cash than it is buying links if you want to look at it that way.

However, there are some variations that you might consider to make it work for your business. If someone were to link back to your website, perhaps you’d want to send them, completely unsolicited, a thank you letter in the US Mail (e-mail is cheap and thought of as cheap, take the time to mail a thank you letter and it is memorable). If they add another link, maybe give them a gift card to have a cup of coffee on your. Use your imagination, but is a link worth a $5 gift card? A link from most websites, I’d say yes.

Top 3 Link Building Myths Regarding Google

Myths abound regarding what kind of links will help you rank in Google. If you’ve been told that Google only counts links from pages related to your site, or that Google doesn’t count links from pages with no PageRank, or that Google doesn’t count links from duplicate content pages, you’ve been lied to.

Google Counts Links From Off-Theme Pages

If your web page is related to arthritis, what constitutes an “on-theme” link (a link from a related subject page)? Maybe the first thing you think of is, “other arthritis-related pages.” That’s only partly right. Consider these subjects: swimming, cycling, weight loss, vitamins, different types of fat, comfortable furniture, etc. All of them can be related to arthritis!

The only way for Google to ignore “off-theme” links is for it to understand every possible relationship of every conceivable subject in every language they index. Sound impossible? That’s because it is.

I’ve ranked dozens of sites by getting links only from pages that are completely unrelated to the site I’m trying to rank. Google puts them all on page one, so I know it’s true.

Google Counts Links From Pages With No PageRank

PageRank is completely overblown these days. It’s true that Google used to weight their search results heavily based on the page’s PageRank value, but those days were gone years ago. I rank sites all the time by getting links from pages with no PageRank (or very low PageRank) values.

Think about it this, too: is it easier to get 25 links from high PageRank pages or 100 links from low PageRank pages? Because the myth about PageRank’s importance persists, it’s very difficult to get webmasters with high PageRank pages to link to you, but very easy to get links from low PageRank pages.

Google Counts Links From Duplicate Content Pages

Article writing is huge in the search engine optimization world. Why? Because writing articles that can be distributed to article sites like EzineArticles.com results in a large number of pages linking to your site from all over the web. It takes a lot of links to rank well in Google, and article writing is a popular way to get a lot of links. Each distributed article is a duplicate of the original, and yet Google counts the links.

Read The Followup To This Article.

Link Baiting and its 5 Hooks

Link baiting is simply getting more and more inbound links with a twist. Rather than hunting out links link baiting brings the links to you through unique and popular site content. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”. Link baiting involves production of link worthy content, video or images, which in turn generates massive amount of one-way inbound links.

Link baiting has been long time regarded as black hat technique, but if it’s interesting information or fun, it doesn’t have to have negative connotations. Content can be both: white-hat as well as interesting enough to generate buzz. Floating information or ideas that people talk about is a sure-shot method to generate links.

You don’t have to be a big brand or have a lot of money to create link bait. Many people have created link bait on purpose and many have created link bait without even knowing it. For search marketers, the techniques, if handled properly in an ethical manner, can be quite helpful in producing good quality one way links.

How Does Link Bait Work?

Link Baiting is just like fishing. You send out bait (content) in the pond (the internet) and patiently wait for a bite (linkback). The article is the bait, and the link is the catch. A properly created page can capture huge links on its own with little to no effort from you.

The Hooks

Before any real ‘fishing’ can take place you need a link baiting hooks and they come in all shape and sizes:

1. News Hook
2. Resource Hooks
3. Contrary Hook
4. Attack Hook
5. Humor Hooks

1. News Hooks

For this to work you almost exclusively have to break the ice on the matter, that means to you have to be the first to break the news. Whether it’s the latest gadget or the latest Britney Spears goof, you have to be the first and the news should be big enough to generate enough curiosity.

2. Resource Hooks

Resource hook is more of an informational page. Do some research and build a great, unique and remarkable article in a field on which you’re an expert. It’s important you know what you’re talking about or else you’ll get trolled.

3. Contrary Hooks

Contrary hooks are when you contradict someone else’s statement. It should be about someone prominent in the industry and it should be controversial.

4. Attack Hooks

Attack hooks are next level of contrary hooks where you launch personal attacks on people taking the debunking of theories to the next level.

5. Humor Hooks

This is the easiest type of link bait, just blog about a funny video or story and you can get some major exposure. But it isn’t as easy as it looks, the niche is really crowded and that means you really need to have something truly funny on your hands and a lot of luck.