What is SEO?

If your website is not to exist in a vacuum you will need to have other sites linking to it. It would be perfectly possible to build the most interesting site in the world about your chosen subject and for no one ever to visit, if the search engines don’t know it exists.

Search engines use links to your site to both discover it in the first place, and to decide how important it is. This in turn decides how many of your pages they include in their results, and how high in the results they place your site.

Although this article is not going to look at ‘keywords’ you need to know what your keywords or keyphrase are for both your site, and for each page within the site. We’ll look at keywords later on, but for the moment let’s assume you want to be found for the search phrase ‘free wordpress templates’.

This is important to know, because you want links to your site to include this phrase, or variants on it, as often as possible. So, the text that someone clicks on to reach your site should say ‘free wordpress templates’ rather than, for example, www.freetemplatesand stuffhere.com or whatever your site is actually called.

OK now that is clear, you need to find these links. In order of priority you want links from:

1. authority / leading sites about your subject
2. pages in sites that are close related to your subject
3. 3-way links with sites on a related subject
4. reciprocal links with sites on a related subject
5. links from well indexed / ranked directories
6. links from other free directories

Not surprisingly the least valuable links - those from new, free directories - are also the easiest to get. With a new site, try and submit it to about 5 of these directories a day. Pretty soon your site will be indexed in google and the other search engines.

Now you can work up the list as your site becomes established - reciprocal links will be easier to get when your site is indexed for example.

3-way links are where you link to one site, and that site links back to a different site - this is advantageous because it is likely that the search engines attribute less importance to reciprocal links than one-way links, and 3-way links are ‘reciprocal links pretending to be one-way links’.

The last two types of links - one way, and from related sites - are harder to gain but much more valuable. Your site will need to be both high quality and interesting if sites are going to want to link to it of their own choice. Sites with little original content and too many adverts are going to find these stages difficult. But don’t despair - keep working to improve your site and it will happen. and even if it doesn’t, you can rank pretty well for most keywords and keyphrases without these types of links.

Note 1 - often you will hear that (a) free directories are too lowly to bother with, and the benefit they confer isn’t worth the effort and (b) search engines can identify reciprocal links and then ignore them completely. All I can say is, this has not been my current experience to date, and both form an important part of my site promotion.

Note 2 - there are a lot of ‘link exchange schemes’ around, where hundreds of sites all agree to link to each other. My early experiences with these were poor, and I would recommend not using them. Most links obtained are from links pages and directories with hundreds of links on unrelated subjects, and really do bring very little or no benefit, and you might be penalised for linking to’ bad neighbourhoods’ - banned sites, inappropriate sites etc.

Still wondering how to put all this into practice? Get started with the free directory list at DirectoryCritic - hundreds of free directories just waiting for your site to be added…