Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning

Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine
Positioning By Dave Davies, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning,
Inc.

It’s no SEO secret that inbound links to your site are an
important part of any complete search engine positioning
strategy. You’ve undoubtedly received numerous emails touting
the benefits of exchanging links with other websites. Provided
that the sites are related, reciprocal linking can definitely
help you in your quest for higher rankings however, establishing
quality non-reciprocal links to your website will provide added
weight and many of the tactics used in developing these links
have built-in relevancy.

There are two main advantages to non-reciprocal links as opposed
to reciprocal links. The first is that these links will hold
more weight, as they aren’t reciprocated (the search engines can
detect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage is
that they don’t have to be monitored as closely as reciprocal
links. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethical
webmasters who will take links down or use other tactics to
insure that the search engines don’t see the links pages. You
have to be aware of these events so that you can remove their
links from your site if warranted however with non-reciprocal
links you don’t have to be as concerned as you’re not linking to
them.

These are far from the only benefits of non-reciprocal link
building but they are two of the most beneficial for your site
and for you as its webmaster. But how do you get something for
nothing? Why would someone want to link to you in exchange for
no links back? Keep in mind the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t
No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In short, you’re not going to
get something for nothing but it’s well worth the “something”
you’ll have to put in.

So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search engine
positioning campaign … but how do you do it? There are a number
of tactics that will work. Here are a few of the more successful:

Write Good Content It’s shocking but some people will actually
link to your site because it is a valuable resource that their
visitors may find interesting or useful. The search engines
initially gave incoming links value based on the belief that
sites with incoming links tended to be sites that others find
worth linking to. People actually linked to sites simply because
they found the content useful. Believe it or not this practice
still exists today.

If you have a quality site with great content, preferably
updated regularly, others in your industry should naturally link
to you. It’s also appropriate to ask other webmasters to link to
your site either through direct contact or by posting a page on
your site, which provides images and/or link details. If you get
even one link out of your efforts it was worth the 5 or so
minutes it should take to put up the page.

Directory Listings Provided that you’re willing to invest a bit
of time and money, directory listings are probably the easiest
way to get non-reciprocal links. Provided that you’re site has
some value to it and is not offensive, most directories will
list it though usually there is a “review fee” involved.

There are the well know directories such as the Yahoo! Directory
(http://dir.yahoo.com/) however you may find that the price tag
for a guaranteed review from Yahoo! at $299 to be a bit more
than you wanted to spend for a single listing. Another “major
player” in the directory world is the Open Directory Project (or
DMOZ) (http://www.dmoz.org/) however you may find that with
volunteer editors, your site can take many months to get listed,
if at all.

Fortunately there are many “secondary” directories and there are
also literally thousands of topic-specific directories that can
provide valuable listings. In fact, topic-specific directory
listings can in many ways be considered more valuable in that
the link to your site is entirely relevant and also, you should
get some quality targeted traffic from your listing provided
that the directory itself ranks well.

How much you should pay for a specific listing is debatable
depending on the industry, the value of the link, etc. however
topical directory listings are usually somewhere around
$30-$100/yr in the majority of cases. If your link will be
placed on a page with a good PageRank and will fewer than 50 or
so other sites it is worth considering.

Article Submissions As you’re reading this article you should
certainly be able to infer that I personally am a fan of writing
articles as a form of non-reciprocal link building. Articles
provide perhaps the best of all worlds in that they provide
valuable and entirely relevant links and also can be a great
source of targeted traffic.

That said, articles are also the most time consuming of link
building efforts. One must consider the time it takes to write
the article, find sites to publish it and also the submission of
the articles to all these sites. As a tip, when you find sites
you wish to submit your article to add them to a folder in your
“Favorites” (or “Bookmarks” for those of us using Firefox). If
you decide to publish more articles in the future (and you
probably will) it’s certainly helpful to start with a list of
the places you’re submitting to rather than having to find them
all again down the road.

When you’re writing your article there are a few considerations
that you should make. One of the biggest benefits of articles as
a link building measure is that the links are relevant in that
they are about the topic of your site. Why not insure that your
titles and content are written such that they add further weight
for your targeted keywords. If you look at the title of this
article “Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine
Positioning” you’ll notice that the phrase “search engine
positioning” (our main targeted phrase) is present. Additionally
the phrase is repeated periodically in the content area. This
will add relevancy to this article and our targeted phrase. If
you look in the credits below you’ll notice that the anchor text
linking to our site is “Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning”
(assuming that the site on which you are reading this article
allowed for HTML submissions otherwise the link should simply be
the http format). This will add additional relevancy tying that
phrase to our site.

Because the Beanstalk website is still in the sandbox on Google
it is unable to rank for this highly competitive phrase however
you may notice that currently the #11 ranking page is one of our
articles. This alone should demonstrate that these articles can
pick up relevancy. Once Beanstalk is out of the sandbox on
Google we will have many highly relevancy links that are strong
enough to rank #11 on their own. You can do the same provided
that you treat writing your articles the same as your content.
It must contain your targeted keywords and it must read well.

Additionally, you are going to want to search for many related
websites to submit to. You can visit the search engines
themselves to find related sites (in our case we would run a
search such as “search engine positioning articles submit”) or
you can use a program like PR Prowler
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/pr-prowler.ht
m) to find the links and also insure a minimum PageRank on the
sites you are submitting to.

If you decide to publish more than one article I would further
recommend that you add to your list with each submission. Take a
few minutes before you submit and find an additional 5+ sites to
submit your articles to. You’ll find your link popularity and
rankings will reward you for it.

Summary Of course there are many additional tactics you can use
to get non-reciprocal links including paid links, press
releases, etc. however those noted above are the ones which will
produce the most consistently over time and while they can be
time consuming, are well worth the effort.

I wish you the very best of luck in developing your
non-reciprocal links and in increasing your search engine
positioning. It will take time; it will take energy; but done
right it will be very rewarding.

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and
ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of
success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may
have about your website and how to get it into the top positions
on the major search engines. To keep informed about what going
on in the SEO world you may also want to visit the newly created
SEO blog (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/) on the Beanstalk
website.