Cross Linking and Link Wheels

Hi, I’m Mike Essex, one of the search specialists here at Koozai, and today I’m going to talk to you about the concept of cross linking. You’ll already have your website, and no doubt you’ll already have some links to it from strong sources. For example, you might have links from an article or a press release. Maybe you’ll also have links from a video that you’ve done or our old favourite, good old-fashioned directories.

What we want to do is we want to ensure that the search engines find these links and also to make them as strong as possible. So we can do that by linking to them from other websites that the search engines already crawl and also ones that will allow us to build up these profiles. A good example is social bookmarking. It will allow you to add a link to any page that you want with any anchor text that you want as well. We can add social bookmarking links to this article. In fact, we can add links from multiple social bookmarking profiles. Again, we could do the same for any of these that we chose. In addition, what we could do is we could have one social bookmarking profile and link that to more than one of these items. We wouldn’t do that for all of these items purely because that wouldn’t look very natural.

The next step is taking this social bookmarking site and making it even stronger as well. For example, we could write an article about Digg, and we could have a profile on there. In that article we then link to this profile that we’ve made. As a result, this article passes people on to the bookmarking site and also passes on link juice. That then goes to two sites and gives all the power to our website as well. It’s a really good way to get these links indexed and to give them extra value.

In addition, we can use social media to talk about these sites that are talking about us. I could tweet out a link to this video on Twitter. An added benefit is that people who get my Twitter feed may then go to this video, learn more about the company, and then go to the site anyway. We’re not just building up the links. We’re also building up the brand online.

Again on Facebook, we could announce this press release on our Facebook account. We could announce it on LinkedIn, any website that we’ve got that would be relevant to the press release. We can use deep linking directories to gain extra links to this article. We could also link to that article on a guest blog post that we wrote somewhere else or a comment or a forum.

The possibilities here are really endless. You just take link sources you’ve already got that will allow you to have a deep link, and then you use that to push these properties. The one thing to consider is choosing these properties that you’re going to promote. You don’t want to pick a really weak link because it’s going to take so much effort to grow that link. It’s really not worth it. So if it’s a page rank zero directory, there’s no point. Also, if you’ve already got a link from a really strong place, like the BBC, there would be no reason growing that link either because it’s probably as strong as it’s going to get. So pick something in between the two that already has some value but the potential for growth, and you’ll really see some added benefits to your own website as well. Plus the website owners are going to thank you for linking to them too.

I hope you found this video useful. For more information, visit Koozai.com or check out our Facebook or YouTube profiles as well.