Book Marketing: Incorporating an Effective Linking Program into your Book Marketing Campaign – Getting Started
By
V. Michael Santoro
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An integral part of your successful book marketing campaign is when your Web pages and marketing material rank well in the search engines.
This is accomplished through an effective ongoing “off page” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) linking campaign. However, not all links are viewed equally by the major search engines.
Do not invest much time acquiring reciprocal links
Reciprocal links are now considered the lowest valued links that you can acquire. If you know someone in a similar highly targeted niche, then go ahead and exchange links for the potential traffic from their site visitors. But a better approach is to contact the Web owners with high ranking sites and offer them original content to post with a link back to your site. With that approach, they get original content which helps their search engine ranking, and you receive one-way back links to your site along with targeted traffic from their site. Win-Win!
Back Link Diversity and why the Tortoise Wins the Race
An effective back linking campaign is based upon obtaining a diversity of links from sites on different IP addresses including blogs, forums, authority sites such as Squidoo, articles, social bookmarking,.edu and .gov sites. These links need to be acquired slowly, over time; obtaining too many links quickly can be viewed as spamming and your site can either be banned or put into Google's sandbox (buried and rarely found).
The solution is to create a 30-day plan in which you acquire a few links per day from a variety of sites listed above. For example, by acquiring only three links per day, you will have 90 quality back links to your site in your first month. Once you complete your 30-day plan, then “rinse and repeat” by linking to other sites. Remember to use your competitive long tail keyword phrases as anchor text if you wish to rank well in the search engines.
This can seem to be an overwhelming task with the amount of research required to locate appropriate sites for your back linking campaign. The following techniques will help you to work more efficiently, so let’s begin with the gold!
Links back from Education (.edu) and Government (.gov) Sites – Pure Gold
Google values one-way back links to your site from education and government sites. These are the “top rung” on the central linking ladder. Obtaining one-way back links from education (.edu) and government (.gov) sites can be difficult. When you can find them, many either require registration or are closed for comments. You will feel like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack and the search can be mind numbingly boring. Here is a hot tip to help reduce your search efforts:
Enter the following into Google and replace the word “keyword” with your keyword phrase:
For Education Sites
site:.edu inurl:blog “comment” -”you must be logged in” -”posting closed” -”comment closed” “keyword”
For Government Sites
site:.gov inurl:blog “comment” -”you must be logged in” -”posting closed” -”comment closed” “keyword”
NOTE: Make sure that there is no spacing between site: and .edu or .gov
College Student Blogs
College student blogs either have a “guest book” or allow comments to be posted without having to log in. If you wish to add additional link backs from .edu sites, use the following to search phrase to locate them:
linkdomain:wordpress.org site:edu student blog
Web 2.0 Properties for Back Links
The fastest way to obtain one-way back links from Web 2.0 properties is to set up a profile page and include your anchor text links. You can begin with the following:
Allows you to set up a profile page and link to three different Websites. For anchor text links, choose “other” to add your keyword phrase.
Allows you to post your link via their “add a new company” and profile.
To create your account, you will need a yahoo ID. Once you are registered, click on “You” to edit your profile and add your anchor text link
This is associated with Twitter and you can add your business.
Locating Other Sites for Additional Links
To find additional sites to add your link, search using the following commands with your desired keyword phrase:
“Keyword phrase” + “add url”
“Keyword phrase” + “add site”
“Keyword phrase” + “add website”
“submit link” site:*.edu
“submit link” site:*.gov
Conclusion
It is critical that you first create a targeted linking campaign as part of your book marketing plan. Remember that link diversity is required and the links should be acquired slowly over time for best results.