The Entrepreneur's Advisor | SEO Virtual Reality: Linkwheels

The creation of links to and from your website plays an important role for establishing your web presence. As previously discussed, the importance of links for entrepreneurs is second only to quality content for determining your search engine rank. Webmasters can create links organically (you do yourself), use link generators (plugins and widgets) or pay someone to create links for them.

The idea behind linking strategies is to create a virtual reality in which your website shows up as many places as possible in order to convince search engines that your website is important and should rank at or near the top of searches. One of the ways to create this virtual reality is to make use of linkwheels as part of your linking calendar.

The following is a guest post by Chris Kluis discussing the merits of using linkwheels to help develop your website.

Guest Post on Linkwheels for The Entrepreneur’s Advisor

The idea behind virtual reality is that you can create a fake reality that mimics portions of real life. In many ways, people who build links to their own sites are trying to create a virtual reality whereby Google doesn’t catch you (or worse penalize you) for artificially trying to bolster your own site. Some consider Linkwheels the best approach for link building.

Reality: How the Web Works

To understand how to build a virtual reality you have to understand the way the world works. In the case of internet marketing… you need to know how the internet works. Google changed search with its algorithm by creating a mechanism where sites “vote” for your site by linking to you. They improved that mechanism by creating elaborate ways to try and understand if these votes were natural or unnatural.

There are all types of links in the world. In my example below there are links from you to sites (in blue) and links from other sites to your site (in orange).

Linking to relevant content is important. It tells Google not only do I know what I’m talking about, but I’m willing to cite/point users to other sources. Remember this is how Google understands the value created from websites. It doesn’t like sites that never link outwards. But… and this is a big but; link out to only the best content and don’t link to bad neighborhoods.
Link Exchanges are when you exchange a link from your site for a link to your site. These are frequently found in poor quality directory sites. They tend to be a bad idea. This is not to suggest that two similar interest sites shouldn’t create links to each other… it suggests that getting links from a directory about something unrelated is not necessarily useful or worth the time/effort.
Links from mediocre/decent sites can provide mediocre results.
Links from awesome websites will provide awesome results.

So overtime what would the links pointing to a site look like? Well sites build links over time… and it’s somewhat chaotic. To make it more difficult, the pages that send you links also gain links over time creating a complicated environment that might look something like:

a = article
b = blog
s = social media
v = video

This isn’t a great representation of link acquisition or building – its just meant to show that natural link building isn’t perfectly clean (like always setting up each page with 5 specific links from the same 5 sources).

Faking Reality: Doing Your Own SEO

Linkwheels attempt to mimic organic link building by randomly creating a circular linking campaign around certain keywords pointing to a primary site. I’m not endorsing Linkwheeler, but I wanted to use one of their images to show you how people build linkwheels.

Paying Others to Fake Reality or Do SEO

Remember, if you are going to pay someone to do SEO. Make sure to choose viable keywords. After this post we will probably rank #1 for SEO Virtual Reality, but no one will search for it. Don’t throw money away at unobtainable keywords… or keywords that don’t matter. Choose your keywords to promote carefully (assuming you do choose to let someone help you).

About the Author

Chris Kluis is the Director of Marketing at Mintek Mobile Data Solutions.Mintek has created Transcendent EAM and CMMS which is one of the best EAM and CMMS solutions. He is also a past President of the Entrepreneurship Alumni Society at USF. Eventually he will rebuild and then blog at http://ckluis.com.

We hope that you have enjoyed this guest post. Part VII of the series The Ultimate Checklist for Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Micro-enterprises will continue with a look at the different marketing methods used for establishing your web presence including the use of social media, PPC, facebook etc…

Articles in The Ultimate Checklist for Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Micro-enterprises so far are:

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