Linkmoz-Blog

So you have finished building your directory and now it’s time to start building up your backlinks.
This is a very important part of running a directory business and it must never end.
Although many other sites don’t need a high PR, a successful directory needs one. In fact this is the most valuable characteristic of a directory nowadays. Link building is also the most expensive part of directory business. It’s very easy to spend your money, while investing it may take some effort. What you will read here is a guide to help you “invest” your money, not just spend it.
Budget is very important but it needs experience to make it work. So if you are new don’t try to spend much as you are probably going to waste it. Start slowly and learn your way up. Let’s say that you have a budget of 1000$ for buying links. What is the best thing you can do with them?

First let’s set up the goals. There are links for PR, links for direct traffic and links that will help your SERPs (indirect traffic).
- Links for PR : These are links to your site, placed on other high PR sites relative to yours, in order to pass some PR juice to you.
-Links for Traffic : These are links that will attract visitors to your site. They are mostly banners. Banners are not good for PR, as Google is very strict when it comes to paid links and PR. And banners is obviously a paid form of advertising. They are pretty good for traffic if placed right, though.
-Links that help SERPs : These are links, usually placed within content, describing the linking site. SEs crawl content and match the keywords used there with the linked site. The result is better results on SEs for the keywords used.
So what kind of links do you need and how much money should you spent on each category?
Given your site is a directory, you are mainly after PR, so until your sites gets a decent PR you don’t need so much traffic, as you have to provide your visitors with a more valuable directory to submit to. Also let’s say you are targeting a PR 5 within 3 months and your budget is 1000$. Of course nobody knows exactly the number and quality of backlinks you must have, to achieve this but we will try to do our best with this 1000$.
First of all you must make a kind of risk distribution as it is too risky to buy only one very strong link, instead of many slightly lower PR links. You never know how google values these links for PR purposes so you better not keep all the eggs in one basket.
You can try buying 2 PR 7 links, sitewide if you can (so you will also have backlinks from the inner pages), 5 PR 6 links, and 5 PR 5 links. Prices are approximately 50$ - 75$/month for PR 7, 25$ - 40$/month for PR 6 and 8$ - 15$ for PR 5. You have to check the sites you are going to place your links of course. Other than PR you must check their backlinks number, PS, domain age etc. Prefer the sites that offer you the possibility of adding a short description to your link. You may also get a discounted price if you buy the links for three months and pay up front, but this is strictly between you and the webmaster you are dealing with. After this you can spend another 50$ on blog posts that will provide content. Blog posts should be permanent and you can look for strong blogs, or blog networks and buy the best you can with this money. Finally go submit to as many quality paid directories as you can and spend your last 200$ there. Remember to check the PR of the listings page where your site will be placed on.
Making the math:
- 2xPR 7 for 3 months (at 50$/month) : 300$
- 4xPR 6 for 3 months (at 25$/month) : 300$
- 5xPR 5 for 3 months (at 10$/month) : 150$
- Blogposts : 50$
- Directory submissions : 200$

Apart from paid links you must try build a number of free links. The simplest way to do this is join webmasters forums and add your link to your signature.
Try to avoid buying footer links as they are not of high value for the purposes of PR. If someone offers you a footer link, look elsewhere. Consider it your last pick.
Finally as mentioned above, link building should be a never ending effort. You must increase the number and quality of your backlinks continuously in order to achieve good results.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.