Monday, December 7, 2009

Use a Link Wheel to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

By Carl Frost

A link wheel is a method of link building that is used to help improve a webpage's rankings in the search engines. It is composed of a set of pages that all link to each other and to the page that you want ranked in a certain way. When used correctly, this backlink building strategy can result in increased traffic to the targeted page due to the higher ranking in the search engines.

When you think of a link wheel, try to picture an old-fashioned wooden wheel with spokes. At the center of the wheel is the article or webpage that you want to move up in the search engine results. At the outside end of each spoke is another article or page that you control. Each of these outside articles links to the center article or page. They also link to the next article on the outside of the circle. In this way, you will connect the dots with links to draw a wheel around your main page.

To help you understand better, you can try drawing a picture of the wheel. Write the name of your target article or page in the center. Now draw six lines reaching out from the center article. Make these into arrows pointing back toward the center to represent the links. Now you need to complete the wheel by making lines in between each article on the outer edge. Make these lines into arrows as well. All of the arrows should go in one direction, either clockwise or counterclockwise. This shows which articles will link to each other.

Next, you need to know what pages to put the links on. You can use pages on a number of different sites to make your wheel. Any service that allows you to publish a webpage or article containing at least two links will work. Some examples include Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger and Ezine Articles. Just pick six of these types of sites to use to build your link wheel.

The content of each page does not have to be completely unique. The center webpage or article should be unique, but the outside pages can all be rewrites of the same article. The purpose of these articles is to create backlinks, not to impress human traffic, so making the content unique is not important.

You do need to make sure you use the keyword you want to target as the link text, though. This is very important. You are trying to get your page to rank higher in the search engines for a certain keyword phrase. Using that phrase as the link text will help you to rank better for that keyword.

Your link wheels can be a lot more involved than the example given above. You can use any number of articles around the outside spoke, although six is a good place to start for a minimum. You can also expand the wheel by building supplementary wheels around the outside articles. Build it up slowly, though. Your webpage could get dropped from the search engine results temporarily if you set up too many backlinks in a short period of time, and that would defeat the purpose of building the wheel.

About the Author: