Hi: I'm working with a well respected website in the web design and hosting market. They have a related website that they set up to attract local searches. The latter site has 50 interior pages (one for each US State) and 1200 interior pages (for specific cities nationwide). I'm trying to figure out how to go about getting links for the 1250 interior pages. I'd like to garner a total 100-200 links - for each interior page - over the next 18 months or so. So that's around 200,000 links total. One method is to get links from local search directories (eg. for links to the Omaha, NB page, I'd contact websites that display links for Omaha web hosting and web design sites, as well as contact other Omaha related sites that may be amenable to offering a link to us). Obviously this is both very labor intensive and costly, and even this method may be hindered by the fact that many such target websites will only accept links from companies that actually have a local office in the particular locale (e.g. Omaha). We only have offices in two cities. Any tips and advice on how to go about getting links for our 1250 interior pages would be much appreciated. Also, does any one know of any link services that may be helpful? Thanks.
I think you may have over-complicated your campaign a little bit. Let me explain: If you have a homepage that is well-respected by Google in SERP rankings, etc, the interior pages of your site will also be considered worthy pages You often see how Google bases its respect for interior pages off a home page by the fact that the pagerank of a site's interior pages is often only slightly less than the pagerank of the home page. I think that if your on-site SEO for your local pages is solid, you'd only have to embark on a massive link-building campaign for your home page with a few extra links for each of the local pages in order to return long-tail searches with geographic locations in them. Good luck.
Thanks, mauik. A couple of things to add to the mix: (1) the home page has a PR5....all the other pages presently have no PR. (2) there is a lot of competition for many of the searches for the interior pages' key phrases. Most phrases return SERP results where the top competitors not only have high PR, but also hundreds if not thousands of inbound links. So I think that getting a few inbound links per page will not do the trick.
"the home page has a PR5....all the other pages presently have no PR." This gives me the idea you have some issues with internal linking. I'm guessing that each of these pages has only 1 or maybe a couple links to it from the site. You probably need to share a little of the PR to the interior pages. Without looking at the site, I would suggest one of two linking options. 1) Link all 50 states on each page of the site, including the front page and then the cities to the state page. This would move the most strength through the site. But this also would look lousy. 2)Group the states into regions (Like the time zones) the region pages would gain the most PR and then pass some of that through to the states and eventually the cities This would make the cities no more then three clicks from the front page as well as every other page on the site. Last Link as much as you can between cities with something in common. This all takes some of the link strength from your index page and moves it around the site. Have a greater number of links pointing to the most important pages (ie, main and individual states) As you put more importance on the localized sections (states) so will the search engines
I take your point about distributing PR to the most important pages on the site. Thanks -that makes sense. That still leaves the initial problem I raised. How do I go about getting a substantial number of inbound links to my internal pages? Any ideas?
you need deep links. i think what you;re doing is making your project too large. Yes it would be awesome to get 100 links for each of 1200 cities but thats not likely. Focus first on states and then take the best city links you can get and you should be fine. Theres no way you'll get 100 deep links to every city from related sites. It's going to take a years to pull that off properly. By all means shoot for the top but start at the bottom.
Thanks - targeting the State pages first seems reasonable. So, do you have any recommendations as to how to get links (preferably one-way links) for a particular State page? Say the page is about "Arizona web hosting". We have no offices in Arizona, so we'll have a hard time getting into local Arizona directories, etc. which usually require a local address/phone number. Thanks again.
This will take some time, but will get you some results. Glad to see the 18 month time frame and not needing "immediate results." Check out Craigslist.org Each city has a forum, and a section marked communities. Post some things there with sig files, etc. Good luck
well start with deep link directory submissions. getting any kind of geo targeting is a start so get listed in any Arizona page you can to start with. once your site gets a little ranking it should be easier to get sites to link deeper. look for other geo related sites and maybe offer three way trades. as an example. find other regional sites such as a nationwide car site and have their city pages link to yours.