Saturday, December 5, 2009

How to Use a Link Wheel to Rise to the Top of the Search Engines

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.

If this is confusing, try drawing it out on a piece of paper. Put a dot in the middle to represent the webpage you want to promote, and then draw six lines going out from it. These are the spokes. Number the ends of the spokes from one to six. These are the six articles that will link to the main page. Now draw arrows from number one to two, two to three, and so on. When you get to number six, draw an arrow back to number one. Now you can see how the linking works.

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.

The most important thing you need to make sure you do when building your wheel is to use the keyword phrase you want to target as the anchor text for your links. In other words, if you want your central webpage to rank well for "weight loss secrets, " then "weight loss secrets" should be the anchor text you use for the links.

Building a link wheel around a webpage or article can give you a huge boost in the search engine rankings, but the six-page wheel described in this article is just the beginning. If you really want to boost your rankings, you can build multiple wheels around a single article. You can also build secondary wheels around each of the pages in the original wheel. Just make sure you build your backlinks slowly and steadily so that your webpage doesn't get sandboxed.

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