Monday, December 28, 2009

Using a Link Wheel to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

By Carl Frost

One way to help boost your results in the search engines for a specific keyword is to build a link wheel around the webpage you want to give a boost. You do this by writing six articles that you can position on social media and other websites and link back to your page and one of the other six articles inside of each of them.

Let me try to explain that a little better. Picture a bicycle wheel that only has six spokes. At the outside point of each spoke is one of the six articles you are using to promote your main webpage or article. The main page is at the center of the wheel. All of the articles on the outside of the wheel contain a link that points back to the main article. Each of them also link to the article next to them on the wheel, so that the links go all the way around the outside of the wheel.

You can draw a diagram to represent the wheel if it helps you understand which articles link where. The main article should be placed in the center of your page, with six spokes radiating out from it. At the end of each spoke, write the name of the article you will be targeting in your link wheel. Now connect each of the outside articles to the one next to it by drawing a line. To make the picture clearer, make the spokes into arrows pointing toward the center and the outside lines into arrows that move all the way around the circle. These arrows show which articles link to what.

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.

These articles do not need to be unique. They do not even need to be very good, although they shouldn't be total crap. You can use one article to build your wheel. Just rewrite it a little bit each time so they are not exactly the same. The only page that needs to be completely different is the one at the center of the wheel.

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.

The link wheel described above is really just a start. You can use more than six articles, or make multiple wheels for a single webpage. You can even make more wheels around the articles the used on the outside of your original wheel, so that you have a wheel inside of a wheel. But whatever you do, do it slowly so you don't get penalized by the search engines for getting too many backlinks too quickly.

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