On September 4th I posted about an attempt to build links like crazy and keep track of the effects in the Google rankings for my moving to Sydney site. My plan was to build a variety of different types of links on quality websites and monitor the effect these new links had on my search engine results for the keywords ‘living in Sydney’. On September 4th, my site was ranked 18th and my goal was to attempt to bump the site to the first page.
Well 10 days in and it’s already there! Stuck in Sydney is currently sitting pretty at number nine on page one of Google’s search results. I’m not convinced it will stay there, but it’s a step in the right direction after being relegated to page three shortly after my links building campaign began. That was a bit confusing but I stuck with my plan and I’m seeing the results now.
So far the main type of links I’ve gone for have been three-way exchanges. I have offered up links to people on this site or Travoholic.com in exchange for links back to my Sydney site. So since September 4th when I started this little experiment I have added 13 inbound links pointing to the site’s main page. While 13 doesn’t seem like that many, they’re all what I would consider to be pretty high quality and half have been from sites about Australia or Sydney so hopefully those links will bring some visitors.
In addition to link swaps, I have also added 3 articles so far on Info Barrel about various Sydney suburbs. In those I have included a link into the suburb-related content and also a link to my site’s main page. I’m going to keep these coming because I think that linking to your internal pages is key to bringing in targeted traffic.
There have been two things that have really helped me in getting one-way, high-quality inbound links reasonably easily. The first is the fact that I have lots of quality sites of my own to offer links from in return and enough of them to be able to offer people options. The second is that I have been making websites for eight years and have built relationships with other webmasters along the way which means I have lots of internet buddies with old, quality sites who will actually read my link exchange requests rather than just deleting the emails straight away. It’s been great reconnecting with people I’ve lost touch with and seeing how their sites are going and the link building process for me has actually been really fun.
Since I’ve done pretty well with the ‘living in Sydney’ angle, I am going to switch gears and start to target ‘moving to Sydney’ and the more popular and competetive ‘Sydney life’. For the former I am currently on page three of the results and for the latter I am nowhere to be seen so it will be interesting to see if and where I appear in Google’s search results for that term.
This has all been pretty eye-opening for me. Links certainly seem to be the ticket to Google’s front page and I’m going to keep at it with this little experiment to try to get some traffic finally flowing into my Sydney site.
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