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Link-Building on Kayaking.org

by Morgan on July 23, 2010

I told everyone that I would share all of my SEO and link-building strategies on Kayaking.org so I thought now would be a good time to give you an update. In case you missed last week’s post – “Landing Page Optimization – More Updates Made To Kayaking.org” I thought I’d share with you the new front-page of Kayaking.org.

I am very happy with the new layout of the site and beginning my first round of link-building. To start link-building I begin by reaching-out to similar sites in the same niche. It’s pretty easy to find these sites, in this case I just search for “kayaking” in Google and Yahoo.

It’s the sites on the first page that are my initial link-building targets. By reaching-out to each of these sites and offering to have a link exchange I’m hoping to get some nice quality back-links to help improve my rank in Google. Back-links take time to develop but in a niche as saturated as Kayaking they are essential to ranking well in Google. This is the same technique I used back in 1995 and it really hasn’t changed too much!

Yahoo puts more emphasis on exact-match domains and you can oftentimes get on the first-page of Yahoo/Bing without doing much link-building. As you can see from the image below I’m in a great spot on Page 1 in Bing for “Kayaking.”

Still – the goal is to be on the first page of Google, Bing is a good start but by no means have I reached the search engine promise-land…yet.

So that’s the next step for me in the link-building process, sending emails to other site-owners in the space and hopefully getting a few good back-links to the site. I’m not looking for hundreds of links, just a few good links from other reputable sites. If you own a category-defining domain like Kayaking.org it’s much easier to get link partners than if you site was on ILikeToGoKayaking.com.

Building a brand is a slow and steady process. I’m patient and know that by making the right moves when it comes to SEO and link-building early-on will set the site up for long-term success. I will also be writing some articles on popular article submission sites and will share that with you in a future post!

Stay-tuned and don’t forget to watch MorganLinton.tv tonight at 7:00PM PST!

Related posts:

  1. How Much “Link Love” Do You Have? Link-Building 101
  2. Launching A Brand: Link-Building Stage One
  3. Building a Brand – Kayaking.org
  4. Building the Next Generation of Kayaking.org
  5. Kayaking.org Makes It To The FIRST Page Of Yahoo In Two Weeks!

Tagged as: brand-building, branding, link-building, sem, SEO

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  • http://www.ComprarDominio.com Leonard Britt

    Just curious what your hit rate is on link exchange requests from sites which are already on page one of Google and you are a new and potentially competing site. I suppose having quality content helps gain links but again why would they want to help a competitor if they are already on page one?

  • Morgan

    @Leonard – you don’t know until you try! I don’t do this with my mini-sites but when I’m building a brand like Kayaking.org there is SEO value for both of us. They may be on the first page of Google but they might not have had a new link added to their sites in months so I can help-out here.

    At the end of the day I’d rather see other sites in the niche as partners rather than competitors :)

  • JS

    Thanks for sharing Morgan. The kayaking.org is a very interesting series of articles.

    With respect to backlinking, I was wondering if you use/would use “do follow” comment finders like Comment Kahuna, Free Blog Commenter and the likes. They are easy to use but I’m not sure if they provide much link juice.

  • http://www.ppcian.com/ PPC Ian

    Morgan,
    Awesome post! Question: When you send out your link request emails, do you propose a reciprocal link exchange or are you simply trying to get one way inbound links to your site? I have found that reciprocal link exchange is far easier, but SEO-wise probably provides less value that one way inbound links. Thanks again for the helpful information!
    All the best,
    Ian

  • http://htmlpress.net Ed from htmlpress.net

    Informative post Morgan. Treating other sites as partners rather than competitors is becoming a global trend. And I’m talking about corporations and small to medium businesses.

    Is kayaking dot org one of your top three sites for monetization?

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