Creating a link wheel is a very effective SEO strategy that can be used by anyone to improve the rankings of their sites. Essentially, a link wheel leverages the power of highly ranked Web 2.0 sites to build targeted backlinks back to your sites. This works because certain Web 2.0 properties like Hubpages, Squidoo, Wordpress, and others allow you to publish your own content on these sites AND allow you to add your own backlinks to this content as well. Google loves these sites and often times your posted content can rank very well on their own. Getting links to your own site from 5-10 of these types of sites is very powerful, and forms the basis of the link wheel strategy.
Here is the classic Link Wheel diagram:
In this Link wheel scenario, every Web 2.0 property links to your main site in the middle, as well as to one other Web 2.0 site in the wheel to form a closed loop. This way, link juice is passed to both your main site and each web 2.0 property enhancing the power of each. I’m personally not too fond of this link wheel configuration because I think it leaves an obvious footprint.
Instead, I like to introduce some randomness to my link wheels like this:
This makes the footprint a little more non-obvious, while still being quite effective. The more properties you can add to your link wheel, the more creative you can be with your linking structure.
What About Content?
To get the most power from this link wheel technique, you want to post articles on these web 2.0 sites that relate to your main site. So if you are promoting Market Samurai for example, you would want to post Market Samurai or keyword research related articles. It’s pretty time consuming to write unique articles to post on all these sites, so usually what I do is post spun articles. You spin your own articles using an article spinner like The Best Spinner. Or if you are quite lazy like myself, you could use a service like The Leading Articles which will give you a daily spun article to use. All you need is one spun seed article from which you can post each unique variation to each site in your link wheel.
Enhancing Your Link Wheels
Most Web 2.0 properties also include their own RSS feeds. Make sure to figure out what they are and then submit these feeds to RSS aggregators like Feedage, Feedagg, and Zimbio. This will help get your content on the Web 2.0 properties indexed faster, and improve their linking power as well. Another thing to try is to incorporate article directories to your link wheel as well. EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticlesBase are some of my favorite article directories to use. Finally, take advantage of social bookmarking sites to bookmark your Web 2.0 properties. You can use a site like Social Marker or a bookmarking tool like Bookmarking Demon which automates the social bookmarking process for you.
Automating Your Link Wheels
When starting out, I encourage you to create your link wheels by hand initially to verify that it works for you. However this is not very scalable and if you have many sites you want to improve your rankings for, you should invest in a more automated solution. My favorite programs to create link wheels right now are SENuke and Magic Submitter. Both these programs automate the process of creating accounts, verifying emails, and submitting your content. They also have their own database of Web 2.0 sites so you don’t have to look around and find these sites yourself. Both programs are very powerful, and well worth the investment.
I hope you can see that creating link wheels is a very powerful technique for boosting your sites rankings. Try it out for yourself and let me know how they work for you.
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