What is a Link Wheel?

Link wheels are an SEO strategy that uses a circle of quality, relevant 3rd party websites that link to a Money Making Webpage at the center. The beauty of this strategy is that you buy links that point to pages and websites you don’t own at the perimeter of the wheel which then pass the link juice on to your website with one clean link.

If your Link Wheel has excellent content, you will also get a steady flow of targeted visitors from the pages in your wheel. Better rankings and organic traffic are often the result of of a well done link wheel.

I created a diagram to the right that demonstrates the Link Wheel strategy at a glance. In the example, I have 8 pages that surround the money making website. I use 8 pages to the diagram readable. Also, an 8 page Link Wheel an affordable a realistic strategy for the average webmaster. A link wheel can be anywhere from 3 to 50+ pages depending on the time and resources you have available to create it.

Each Keyword page in the wheel should have the following characteristics:

1. Each page should be relevant to the content on your website.
2. Each page should be on a 3rd party domain that cannot be tracked to you by the search engines. Example keyword page domain locations would be:

• WordPress.com (A WordPress blog hosted at WordPress.com)
• Hubpages
• Squidoo Lens
• Hosted marketing page. (You buy and create a permanent page on a relevant website)
• Relevant articles on some strong Content and Article sites.
• Guest blog posts

Steps to create your Link Wheel

1. Create high quality, relevant content for each page in your link wheel..
2. Point as many links as you can afford to each of the pages (red arrows).
3. Create one or two outbound links that reference authority pages (green arrows).
4. Create the circle: If you examine the diagram you see that page 1 links to page 2 links to page 3 etc..forming a circle of power. Avoid cross-linking the Keyword Pages as this will most likely destroy the wheel’s power.
5. Add the Spoke Links from the Keyword Pages to your Money Web Page. This must be your last step and is best done over a few weeks instead of all at once.

It can take some time to create the wheel. Don’t worry, this is a good thing, putting up a link wheel in one day is not as natural as putting it up over six months. When it comes to using paid links, the more natural and on topic the better.

Some tips on the Spoke Links (blue arrows)

1. Mix your anchor text up. Don’t use the same keyword anchor text more than once (maybe twice in a large link wheel).
2. Only point one simple Spoke Link from each Keyword page to your central Money Web Page.
3. Have some Spoke Links in the content and other Spoke Links on the sidebar. Make the Spoke Links out to your Money Page as natural looking as possible.
4. The only anchor text you can use more than once is your money pages is your URL like: http://www.buyselllinks.com/2011/03/22/anchor-text-link-strategy/ A standard URL looks very natural and many SEOs believe they pass link juice more freely than keyword links.

Link Wheels should not be confused with Web Rings. Those of us that started out on the web in the 90′s probably remember Web Ring links at the bottom of many websites. Web Rings are groups of websites, all in the same general category best set up with some automated technology that allows the group of sites to share some relevant traffic. They are an artifact of the days when Google did not dominate so sites banned together to share and distribute quality visitors that came to their sites.

Unlike Web Rings, Link Wheels are mainly an SEO strategy that are best run and owned by a single website that sits in the middle of the link wheel. There are some “Commercial” Link Wheel services, but you are often sharing the middle of the wheel with several other websites. Not only does this take away from the power of the wheel, it could create a footprint large enough for the search engines to easily spot and diminish the wheels value. Keep your hand on your Link Wheel to keep its power under your control.

If you have the time, money, and knowledge to set up a Link Wheel you will have one of the best SEO strategies out there in place. Once your Link Wheel is built, don’t let the pages in the wheel become stagnant. Add and edit content and slowly continue to add high quality links to your wheel.

Tagg: Link Wheel, SEO

Category: Pagerank, Text Link Advertising