How to Build Links with a Link Wheel

Inbound links are the most important search engine ranking factor. Great content can pull links naturally, but it’s a common way to do SEO and link building by building forced links using article marketing and various web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages.

Many people do this by linking all those articles and web2.0 pages directly to the “money site”, but it’s more effective to build a link wheel instead, where each article or web2.0 page links to another web2.0 page in addition to the money site and all links are one-way, thus creating a wheel.

Link Wheel? Link Trio?

Instead of just including a link back to my website, I can also add a link to another article I’ve written.

In his post, Glen of Vipershill calls the link wheel a link trio, but it’s the same thing.

Whatever name you use, the fact is that this thing works…

How to build a link wheel

The individual services you use doesn’t matter, but do start building the wheel from a site that allows to easily edit the links, e.g. Squidoo or HubPages. (This example uses the same “relationship blog” and “online dating” example as Glen’s Link Trio post.)

1. (you have your blog / site / page you want to link to, e.g. “relationship blog”)
2. (you have your other blog / site / page, e.g. “online dating”)
3. start with a service where you can add/edit links (to close the wheel in the end), and continue counter-clockwise and build the wheel
4. create a Squidoo lens related to online dating and link it to the online dating blog
5. create article to GoArticles related to online dating, and link to the online dating blog and the Squidoo lens you just created
6. create article to EzineArticle related to relationships, and link to the relationship blog and the Go Articles you just created
7. create Hub Page related to relationships, and link to the EzineArticle article and the relationship blog
8. edit the Squidoo link and add link to the Hub Page

You’ll need to wait in between, if you use article directories like EzineArticles, which take a while to approve each article.

You could grow the wheel by adding more properties instead of closing the wheel at step 8, and you can even leave the wheel open, or “break the wheel” intentionally, but the above is the basic link wheel.

The key is to use different sites on the wheel, e.g. not have two Squidoo lenses or two EzineArticles.

Here’s what it looks like in the end:

Continue growing the wheel by building links to the articles and web2.0 pages. Pat Flynn explains one way to do this in his backlinking strategy.

Take another blog / site / page optimized to another phrase, rinse and repeat.

If you liked this SEO / link building tip, check my blog at http://zemalf.com for more and send me an email using the contact form there, if you have any questions.