Horrible ideas breed great ideas
Today Seth Godin put up a wonderful post on his blog about bad ideas and good ideas. He emphasizes the point that you are going to have a lot of bad ideas before you have good ideas. Which also means that overnight success is not going to happen. All good things take time, Rome wasn’t built in a day after all.
When Thomas Edison was inventing the light bulb, it took him over 1000 tries. Someone once asked him about his failures. He said that he didn’t have any failures, but hundreds of ideas that didn’t work. The point is you are going to have lots of ideas that don’t work before you have ideas that do work. So you are going to have to work hard, test, and learn.
Straight No Chaser
One of my favorite singing groups is Straight No Chaser. Since its Christmas time I thought you would like to see the 12 days of Christmas, SNC style.
Why should I link to my link wheel?
At first when I started messing with link wheels I thought that you just made the link wheel and that was it, great rankings and move on. I even made a blog with posts I did for 8 months in advance. Well after the 8 months was up I was getting a whopping 4-5 UV per day from Google. Fail.
Of course I was wrong, because a link wheel is only a tool or a start. Its like your core. You need to link to your link wheel. In the game of SEO its about looking natural. If all of your links are pointing to your main site, Google will know that its not natural. However if you had a site that went viral and everyone linked to it cause it spread by word of mouth, then you would have links showing up all over web 2.0 properties.
People hang out and create pages on places like squidoo, and Google likes links that they feel are from people “casting their vote” for a site. So if you had a viral site you would naturally have links on web 2.0 properties, forums, blogs, etc… People would also naturally link to other web 2.0 sites and not always link to your site. You have to understand that 90 something percent of people can’t tell the difference between paid ads on Google search results and organic. So if they can’t even tell the difference in an ad and not, then they don’t really know that they should link to your site even if it was viral. They would often link to the site that led them to your site instead of your actual site. Basically the average person just doesn’t get a lot of in depth internet/seo stuff. Thus we need to emulate this randomness of people.
So we make a link wheel and we create links to the link wheel. Links from other web 2.0 sites, links from forum sigs, links from blog comments, links from article submission, directory submission, etc…. If you are planning on doing any greayhat/blackhat stuff, then linking that stuff to the link wheel rather then directly can protect your site from harm if google penalizes for the links, but you get the link equity if its not penalized. 
Its a win win. Also if you happen to be able to get a link from a “bad neighborhood” or totally no relevant site you can still pass the juice to your site ultimately, but by filtering it thru your link wheel. I heard someone describe it as “link laundering” lol. Not that I am saying you should go spam your link everywhere, but I have had opportunity on occasion to get a link free that wasn’t really relevant. Trade and different things.
Point really is just to try and emulate the total randomness of people that have no idea what they are doing when it comes to the web, or people that know just enough to be dangerous. If you need some good examples sit down with a friend that knows enough to be dangerous, but no more and ask them to help you work on some project. Research, creating a squidoo page, maybe a website they are intersted in, etc…. Just watch how they surf, what engines they use, what they click, what they think, how they act, how they react to things… I have had the opportunity just from circumstances of my day job to do this a lot. Its VERY VERY enlightening. Then just emulate them. People are random, but thats normal to them. You could also read about peoples world view. I have read some good stuff, but the most recent is Seth Godins All Marketers are Liars – Now renamed All Marketers Tell Stories. Its on itunes and Amazon.
Link to your link wheels. If it seems like a logical link structre, don’t do it. If it seems like a random un logical link structure, thats the ticket, run with it. Not to say you don’t need a plan, but generally be creative.
Link Wheel Basics
Given that I have only been in the niche of online development persay since 2007 I am still learning a ton. I have done ok in search ranking, but it was hit or miss. I have seen a lot more about link wheels lately, but it took me a while to wrap my head around it. So here is what I got, see what you think.
Basically you need a lot of links, and good quality ones, to get your site to rank. A link wheel is kind of like an outline for your linking strategy. Its a simple visual that illustrates the point of having your site link profile like an actual wheel on a bike. Where your site is the middle of the wheel and all the spokes are links pointing into your site.
However with link wheels you want to have multiple layers of links. The way link work is that when one page, links to another, then that page links to another, then that page links to you – you get a little bit of link equity from all those pages. Its like the link juice starts on the first page and then flows to each page and eventually to you, and thru your site on to the sites you link to.
So by creating a link wheel you create a set of site that link directly to your site, then sites that link to your first layer of links, then site that link to your second layer of links. You can take it as far as you like, but you get the point. Here is an illustration of a simple editable link wheel template that I use (click to enlarge):
If you want to use this you can download it here.
A lot of what value a link has, is dependent upon its trustrank. The short story is new sites don’t have much or any, but established sites do. So a super easy way to do your link wheel is by using web 2.0 properties such as squidoo, quizilla, wordpress.com, blogspot etc… These sites already have high trust and you can create free pages on them.
Having some sites link directly to your main site, and some to other link wheel sites etc… The point here is to make it look natural. Not every site on the planet is going to link directly to you. Google knows this. But by linking indirectly you still push link equity to your site, while remaining natural.
In an ideal world you would get linked to because you have great content and everyone thinks you the best. With a properly done link wheel, you can make it look like everyone really thinks you are the best. Not leaving a foot print is the goal.
Here is another example which I got from a friend. Its a bit more complex, and is also a great starting point for what sites to create pages on.
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