Wise Startup Blog

So what is a link wheel and how exactly can it help us to increase our SERP (search engine ranking positions). A link wheel is an SEO technique utilizing multiple Web 2.0 blogging platforms to interlink articles, that is one of the most effective ways to target a specific keyword and get to the first page on Google.

Followup Post: The SEO Link Wheel – How I Got The #1 Spot For My Keyword

How To Build an SEO Link Wheel

The key to building a good link wheel is to use multiple properties, and link each one to only one other article. The larger the link wheel, the more diverse the links and the better the overall outcome of the linking. The diagram below shows popular Web 2.0 sites that are free, and are a great place to start your first linkwheel.

Each article is linked to one article, but never linked back to the same article, all to create one-way backlinks to each of the properties.

Link Wheel Experts

As link wheels have become more popular, it’s important that you find the sites that haven’t turned their links into Nofollow. This can be a tedious task for the average user, but with firms like SEOLinkWheelers.com, they are 100% dedicated to building link wheels. They make monthly audits of their 52 web 2.0 sites and remove all of the sites that are Nofollow, and add on additional sites to ensure the links pass the highest value.

When making your own audits, you should look for the Web 2.0 sites that showup high for your search terms. For our eCommerce store, My Salon Tools, popsugar.com has a lot of beauty related pages ranking high, so we selected that site for our linkwheel.

You can do the same by doing some searches in your vertical and finding the web 2.0 sites you can use.

My Link Wheel

I created a link wheel to help increase the SERPs on my eCommerce store — http://mysalontools.com/. I’m targeting the keyword “shears” and “scissors” and am linking back to my store through the following articles:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Different-Types-of-Salon-Shears

http://salontools.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/how-to-choose-your-first-haircutting-shears/

http://mysalontools.onsugar.com/4502005

http://www.squidoo.com/haircuttingscissors

http://salonscissors.blogspot.com/

By linking back to my articles on this post, I am also helping to build the corresponding back links to each of my different spokes, and in turn increasing the overall value of my SEO wheel.

Building Backlinks to Each Spoke

For each of the spokes on my link wheel, I need to make sure they have plenty of backlinks as well, so that my overall net value for My Salon Tools is maximized.

For each of the articles, I submitted them to Feed Ping, a service that pings ~100 blog services and gets Google to index your articles faster. Additionally, for each of my articles, I submit them to as many social bookmarking as I can. My shortlist of bookmarks is:

Delicious
Digg
Mixx
Simpy
Plurk
Twitter (follow me @andrewwise)

For Twitter, a great resource is TwitterFeed.com. You give it an RSS feed and it automatically posts the latest updates from the site on a Twitter account (or 2).

Creating Sidecars on Your Main Linkwheel

A typical SEO wheel is created using one article from different sites, but a “sidecar” is creating a wheel within a wheel. So in this example, I have Squidoo as being one of my spokes. A sidecar would be creating 6 different articles within Squidoo, all interlinking to each other, and then out again to (eg) HubPages.

The more spokes, and the more sidecars you have, the better your overall results are going to be, it’s just a matter of a little bit of organization.

Hopefully this article was useful to you, and if it was, please thank me by linking back to my article, and helping me spread the SEO gospel to more people

Hiring a Linkwheel Company

So linkwheels are great ways to build backlinks, but who has an extra 2 hours they can spend writing all their own content, auditing all these sites, and all filling in all these forms? I know I don’t, so I’d like to recommend you checkout SEOLinkWheelers.com. All packages are completed in 2-3 business days and you get a tracking spreadsheet as soon as you order that lets you follow as the order is completed.