Thursday 6 June 2013

Building Link Wheels with Social Signals

Link wheel is a widely used internet marketing strategy. The basic idea of link wheels is to create a pattern of links which flow from one website to another which would finally link to a targeted website requiring promotion.

Link wheels have been widely used since the spark of the search engine optimization concept which is considered to be in 2002. Back then, the content marketing sites and the article directories were widely used to create the link wheels. Content would be written based on the targeted keywords and published at the content sites. Links would be placed within the content, which would flow from one site to the other. Usually, every published content would carry one link to the adjacent site and one link to the parent website that is being promoted.

With the introduction of social media sites and the possibility to post content and gain links in the social media sites, the link wheels were made purely using these social media sites. Due to the viral nature of the social media sites, link wheels framed with them reflected huge effectiveness.


As a matter of fact, there is no specific pattern or rule when it comes to framing a link wheel. The effectiveness of the link wheel depends on how organic the pattern is. SEO experts believe that link wheels should not be framed to trick the search engines but should include a natural flow from one site to another. For example, the link can flow as more information about an article presented at the adjacent site. This would keep the readers interested along with gaining the attention of the search engine bots. As obvious as it is, different internet marketers make use of different patterns. Some of them would be using only social media sites, while some of them would use mixed media such as video sites, image sites, forums, discussion boards etc.



It is said that “Content is king” when it comes to search engine optimization. The same rule applies with the link wheels too. As already said, the link wheels should keep the readers interested, which is possible only by publishing well researched unique content. Usually, short informative articles would be written and posted to a handful of web 2.0 sites such as blogger and wordpress. Links would be placed in the anchor texts present in the articles.

There are many structures for Link Wheels, it could be simple, or complex (see examples below), but what matters most is how natural these links are, as well as the content used?