In the last post, we talked a little about the basics of linking. It’s important to understand how pages show up in search. So by building your online search profile, we’re talking about making it easy for people to find you and managing what people see when they search for you. If your name is rare, you’ll have an easy time. If your name if John Smith, you have some work cut out for you!

I’ll use myself as an example right now. If you search for Jeff Tomlin, most of the results on the first 2 pages of Google will either be my online profiles or articles about me. I’ve achieved that primarily by linking my profiles together. That is, on most of those profiles and websites, I list all of my other profiles. Next, I link to other articles about me on my blog. This gives rank to those other articles about me. Lastly, I try to list my sites and profiles on other 3rd party sites, directories, blogs and news.

There are a few things to note. Let’s go through the list of link attributes I mentioned in the last post.

1.Page Rank of the Linking Pages

I have about 12 personal sites and profiles that I link together. Each one I add means they will all generate another link. But linking them together isn’t enough. Each profile needs to have independent incoming links. I can’t write for and market all of these profiles effectively so first I syndicate content to some of them. An example of this is friendfeed. It aggregates content that I’ve posted from my other accounts and thus it updates regularly, but I never really go to the site. Secondly, I really focus on building a small number of them. As I market 2 or 3 of them, their individual rank goes up. As they build popularity, the links from those 2 or 3 to my other profiles carry more weight.

2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page

To maximize the value of the links I have to each of my profiles, I manage the total number of links on my linking pages. To do this, I simply ensure that I don’t populate my pages with links to too many other websites.

3.The Topic of the Linking Page

I want to maximize the topical importance of my linking pages. This is one reason I’ve created so many different online profiles. Each profile or website is about me, Jeff Tomlin. Thus when I link to all of my other sites, the link is highly relevant. Google now recognizes that these sites are all about the same person.

4.The Text of the Link

When I link to one of my sites or profiles, I use proper link text. The key is to ensure the link is descriptive, yet optimal from a search engine point of view. That is, you want to describe what the link actually links to, and you want link relevant value from the text. So I’ve formatted links to my profiles including a short name of the profile along with my name. An example is: “Jeff Tomlin – Linkedin”. A good clue to use is to try and make the link text similar to the title of the page you are linking to.

5.Reputation of the Linking Site

I always ensure that I don’t engage in linking schemes. I am careful of the sites I link to and I only promote my sites to other reputable sites. This happen naturally when you market yourself with ethical online practices.