The link wheel is one of the hot topics in the world of search engine optimisation at the moment, and there’s little doubt of their effectiveness when it comes to driving traffic to your site and increasing brand awareness, but what is a link wheel and how does it work?
Link Wheels
In its simplest terms, a link wheel is a series of independent, unique web properties, ideally with a high PageRank and degree of authority, which link back to your site. At the moment, this doesn’t sound too different to a regular linking campaign, but the next stage is where the wheel aspect comes into play: as well as linking to the target site, the sites in question also link to the site next to them in the wheel, creating a series of ‘spokes’ which lead to the ‘axle’ or ‘hub’, which is the target site.
Outer Spokes
There are typically at least five ‘spokes’ which link directly to the ‘axle’ in a good link wheel. These will typically be established, high authority web 2.0 sites including blog providers such as WordPress or Blogger and also properties such as Squidoo, which are concentrated on user-generated content. Each of these sites will host unique content featuring the keyword you want to target. These keywords should be worked organically into the content and linked via anchor text with one leading to the ‘axle’ and the other linking to the next ‘spoke’, passing the link juice to both.
The next stage of the link wheel is to create the ‘outer spokes’. These can take a variety of forms such as regular linking campaigns, social bookmarking, blog commenting, forum posting, other social media platforms or all of the above. These should target each of the internal ‘spokes’, helping to improve their rankings in the search engines and their authority. By utilising your search engine optimisation skills on your inner ‘spokes’, you help to build the power of the links which each of these unique properties passes to your site.
Maintenance
The results that this search engine optimisation tactic offers are usually both almost immediate and long lasting, as they are utilising unique, well written content on high PR sites, but unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Search engines appreciate fresh content and so you will have to continually maintain and update your link wheel with more fresh, unique content.
Unfortunately, due to all of these platforms being free, they are open to abuse by black hat SEOs who will scrape content from other sites automatically and utilise these platforms to spam the target site. Provided the content is generated organically and the wheel is maintained manually, this method should not lead to penalisation, but it is certainly a labour intensive method of improving your SERPs.
As effective as link wheels are, they are a time and effort-intensive method of search engine optimisation, which require high levels of keyword research and generation of quality, unique content on a fairly regular basis, thus are best left to the experts. If you’ve got the time and the knowhow, a link wheel is one of the most effective link building methods you can utilise for your site.
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