What is a Link wheel and how can it help boost your website’s placement in search engine results? The link wheel is one of the most popular search engine optimization techniques used right now. It basically involves creating several Web 2.0 properties such as blogs or ‘microsites’ on a certain topic that allow “do follow” links that point back to your site.

Each of these sites have unique content of at least 200 words, one link to your targeted site and one link to another blog or microsite in the wheel. The idea behind the link wheel is that by creating a network of links from several high-ranking sites, this will improve the page rank of your site. Because these blogs are hosted in established sites like Hubpages or Blogger.com that already have high Google PageRank, the benefits are passed on to all the blogs and ultimately to the targeted site. A number of high quality links pointing back to your site will make the search engines consider your site as an authority on the topic or keyword that you are targeting.

By inserting a single link in each of the new sites that leads to another site in the wheel, the so-called link juice is also passed on to all the sites. This builds up the value of each of the links. The links are also one-way – say for instance, site #1 links only to site #4 but site #4 links to site #6. Through one-way linking, the value of each link is passed on and not diminished by reciprocal linking.

Link building has always been an important aspect of any search engine optimization initiative because it improves the popularity of the website that you are linking to. Building a link wheel takes this concept one step further by creating and improving the value of the links pointing to your site.