What’s wrong with link wheels?
Your search engine ranking depends upon links from other websites to your own. SEOs want to make sure those links seem natural, which is why techniques that use natural language and a natural linking pattern are favored by professionals. A long time ago, people figured out that a bunch of random links from a bunch of random sites, all pointing to a single website, looked entirely artificial and therefore the technique was not favored by search engines.
A link wheel attempts to create a natural linking pattern by making sure each page that links to your site also links to another page. Since inbound links add to a page’s “link juice,” it means the link coming from that page is also more valuable. It makes sense in theory, but there are two problems: First, a perfect wheel is anything but natural, and search engine “bots” can detect the structure. Second, every page is connected, in the wheel, to every other page. If any one of those links is penalized for any reason, the interconnection can cause you to lose all your links at once, which would hurt your ranking.
A link cloud, on the other hand…
When webpages link to other webpages, the pattern they form is pretty random. A journalist may link to a site as a source, a customer may link to the same site to recommend it as a vendor, the same site may be listed in a directory, and so on. Meanwhile, the incoming links to the journalist, the customer, and the directory are probably not linking to one another. It’s not a wheel at all! I call this a link cloud.
If you examine this link cloud illustration, you’ll see its many advantages over a link wheel:
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• Multiple pages of the client site are linked, for a more robust presence that brings exposure to more of your content. (This is also a more natural pattern: People don’t always link to your home page.)
• Important Web 2.0 social media pages are built that link directly to the client site, but not to each other. Social media sites can include Squidoo, Hubpages, Facebook, WordPress, and more.
• Additional link building boosts the authority of the social media pages, which in turn confer that authority to your home site.
• Link building randomly connects to the center of the “cloud;” meaning your home page, your secondary pages, and your primary social media pages.
• Link building sites never link to each other. This means that if one such link is problematic, it cannot contaminate the other links.
A link cloud is more time-consuming to build and maintain than a link wheel, but it is much better for your website and for your search engine ranking.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking on the client sites and social media pages adds a boost of additional authority. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc. add to the “juice” and visibility of a web page.
Most SEO experts say that keyword density is not important these days, but I disagree. I increased my keyword desity on 3 sites recently to above 1% and the rankings improved drastically for all 3 with no other SEO efforts
I think keyword density is one way of approaching SEO, but your long-term results may suffer. Eventually, Google may ding your rankings for keyword stuffing. A healthier strategy is to use synonyms and related terminology to boost the strength of the keywords.
I agree with your position that you should “continue” to pay attention to your keyword density for optimal on-page optimization. I happen to use a plug-in to prompt me for my density score (in real-time) but I also like you model for building a well honed link wheel.
I’m working on a phase 1.2.3 model that I will post up on my weblog and ask my readers if this model is too complex or if they’d rather outsource it to focus on other time pressing tasks and matters.