It is not exactly a trade secret that link building is a vital sub-section of search engine optimisation. After all, it figures that the more links a website has to it, the more relevant traffic and click-throughs and lower bounce rate it will experience.
Did you know, however, that the search engine algorithms study the ‘quality’ of sites that link to your site? If a site to which Google assigns a high authority links to your site, it can be as advantageous as 10,000 low authority sites linking through to you. In fact, low quality or authority sites that link through to your pages can even have a negative effect on your retrieval success, especially if these low quality links are accumulated very quickly, i.e. 10 or 20 a day, causing Google to suspect spamming activity.
When Google spots this sort of activity, it lowers a website’s ranking, known as blacklisting. Furthermore, the quality of inbound links will have an effect on how regularly search engine bots will crawl your pages and how thoroughly. It can also affect how a search engine places you within your field – if lots of your inbound links are from other major and high-traffic websites in the same field, for example a market leader in the car industry linking to your page for repair advice, then a search engine will assign you higher authority within your field.
In a similar vein, the anchor text which is directly clicked on as a hyperlink to your page needs to be rich in keywords. This will help a search engine recognise exactly what is being linked to; e.g. Users clicking on ‘ABC Car Repairs,’ is much more suitable than ‘Click Here,’ when being linked to.
Google, for instance, will see a link to your page, read car repairs and know to put your page higher in the retrievals for that specific phrase or similar phrases, depending on how trust-worthy your peer inbound links are deemed to be. As with most areas of SEO, you should be beginning to see that the process is exponential and self-propagating.
Link-Worthy Content
You can’t expect any web pages with any sort of decent PageRank to want to link to you if you aren’t providing some sort of useful content. This can be anything, as long as it is not out of date or has become redundant – Users will quickly boycott your pages and your bounce-rate will soar if they’re not finding something useful or relevant. Make sure the content is easily accessible and simple to use or put into practice, be it regularly updated blogging or news content that keeps visitors up to date with the latest developments in your field or a useful and relevant embedded tool, a currency converter for example, that will make your page a practical place for users to frequently visit.
Link Building Software
There are many useful tools, web-based and otherwise, available for link building, the most useful of which usually require the purchase of a license. The careful employment of these tools can help you optimise the link building process with options like link diagnosis and link partner suggestions.
In-depth link diagnosis involves a multi-faceted approach to assessing the quality of a link and therefore its potential to boost your retrieval rankings and provide you the relevant traffic. These programs account for factors such as the page’s age (or its uptime on the web), or its inbound and outbound links and the number of these links (multiple poor quality outbound or inbound links can do serious damage to a page’s reputation and therefore linking authority.) The PageRank of a link is after all determined in large part by the PageRank of its inbound links.
The ability of some these tools to identify potential link sharing partners can also be highly lucrative. It will suggest appropriate web pages with which it might be beneficial to start a link sharing relationship. Sometimes these are business directories that list numerous local businesses, (in fact Google has its own local business directory that can be very useful when someone searches for something like ‘local plumbers,’ as the search engine will use the individual’s location to identify and prioritise plumbing companies that are nearby in the retrivals) and sometimes they can be other websites in your field, perhaps providing a similar service that are prepared to link to you in return for a link in the other direction.
Link building software can be a time saving and detailed way to begin a link building campaign but should not be relied on entirely, as software cannot employ the common sense and research that a company’s SEO practitioner can.
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