IMPORTANT TO SEO & SEARCH ENGINES
Link Building
Links are of utter importance to both search engines and SEOs. To search engines, they are what connect the Web together, guiding spiders to crawl from one page to the next.
To SEOs, they represent popularity and success. The more links to and from your site, the higher ranking it’ll achieve. Links are very influential in the ranking algorithm. Link building is quite possibly the top goal of an SEO, though it can also be the most difficult to achieve.
Types of Links
Links carry more weight than just at face value for search engines. Links have character. They can be judged on things like popularity, trustworthiness, authority, and spam content. All of these characteristics can add or detract value to and from a link.
Metrics to focus on:
Popularity – Links from largely known sites will prove more valuable.
Topic-specific – Links from sites within your niche matter more than links from off-topic sites.
Anchor Text – The text of the link itself will improve its ranking for a targeted keyword search.
TrustRank – Links from trusted (minimal spam) sites are more valuable.
Be mindful of who you link to and who links back to you.
Link Building Strategies
As for the actual link building, there are several general methods to go about doing so. Some are precise and under your control while others are out of your hands. It is up to the SEO to decide what is right for their site, but making use of parts of all these strategies is recommended.
- Editorial Accumulation – These are links given to your site by sites that simply post a link to your material. There is no action to be made here by the SEO other than having rich site content that people will want to see and share.
- Suggestion – This includes contacting sites and bloggers about your content, paying for links, and submitting your site to directories. These directories add only so much value, but for a small and upcoming site it can be worthwhile to do so.
- Self-Created – The key here is to let your users and customers do the linking by providing them opportunities to do so. This can be through blog comments, user profiles, forum signatures, and so on.
Measuring Success
Getting an idea of how well a link building campaign is going can be difficult to judge. This is because there are so many factors to consider in deciding the value of a link, thus it’s impossible to be precise. Luckily there are some tools and methods to go about this madness.
- Page Ranking for Relevant Search Terms – simply searching a keyword will usually gather up the most relevant and valuable sites.
- Number of Links on a Page – It’s good to know that the more links on a page, the less value they each have. If you get a backlink from a popular page with minimal links, it’s a great success.
- Potential Referral Traffic – Links that send a higher direct CTR will have more value in terms of ranking.
- Google PageRank – assigns a page ranking which, while not always accurate, does correlate with passing more link value.
- SEOmoz mozRank – tells how popular a given page is on the Web.
- Yahoo! Site Explorer Reported InLinks – great tool for seeing the links that point to a site or page. You can use this to analyze the popularity of site based on its link relations.