Follow These Effective Link Building Principles
When building links its important that you do it effectively. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad information and practices out there when it comes to link building. So let’s try and clear a few things up for you so you can be sure that you are building your links in the most effective manner.
PageRank
As a reminder, PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of a page. So essentially it’s a quality scale. Conceptually then, if you can get a link on a page with a higher PageRank, that link will be more beneficial for you than a link on a page with a lower PageRank. So ideally, when we’re out there looking for places to build links, we want to focus on those sites that have a decent PageRank. Start with a 3 and above. Higher is better of course, but don’t be afraid to get links from lower PageRank sites.
One of the problems with just measuring your links according to PageRank though is that it isn’t really current. On the back end, PageRank is changing all of the time. When Google does a “PageRank Update”, it simply means that they’ve decided to update the information that they publish to the public. So don’t swear by PageRank 100%. Instead, use it as a guide.
Related Sites
One of the big misconceptions out there about building links is that it only matters how many you get. Just build tons and tons of links with any sites that you can and it will help. I wouldn’t recommend following this policy! Whenever you are doing link building, you want to keep you links coming from websites with a related topic as much as possible. In other words, it need to make sense for your link to be there. For example, if you have a website that sells fishing gear, why would you want your link to show up on a site about picnic baskets? That doesn’t make a lot of sense does it? We want to link with related sites.
Varied Anchor Text
When we talk about anchor text, we’re talking about the words that you can click on in a hyperlink. For example, here is a link: website marketing. The anchor text for this link is ‘website marketing’, but the link goes to the eComm Tips home page. When building links we want the anchors for our links to be our main keyword phrases. But we also don’t want to use the exact same keyword phrase all of the time. By adding variety to our anchor text we avoid the problem of being penalized for overusing the phrase we’re trying to get rankings for. So its actually a good idea from time to time to have the anchor for your links to be either your site name or even a general phrase like ‘click here’. You should also have several main phrases that you’re trying to get traffic for.
Various Types of Links
We should also have links from different types of sites as well. That’s why we do different link building methods like reciprocals, directories, articles, press releases, blogs, etc. All of these add up to be your site’s overall link profile. We want to have variety to that link profile if we’re going to use an effective link-building strategy.
These are just a few main pointers to consider when developing your overall link building strategy. Let me give you an example of a very poorly constructed link building strategy (and it’s one that’s pretty common out there unfortunately): sign up with a link marketplace that does reciprocal links with any site out there and just get as many links as you possibly can with anybody. You’ll notice on some websites that when you go to their links or resources page they have hundreds of links with all different sites. This is not the best way to do it!
Think of it this way: the internet is based on information. Search engines are trying to sort through that information to give the end user the most relevant results. So wouldn’t it make sense to mostly associate our site with other sites in the same topic or genre, thus improving the overall relevancy of the search results? Stick with related sites, vary your anchor text, and get different types of links. These are 3 of the backbones of an effective link building strategy.
Related Posts
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I couldn’t of said it better myself. But page rank isn’t everything. It help to get a link from a page that has alot of links itself, because page rank isn’t always accurate.
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San Diego SEO,
I completely agree that PageRank isn’t everything. I recommend using it as a guideline, but that’s all.
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What you say makes sense. It’s difficult, though, to find related sites let alone related sites who will link to you. What do you advise in this field?
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Jan,
It sounds like you might be focusing too much on sites that you have no control over. Some of your best links will come from things like articles, blogs, etc. where people are adding your link because you’re providing them with content. Naturally if you just approach most sites and say “hey, will you link to me?” they won’t even respond because it doesn’t help them any.
Let’s take the example of submitting an article to an article directory. When you submit that article, other site owners may come along and find your article interesting. They may then choose to add it to their site and Bingo! You now have a link on their site. But you went about getting that link indirectly. I hope that little example helps.
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Don’t forget, contributing quality comments to other blogs is good idea–particularly for sites that are just starting out. And focusing on the ones that have joined the “Do Follow” revolution is an even better idea!
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Zen Zoomie,
Yes, leaving good, quality comments is a good tactic for building links. It’s also a good general marketing tactic because you’re getting your name out there in front of other readers each time you leave a comment.
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I think I’m getting this a little better. Thanks for the tip. I’ll attend to varying my anchors more frequently. This anchor stuff is the most difficult to grasp. I’m glad you keep writing about it.
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annl,
Glad the tip could help! The sooner you can get this whole anchor thing the better, it really is that important of a concept.
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After trying social bookmarking, article promotion, a little manual directory submitting and other such stuff and it worked well for me.
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Great post. Enjoyed reading this article, first time here at the site and will be back again.
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Dan Reply:
October 20th, 2008 at 10:00 am
thanks for dropping by, I hope you find some good tips!
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Great post. The popularity of link building has somewhat reduced lately. Website marketers seem to be using other methods such as social networking, blogs, and so on to getthe back links. However link exchange still remians on of the most effective tols for search engine optimisation if done correctly. A well thouigh of link building approach witj niche websites in an industry can add immense value to any search engine marketing campaign.
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Dan Reply:
October 28th, 2008 at 6:02 am
I think you have to take a balanced approach to it. Do the older tactics like articles, etc. but you also can’t ignore the social side. But if you over emphasize either one you’re probably missing out on some good link possibilities.
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I think that link diversity is key. Most people forget press releases. If you are not afraid to shell out the $200 for the PR Web package, you can get a nice little source of authority links.
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