Building Links - Tips and Relationships
Links are important for SEO because they tell the search engines how important your site is to the wider online community. Links from high quality, relevant websites will give you an enormous boost to your SEO.
First, evaluate your competition
You need to find out who your online competition is. Do a quick search for your keywords (you know what keywords are, right?) and the top three websites are your competition (unless your site is in the top three… if this happens then do another search for a different keyword, and so on). Next, you need to find out how many backlinks your competition has, because if they can acquire them, then in theory, so should you be able to.
The easiest way to discover your competition’s backlinks is to go to yahoo.com and type in the search box linkdomain:http://www.yourcompetitionsdomain.com and Yahoo Site Explorer will list all the pages that link to that domain.
Quality Links
You should bear in mind that not all links are equal, some links have better “Link Juice” – the page they come from has a higher PageRank, and they are relevant. Relevancy is more important than PageRank. A link from an unrelated site with a PageRank of 10 isn’t going to be as useful to you as link from a relevant page with a PageRank of 7.
The age of the domain is also a factor that Google, in particular, seems to take into consideration. Visit www.domaintools.com, enter the competition’s domain in the whois lookup search box and click search. Scroll down to Registry Data and look for “Created” this will give you the date the domain was created. Generally an older domain will carry better “link juice” than a newer one.
Another great source of links are .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. Search engines know that educational and governmental websites don’t give away links to just anyone, so, in theory the links they do give will be of high quality and high relevancy.
An additional thing to consider when examining linking partners is who else do they link to? Is it a page with hundreds of other links on? If it is then it probably isn’t worth your time and effort to obtain a link from them, as the search engines probably won’t even count the link anyway.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a hyperlink. Often this just says, “click here”, which is as about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, as this doesn’t tell you anything about where the link is going to take you. It is always best to use descriptive text for your anchor text, for example a site about web design should have links to it called “Web Design” or “Website Design” or something else related to the subject of web design. It is also a good idea to vary your anchor text, as overuse of the same keyword can actually damage your search engine results as the search engines may see this as spamming, as it looks unnatural.
Community participation
This has many benefits, and not all of them are for SEO. By participating in your online community you will become known to other members of your online community, who are probably already ‘authorities’ in their (and your) field. You will also get the opportunity to learn and share information with these people, giving you access to a huge wealth of information.
Blog commenting
Blog comments often give you a link back to your site or blog. It is very important that you do not spam the blogs, blog moderators will just break your link, ban you or in some cases they can even report you to Google, getting your site sandboxed for a period of time. This obviously isn’t the name of the game, so when commenting, make sure you add something useful and informative, ask questions, give advice, but always ensure you stay on topic.
Web Forums
Forums are usually moderated, so, again, it is best to stay on topic. Make sure you find relevant forums to post on. Find forums that are related to your topic and make constructive responses, otherwise you’ll just be labelled as a spammer. Try to find forums with a PageRank of at least 4, and make sure that they have a lot of incoming links, this will ensure you’re efforts won’t be wasted. An added bonus of using forums in this way is that you will probably start to get traffic directly from the forums themselves, as well as increasing your rankings in the search engines.
Requesting Links
You can request links from other website owners. You will already have found a lot of sites you can target from your competition evaluation. Make sure that they are high quality sites and the links you get from them have good keyword rich anchor text. The best way of gaining a link from a website owner is to try to establish a relationship with them before asking for the link. This obviously takes time; so make sure you only target quality sites.
