In SEO, internal linking is connecting two website pages, it’s all about usability. Not only from a human perspective, but also for the search engine robots. If we start off looking at it from a users perspective and leave you pondering what the heck search engine robots are?

A website should allow the user to fulfill their need quickly and easily. If they can find what they are looking for, they are more likely to make a purchase or contact you about your services, if they cant they will hit the back button and you have lost yourself a sale! Looking at it objectively the best place to start is the home page you have two perfect opportunities; your navigation and your footer. Both should have keyword rich page names relevant to what you are optimising that page for. A sitemap is often over looked, however a good website should never be without an easily navigated list that can quickly point a user to the products/services they want. If you are optimsing for milk chocolate, white chocolate and dark chocolate, and you decided you want a whole page on each (and who could blame you) if you happen to mention dark chocolate on the milk chocolate page link it back to the milk chocolate page. But why….? This is where the search engine robots come in to the equation!

You may have heard of a search engine robot or spider that “crawls” your site and takes the information back to the search engines database. Everyone seems to have their own way for describing how these robots work. The metaphor that struck a chord with me was when they were described as an explorer ant, leaving their colony with one thought on their mind: Food. Except it is not actually ‘food’ they are looking for it is HTML text, and to get to it they need to travel along well planned out, obstacle free paths, these obstacle free paths just so happen to be your links. The happy ant then returns home with all its food (text) after a successful mission and stores it in the anthill (search engine database). If the path is not clear, the ant gives up and goes somewhere else as there is no food and returns with nothing.

Next time you sit down to carry out a search, remember in that few seconds you have sat their impatiently tapping your fingers, that the search engine has sifted through its database, sorted the millions of results into a list of the most relevant sites hopefully containing a match to your exact search criteria. Keeping those robots happy and well fed, and channeling your potential clients in the right direction will not only help your SEO listings but it will increase your revenue.

Anyone involved with SEO knows that Link Building is essential for maintaining good listings. But, you may or may not be aware that not all links are equal.

I often get clients tell me they ‘don’t have enough links’ because they’ve spoken to someone ‘who knows about SEO, who says they need more links’. Now, they may have a point, their backlinks may seem slight on first looks, but what they may not be aware of is that it is quality, not quantity that we look for in link building.

Anyone can buy hundreds of links but in my experience this is often a pointless and costly exercise. There is no point building links for the sake of it. You need to look at each link for it’s own individual merit and how it will benefit the site in question.

How do you know which links are best?

1. Relevancy
   I put relevancy high up on my list of attributes I believe links should have. This is because a link from a relevant source is much more powerful than a link from somewhere unrelated.
2. High PageRank Source
   If the page you link from has a high PageRank (PR) then some of that PR will ‘leak’ out to your site.
3. How many other links are on the page?
   I often have to ask myself this question, because the fewer the links out the stronger the link will be. PR gets divided up amongst all the links on the page, so a page with a PR 4, but with only one other link will be much more powerful than a link from a PR 6 page with 40 links out.
4. To ‘Follow’ or ‘Not to Follow’
   That is the question… A ‘follow’ link is more powerful than a ‘no follow’ link. ‘No Follow’ was originally created as a backlash against spam commenting on blogs (which still goes on, unfortunately). That isn’t to say that ‘no follow’ links are useless, they do have their place, and I think show that your link building activities are ‘natural’.

Where do you find ‘good’ links?

I think one of the best places to start for link building is your competitors backlink profile. Check Yahoo Site Explorer, and drill down the list of links. There must be some places amongst the list that you can approach for links.

You could also start to ‘think outside the box’ at this point and think of similar industries to your own where you could get links from – remember relevancy is important.

Another place to look for links is from your suppliers, do they have a website? If so, could you ask them for a link?

What keyword do I need in my link?

This question has a simple answer… ‘The Keyword you are optimising for, of course?’ But I would elaborate a bit further here, don’t link everything back to the homepage, make sure you link to your internal pages where possible as well. This will strengthen your domain and help support your website.

I would also add that if you only optimise for one keyword, then it would be a good idea to create a few keyword combinations with that one keyword in and link build using variety. This is because a large amount of keywords with the same anchor (link) text going to the same site will trigger ‘alarm bells‘ at Google HQ, so avoid this by maintaining a healthy amount of variety in your link building activities.

So there you are, next time ’someone who knows about SEO’ tells you that ‘you don’t have enough links’ tell them: ‘it’s quality over quantity’. And remember, one quality link can be worth a lot more than a hundred ‘bad’ (useless) links.

Script:

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we are going to take a quick look at link building and in particular what to look out for when asked to pay for links on other webmasters sites.

Firstly tho, a bit of news. You might have seen the count down on Google when you clicked ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, well after all the talk about it counting down to a new Google release or something exciting within the industry, it turned out to be a bit of a gimmick.

- video -

Very festive!

When thinking about buying links, it is important that you are very careful. Google can easily identify paid links, potentially leading to negative effects towards your SEO campaign.

So a few things to look out for when buying links are as follows:

Firstly, domain authority. Page Rank (PR) is a good way of seeing what sort of authority the domain has in the eyes of Google, it may also be worth looking at domain age and site performance.

Secondly, related content. When link building it is important that the sites content reflects your businesses keywords and SEO campaign, this will look more natural to Google.

Third, outbound links. If the site you are considering is littered with links already and covered in advertisements, it is probable that Google is already aware of this and it will have potentially lost some authority.

Fourth, quality content. Content is king, Good quality content is vital, so take some time to read through the text and make sure it isn’t full of spammy text and internal links.

Fifth, index depth. Small sites can only hold so much information, so a site with a larger search index can hold more related content, which can help to build the authority of a domain and increase the value of a link from this site.

I hope this mini list has been of some help, remember that when building backward links you should always consider quality over quantity.

Thanks for watching, please leave any questions or comments on the youtube channel or supporting blog post.

Every SEO knows the importance of links. Links are the ‘currancy’ of the web. External links are great to get your site found, spidered and indexed by the Search Engines, but can be difficult to obtain, manage and control. So, your site should have two types of links, some pointing to it ie external and some pointing to other pages on your site ie internal links. The best thing about internal links is that you have control over them, you get to decide the anchor text, you get to decide the placement of them and you get to decide how many you’re going to have on a page, or pointing to a page.

Internal links don’t cost anything. They can be targeted, from within relevant text, to relevant pages, making them stronger and more valid. You can increase the PageRank of a page with internal links. You homepage usually has the highest PageRank of your site, so create an internal link from your homepage to the page that you want to pass the PageRank on to (ie a page where you’re optimising a competitive keyword that doesn’t fit on the homepage). Use descriptive anchor text. Use the keywords that the linked-to page is about, this will help the search engines and your users to know what the link goes to. You can use this technique to help your internal pages attain higher rankings

You should have several different types of internal links on your site.

1. Navigation Links – Always ensure that if you use JavaScript or image based navigation that you provide a html version as well to help the search engines spider your site effectively.
2. Footer Navigation – this is different to the main navigation, and should always be written in a list format. Use your most competitive keywords as the anchor text.
3. Inline Text Links – These are some of the most important links on the page. Why? Because you can surround them with relevant text to increase their ‘worth’ to the search engines. You can also use them to direct users around your site, and hopefully eventually towards a conversion.
4. Sitemap links – by providing a sitemap you are giving the search engines a valuable list or ‘contents page’ of all the page’s within your website. This is useful for both the search engines and your visitors, especially if you have a large site with a lot of pages to visit.

You should use internal linking as part of your SEO campaign. You may well find that by creating a few targeted inline text links that your site starts to climb the listings. Obviously this isn’t the only SEO technique that will make a difference to your campaign, but when integrated with well written copy, good site architecture, and of course a great external linking strategy, you will find your listings are higher, your pages stronger and your visitor numbers increase.

‘Link Baiting’ is yet another buzzword that seems to have become a popular phrase in SEO/social media marketing.  It’s strange, when the term is mentioned I often draw an analogy with my childhood days when we used to go fishing down the local canal.
Friends and myself would haul our fishing gear (rods and baskets) for miles, along the canal bank, to find the best ‘patch’ to set up for the day. We would intuitively know where the best patch was, either by word of mouth from fellow anglers or we would look for an area of the canal that was potentially teeming with fish. I say potentially because as we well know with fishing (if you are an angler) a lot of things happen under the water, so you learn to trust your instinct for where the fish are. This might be a small ripple or other indications that conditions appear to be right. These conditions would depend on how clean the water is, the depth of the water, safety in numbers, where the fish would gather, what kind of cover the fish have and where the location poses no threat.

Preparation and checks would be next on the list.  A good angler would then check his equipment; rod, reel, line, float, weights, hook, bait and depending on the size of the fish, a landing net.  Next, the preparation of the water, to attract the fish, this would entail using a catapult to launch balls of fish bait to the selected target area. The next thing to prepare would be the type of hook you use (size) and also the strength (breaking strength) of the fishing line. For example it would be no good trying to catch a large fish with a small hook and a line to weak to hold it and the same principle would take affect for a small fish but in reverse.  When all preparations are in place the game or sport begins.

In many ways (SEO) link baiting is similar to this analogy where in-bound links are encouraged by preparation and hard work and maybe a little luck to entice the catch.  The next question should be what bait (bait linking) are at our disposal as a resource to lure in-bound links to a customers site. The following list could be used as a guide:

• Current news baiting - Continuous, up to date news on breaking topics with expert commentary on the topic, products and service.
• Controversial baiting - You can also say something controversial to generate discussion – introducing  debate into a topic that will  encourage  reasoned response. Check your facts and make sure you know what you are talking about or you’re going to get some serious reputation management issues to deal with.
• Resource baiting – Build authority by resources that are available to all, social media sites, directories, blog sites and create your own blogs or RSS feed. There are plenty of ways that can establish that you are an expert in your particular interest or have a knowledge that will help others to promote there product or service. And, in the process attract a whole bunch of links at the same time.
• Humor baiting- Write something funny about your industry or the people in it. Everybody needs a good laugh now and then, it alleviates stress and helps bring approachability. A little self-deprecation is great to show people you don’t really take yourself too seriously. Create a site that is purely for fun and allow the links to flow in
• Ego baiting. Create a site that allows other bloggers with a voice to express their ideas by offering them significant exposure.

To summarize Link bait - Link baiting simply put, is content that is interesting, useful, funny or otherwise so outstanding that it becomes alluring to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. It’s a good way of improving your site’s inbound links and therefore it’s value in the eyes of search engines.