Link building so important often misunderstood

If you are new to SEO I hope this helps your understanding of why linking is so important to the SEO campaign, if you are an old hand to organic directory search optimisation if you feel so inclined add your thoughts to further help the newbie.

Many SEO people like to keep a shroud of smoke and mirrors around the subject, allot of search optimisation people can’t or wont tell people what they actually do to increase the rankings of the sites they are working on. Why? In our opinion two reasons; one they can’t say as it is either unethical or they do so little the client would feel hard done by with the amount of money they have just paid. Or they feel by not telling people than they keep their market to themselves this in fact does more hard than good. If someone does not understand they will often not spend on it in the first place. Also it is stupid thinking, many people know how to change the oil on their car but does not mean suddenly they will no longer use the garage, just because someone knows how it works does not mean they will suddenly do it themselves.

Now I have that gripe out of the way onto the reason for the post.

Linking can be thought of as one of the most important factors in the website optimisation plan, although there are around a hundred or so factors that ultimately effect the ranging of the page being optimised, linking is very high on the importance scale. A single web page can and should only be optimised for two keyword phrases or search keywords more than that and it will lose the effectiveness and confuse the search engine bot or spider as it were (I am talking on site optimisation).

Link building is part of the off site search optimisation strategy, with ethical link building we can optimise a page for a plethora of search phrases and keywords, although it does and should take some time. Let us look at the anatomy of the link.

<a href=”http://www.webrand.com.au” title=”Tactical Marketing”>Search Engine Optimisation</a>

In this example there are 3 parts to the link; the website address, the link title and the human readable linking word. We will leave key wording the domain and actual website page key wording for now and address that at a later stage.

First we have the actual address of the link, this can be as in the example just the domain name, or it could be a deep link, ‘a link which points to a particular page’. We then have the link title, using a link title is a good idea to broaden the scope or relevance of the link, I will explain more in a sec. Third we have the actual link text that we humans can read and the visiting search engine bots and spiders.

If we for instance just use our domain name as the linking text we are doing ourselves no favours, no1 you will rank for your domain name in most cases anyway and second in most cases not many people will be searching for your domain name. So what we are looking to do and this is of course after you have performed the all important keyword research, is use phrases targeted at your goods or services and secondary using phrases people are actually searching for.

Now back to the link title, by using a title tag we can also tell the visiting search engine we are relevant for another term in this case ‘tactical marketing’ so in essence we have created a two fold keyword phrase our main keyword phrase ‘Search Engine Optimisation‘ and our secondary phrase ‘Tactical Marketing‘

Now you understand why we must use descriptive words for our links on to the correct usage and why one way is important.

First the one way link, one way links are far more valuable the reciprocal links, this can be understood with an easy analogy. If you give me a beer and I give you a beer we are no better off, but if I just give you a beer then you are a lucky person.

Links in a nutshell are votes simple as that if we both vote for each other than it removes weight from the equation, but if I am just voting for you then I am saying you are doing a great job and here is my vote so as other people can see your great work.

Why SPAMMING is a waste of time

If you are running a blog; then you probably like me spend a bit of time clicking that bulk moderate comments to SPAM fun isn’t it. SPAMMING is apart from being a lowlife losers occupation, useless. No1 nearly all of us either mark the offending comment as SPAM or have a more advanced filters in place to stop it even getting that far (we will address advanced SPAM filtering in another post)

SPAMMING comments does you no good at all, most of us have ‘NO FOLLOW’ in place in comments anyway (although some search engines do not worry about the tag and index anyway). Apart from that nearly every search bot can see it is spam as easily as we do and such simply take any link weight straight out of it, rendering the SPAM comment totally useless.

One good link

One good link from one website is worth hundreds of low quality links.

Some links are worth more than others, for example in the domain extension world .gov and .edu are worth more than .com or .com.au a good link from a .gov or .edu domain simply is worth allot and could be considered the holy grail of links. An old website is also worth much more than a new website, it is in debate how much extra a high PR site is worth over a old domain name, we find ourselves though that age beats page rank, but high page rank beats new site. All in all if you can obtain links from high PR sites with an old domain name you really are in the holy grail of link weight.

Blogs are like a good wine

If you can pick up some good links from new blogs these can be worth a great deal over time, just because it has little PR or age now, like a good Shiraz it will get better over time. Become involved in your market and engage your market, seek friendships with bloggers and web masters one link from a blog can turn into a valuable and profitable resource. Just remember nothing is achieved overnight, as with a good red it takes time to mature be patient and be honest to your market and you too could be the next heavy weight boxer in the link stakes.

I am Patrick Ryall - CTO and National Brand manager for WEBRAND Creative Brand Agency - Engage your market and most of all

Have a B L O G G I N G good day!