Building links and creating quality content go hand in hand, and you need both for a successful website. Without links, you will not be able to rank highly in the SERPs. However, without exceptional content, you will not get return visitors or you will have low conversion rates and low profits.
Here are some actionable steps you can take immediately to optimize your link building campaign:
• Using the right landing pages for link building
• Using varied link anchor texts
• Diversifying your incoming link sites
• Maintaining a steady link velocity
Using the Right Landing Pages for Link Building
Even if you are able to generate good incoming traffic to your web pages, it will not mean much if you are not converting your visitors into sales, registrations, subscriptions, etc. The most important aspect of high conversion rates is the landing page.
As you are building links to your site, you need to create proper landing pages for your targeted keywords. The page should be designed to hook the reader with eye-catching text and graphics. The layout should not be too “busy” that it confuses or frustrates the visitor. In particular, do not try to cram too much small text into the page.
Web surfers like pages that can be quickly digested with short paragraphs and plenty of “white space.” Create the landing page so that the eye of the visitor is quickly led to your call to action. Place more detailed information on pages linked to the landing page.
The call to action is an important part of the landing page. One big mistake that web designers make is forcing the visitor to browse through many pages before reaching the closing pitch that asks for a sale, registration, share or other action.
Using Varied Link Anchor Texts
The link anchor texts play an important role in SEO and your search engine rankings for targeted search terms.. Many web marketers use the same keywords or key phrases repeatedly thinking that repetition will improve rankings.
However, you do not want the search engine ranking algorithms to sense that your links are related or forced. For this reason, you should vary the anchor text as much as possible, not just because of that, but also to add more relevance authority to your pages. Of course, you want to use related keywords each time, but the links should appear independent.
Diversify Your Link Source Sites
In order to make your links look as natural as possible, they should come from as many different types of websites as possible. For example, solicit links from blogs, directories, social media, communities and specialized sites. By diversifying the sources of your links, you make your link profile appear as “natural” as possible rather than looking like the result of a marketing campaign.
One way to encourage links is to place sharing and rating buttons on your web pages and most importantly a simple link to us page, it is amazing how many great websites are missing that. There are amazing plugins that can help you with that, like the Copylink WordPress plugin. A Facebook “Like” button, for example, makes it easy for visitors to share your pages on their Facebook newsfeed. If others on Facebook also like the page, they can share it again on their own profile.
You can also place rating and bookmarking buttons on your web pages. For example, the new Google+ button allows you to give a thumbs-up to any page. The Facebook, Google+ and Twitter buttons are important also because they are used in search result social annotations.
Since Google’s SERPs are lead by personalization this is no more important than ever.
Creating great updated content is also essential in getting different sites to link to your pages. Add content that you know others will want to share on their pages. Of course, by being among the first to publish content, you will have better chances of having others link to your site.
Don’t forget though to solicit links from pages that have high ranking or authority. The pages and sites should have high relevance to the keyword topics.
Maintain Link Velocity and Stick with Your Plan
In order to wage a successful link building campaign, it is important to have a plan and to stick with it consistently. Most links go stale after a period of time and your page can lose ranking if fresh links are not appearing. If your pages receive links for a longer period of time that tells the search engines that the content there is evergreen and the rankings will stick or even improve if there is room.
The rate at which your pages and site gain and lose links is known as link velocity. The speed in which links lose “juice” will depend on the quality and the type of link. For example, links from blog sites are more likely to have a longer lasting positive impact than shares on social media. Because of the transient nature of social media, you will need a steady stream of shares to boost your rankings. While a link from a blog can get even more powerful with time.
In order to stay ahead of the competition, link building must be a continuous effort just like other types of marketing. Allot a certain amount of time per day or per week to maintaining your links.
Have a schedule for checking over each item related to your link building and to your site’s content. Remember that everyone is competing for the top spots in the SERPs, so you must be energetic and diligent to gain the top search engine rankings.
About the Author:
Zac Grace works as SEO Strategist and Link Building team leader at Dejan SEO Company. You can connect with Zac on Google+ and Twitter
Guest blogging is becoming increasingly popular for companies from many different industries but not just for SEO. It has many other benefits in addition to helping your page rank or back links.
For those who are unsure, guest blogging is where a writer (guest) posts an article on someone else’s site. You may be thinking to yourself, “Why would I want my hard work to be published as someone else’s?” This article will answer that burning question.
Firstly, many sites that allow guest blogging will display an ‘author’ section at the bottom of the post, or enable you to set up your own author page. It varies from site to site. Beneficially, a lot of the sites that do offer this will also allow you to have an author’s biography section, a profile picture and a few links for your Twitter account, blog and homepage for example. So in essence, you do receive the credit for your hard work.
As well as having links in your author’s section, a lot of sites will permit links in your post, and these can be to your homepage or any other page you choose. This will create links to your site and depending on the site’s PageRank, they could be high authority which is greatly beneficial to you and your site.
Writing for other blogs can also help to publicise not only you but your company and help establish brand awareness. Obviously this will depend on how popular the blog is, but if you are writing for them you should check that their blog is of a high ranking and experiences a lot of traffic. There is no point writing a post for them if no-one is going to see it.
Writer’s block is something many suffer from time to time, but having another blog to write for can overcome this to a certain extent. A lot of the time your guest blogging sites will have specific topics they would like you to cover, and having these guidelines can really help you focus on your writing.
In being signed up to a guest blogging site with a high traffic site, your blogs are likely to be receiving a large number of views. This will result in more people being driven to your site through your links and if your name and company are everywhere it is a sign that you are a good, well-established business. This in turn will sway users and bring in more traffic to your site.
Like with any SEO technique in existence, there are the positives and the negatives. Guest blogging is no exception; each guest blogging site will want an individual post. If you are a blogger then you will understand a good post can take a few hours, therefore it is crucial that you weigh up each site with the time it will take you to write the post. Sometimes you can end up worse off from taking on guest blogging but it is all down to distributing your time accordingly. If you do this correctly you will see the benefits from guest blogging come to life before your very eyes.
SEO companies know that one of the most tedious as well as valuable task next to content development is link building. Link building is an equal ranking factor with that of content development which every SEO consultant should perform or conduct properly in order to achieve the ranking that they so desire. There are several ways on building links like submission to article directories, directory sites, commenting and plainly gaining a link through social media and recommendations from other websites.
However, building links does not mean that you blindly add your site URL via these methods this is because some links may prove to be valueless and may help in increasing your rankings rather it might even contribute to the decline in your ranking. This is why before you are to start with your link building process it is advisable that you are to first know how your links are valued.
1. Site Authority –when you try to gain a link from another website it would be best that you gain such link from authority sites, although there are no direct indications which sites are authoritative the Google page rank may be a good implied indication of a sites authority thus the higher the Google page rank the more authority such web page has.
2. Trust Rank – when building your links it is also imperative that you determine the trust rank of the website you want to link from. Determining the trust rank basically involves the determination on who or which sites are linking to the website that you are going to link from. This process according to SEO experts is likened to determining the link neighbourhood of a specific website.
3. Relevance – according to the research conducted by SEO firms, links coming from websites that are related to your target websites would be given more weight or value by the search engine rather than those links that comes from unrelated source. Thus it would be better for an SEO Company or SEO consultant to research on the list of websites or directories that are related to his or her website and build links from that rather than wasting your time building links on unrelated websites.
As far as search engine optimisation is concerned and as far as many SEO companies believe and has observed, the two main factors that an SEO consultant should focus on and these are content and links. The former means the development of the text that would be posted on the target website and that such should be unique and well written for users to read and for the search engines to easily crawl and “understand”.
With regards to link building one popular practice is to comment on blogs with high PR ranking with the hope that your comment will be accepted and thus allowing you to get a backlink from such website. Indeed the use of quality content and backlinks are the major factors that would contribute to the success of such SEO campaign. With regards to back-linking one must choose wisely on to what website should be targeted for linking, and determine whether the link will last for a long term or not. It is important for SEO firms to incorporate the factor of longevity in terms of the existence of the link. However, the question is this, how does one determine whether the link would be existent for a long time or not? The following are some of the ways of determining the quality of the link:
1. The topics or the target domains should be consistent with the general thrust or theme of the website. This would mean that the target domains and the topics contained within their website should be closely related to the theme or business page that you are promoting. Mismatch in the theme with the sites being linked to would mean that your links would only have temporary effects and would later on diminish.
2. A long term link is also one that would be existing as long as the page or the website is existing. This means that when you link to a website make sure that your link will become a vital part of the website that the administrators of the website you are linking to will never delete such link.
3. The website you are getting your link from must be observed constantly on whether or not such website is also improving its rankings. This is because if the website you are linking to is constantly trending upward then such website can be regarded as authority and or significant as compared to a website that is on a constant decline which means that no improvement is being incorporated thus having a link from such site might only prove to be detrimental your link building campaign.
Many SEO firms know that the field of search engine optimisation has two facets one is on the internal structure of the website including its links and that of the external or the links or “vote” being casted in favor of the target website. Notice that linking is an integral part of the strategies being utilised across the field of search engine optimisation. The following are some of the different strategies that SEO consultants may use amidst the effects of Googles’ algorithm change.
1. Research – this strategy involves different processes whose goal is to find the best sites where the SEO company could submit to. There are several pages or websites that offers link submission and such sites are also of good page rank and good SERP position which are the two ingredients needed when scrutinising the site you are linking to.
2. Document your every move – when linking to different websites it is imperative that you know your every move thus documenting your move or in this case gathering of such blog URL or directory URL you have submitted to or gained link from should be listed down in order for you to analyse their effects or influences to your own sites’ page ranking.
3. Link to the internal pages of your site – of course if the linking would come from those not part of the website meaning the link being an external link such would be difficult to acquire. However, if you have several blogs which you can utilise then it is important to promote your website via those blogs, just make sure to link from the blogs to the internal pages of your target website. This way your target website will not only have the home page as the one being linked to thus gaining considerable link juices but also the other pages of the website which will then stand a chance in giving such pages some link “juices” that would be a criteria in gaining a page rank for the page.
Google recently had a major algorithm update and these updates were geared towards eradicating content farms from their search engine results page rankings. This came about after a lot of internet marketers have been complaining about the increase of such content farms where websites are getting away with it by being ranked high by Google.
As a backgrounder, people who utilises content farms are those who are building backlinks from such contents. The new algorithm aims at de-ranking such websites utilising content farms for their link building strategies. Some SEO companies and may have been affected by this algorithm change because of the fact that link building using such content farm sites would definitely hurt their rankings the following are some tips on how one can build links where such links would not hurt their campaign instead it would benefit such.
1. Link only to credible sites or sources – with the recent Google update, sites which scrape of contents and those that have duplicate contents does not provide any of those so called “link juice” as such sites are now considered to be a site of no reputation. Therefore having an online reputation is important for the search engine companies.
One way to gain link from reputable websites is by joining online groups such as Advocacy groups, Support Groups, Professional organisations, Trade and different Civic groups. These organisations may include you in their online roster of members which would therefore make your site gain a high quality link.
To increase probable linkability send a tweet announcement every time you join an organisation and ask your followers to retweet, this goes the same with tweeting on the different organisation announcements. Another way to increase links from being a member in a professional organisation is by utilising social media such as Facebook to display the organisations’ announcements among others.
2. Submit links to directories – this may be an old technique where SEO consultants would submit their sites’ links to a long list of directory sites. However, submitting to a long list of directories would ensure your site to being given a high ranking in Google. Search engines prefer to rank those that have high quality links rather than a thousand low quality links. One way of getting a high quality link would be submitting to DMOZ and Yahoo directories. These two directories already have several categories which could accommodate a single niche.
With the Algorithm change of Google it is believed to be the start of a more relevant and highly reputable search engine results page rankings.
The road to a good ranking in Google and other Search engines is considered to be a very rough road as one must tackle several stages in the development of the website. These three stages are Web Development stage, SEO/content development stage and the Link Building Stage.
The third stage is of course necessary in order to establish a websites’ reputation and it can only be possible by building links to a website, this is because of the fact that every site linking to your target website is considered to be a vote to that target website. It is therefore necessary to acquire links to your target website, however there are several aspects that SEO companies should understand about link building and these are the following:
1. The process of link building does not happen overnight, if you want to gain high quality links then you have to be patient in building your links. Be choosy on who will be linking to your website as it may also affect your ranking, remember linking to bad neighborhood may besmirched your online reputation.
2. Link building needs every SEO consultant’s attention. Many SEO companies consider link building as a process that could take the backseat in their campaign however it should be a process that is supposed to be up there with other basic SEO processes. This is because of the fact that it would take time before the site will gain or before the link building efforts are going to be realised.
3. Always document your link building efforts. Link building is a process where there are no known metrics and because it is focused on gaining links from various sources that may number even up to hundreds of thousands documenting each would give you the metrics that you need to put value on your link building effort. Further, this documentation would also give you the needed information on knowing which sites are giving you the boost in terms of your site’s reputation.
For SEO companies understanding these link building facts would greatly increase their link building plan for their future websites.
A keyword is a very essential part of an SEO company’s SEO campaign. This is due to the fact that it is through keywords that Search engine users are searching for the websites that they are searching for, it is therefore imperative that a website’s chosen keyword should rank high in a search engine results page ranking. The ultimate purpose of ranking high on the chosen keywords in the search engine’s SERP is to gain more traffic for possible conversion and revenue. Making a chosen keyword for a website to rank high in a search engine results page could be a very daunting task and many SEO companies find that sometimes their client website would rank best on the General Keyword terms but would rank poorly on specific search or keyword terms or vice versa. This type of problem could emanate from different sources or reasons but one of the most common reason on why this happens is the fact that there is a poor page to page linking as caused by indiscriminately linking one page to another. This process of indiscriminate linking will dilute the organisational theme of the website making it a lot more difficult for the chosen keywords to naturally rank in search engines.
To solve this problem top SEO experts are resorting to siloing. Siliong is a solution for problems arising from unfocused linking giving you the opportunity to achieve high search engine ranking for both the search specific and general keywords via themed vertical page linking. There are two type of Siloing, one is directory silo and the other the virtual silos. To start creating a directory silo you have to prepare a single directory where you will place like-content pages. The key here is to properly group contents which are closely related with each other and place them in a single directory. Categorising contents with other similar contents would increase efficiency in crawling the content pages.
For a virtual silo, the theme is developed through linking. The silo here is determined by the pages that the main silo links to, this can be achieved by creating a landing page or a main page and there are several pages that are linking to the said landing page or main page to support such landing page.
Following these two types of silo structures could help increase the crawling efficiency for search engine bots which would in turn help increase the visibility of your chosen keywords to the search engines.
Every new year there is always something to look forward to, basically because of the fact that the new year is yet again another time and opportunity for people to make something extraordinary. Future trends can be predicted as culled from the present trends, in the field of search engine optimisation and for SEO experts the trends during the last quarter of the year is one of the most important time to observe the trends in SEO. The last quarter is an important time due to the fact that whatever are the current trends during this time it would play a big influence on the trends that may be exhibited during the coming year. Predicting the next big thing is very important because of the fact that those who are able to implement the trends would have a fresh unsaturated market which has therefore a big potential for earning or if it is an SEO strategy the chances of implementing it successfully is high.
For the coming year 2011 and looking back on what has happened lately in 2010 experts are predicting that Social Media Marketing is going to be a very indispensable tool for search engine optimisation. For the year 2010 we have seen the growth in the number of social media network users. The effect of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and even blogs has not yet been fully studied however it is a known fact that using these three services can actually increase link popularity for a target website.
On other parts of SEO the year 2011 is also predicted to be the year where the long tail keywords will have much more importance, this is why the meta element will again play a major role by accommodating these long tail keywords, it is however a challenge for every SEO companyon how to solve problems on keyword stuffing, the goal for 2011 therefore is to be able to fit all the keywords or key phrases on to the target website without your site being flagged for keyword stuffing.
In the field of website design the “rel” attribute in the anchor tag of HTML is not widely utilised for the sole reason that webdesign-wise there is no direct effect to the website, in the point of view of an SEO company or an SEO consultant on the other hand there is a big significance in terms of page ranking among others. The rel attribute is useful for many SEO companies especially if they are utilising blog campaign for the promotion of their website. Many blog software nowadays automatically includes comment form where anyone could just comment on your articles or posts. Commenting is not prohibited instead it is encouraged especially if such comments would spark discussions within the community, however commenting could be deemed as a spam when the comments would only be for the sole purpose of gaining backlinks and not taking into consideration the relevance or the quality of the comment being posted. These spammy comments are what many bloggers or website owners are combating because of the fact that links to the website of the person who commented are created when comments are posted in effect this would cause the passing of your web page’s reputation on to the site that is linked to. There may not be a problem on linking with the different sites through comments however one must always take a careful look on where the site is linking to because it might ultimately have an adverse effect on your blog’s page ranking or your blog’s reputation in general.
In order to solve this problem many SEO firms and SEO experts are using the “rel” attribute with the attribute value of “nofollow”. In effect the nofollow attribute value would tell the search engine not to follow crawling on to the other website thus saving your websites’ reputation from linking to a spammy website.
