For the next in my SEO speak series I thought I’d talk about link building and why it’s important
Link Building is an important part of the SEO process on any website, in fact it can be said that this element of your promotion to search engines is more than half of the work you should be doing. The process of link building is where links to your website are established from good quality authority sites. Links coming into your website are used by the search engines to work out the reputation of your website in order to rank the site
As a rule links to your site should be avoided from sites that don’t have any presence on Google.
There are a number of things that need to be considered when thinking about link building including:
Anchor text
The anchor text of a link is the words clicked on to activate the link – for example to words SEO above which link to our homepage. Make sure that the link building you undertake for your site uses keywords you want to prove your relevancy for. It’s normally not a good idea to use the URL of your website or the company name, as in the majority of cases you will rank well in the search engines for these terms anyway. Try using the keywords you have selected for your SEO campaign, with an even spread of anchor texts across all of these keywords.
Paid Links
Paid links are not a good thing, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines specifically mention paid links as something they watch out for, and there are ways of handling paid links so that there is no penalty associated with them.
The first of these methods is to make sure that any website you pay to link to you uses a “NOFOLLOW” element in the link. The second way is to make sure that the paid link goes to a page on your site which is removed from search engines using a robots file.
Google Japan recently received a penalty for buying links on blogs to promote their service to the Japanese market. The core Google Algorithm penalised the site and dramatically reduced the trust Google has in it’s Japanese site. If one of Google’s sites can be penalised for using paid links to promote itself so can yours!
“Natural” Linking
When carrying out link building for your website try and make the linking look as natural as possible. “Natural” looking link building involves a core number of links being created each month, that is not to high a number, 10,000 links a month could look unnatural to search engines, so it is best to go with a lower number and supplement this with article and press release submission. The above items about paid links and the anchor texts that are used to create links are also important in creating the more natural link profile as possible.
Articles and Press Releases
Articles and Press releases submitted to a series of sites designed to promote such content can also help with your link building. Most of the sites where articles and press releases can be submitted allow for links to be created from within the content of the posted item to a site of your choosing. In submitting articles and press releases that relate to your main keywords and creating links from these keywords to your website you will aid your link building and the overall reputation of your website.
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