Link Building | SEO Tuesday
Welcome to Week 3 of SEO Tuesday
Did you miss last weeks post? Check it out, Keywords, Domain Name and Site Structure | SEO Tuesday
Link Building
One of the major factors in Google’s Page Rank algorithm is link building. The idea is that if you are popular people will link to your site. Pretty simple, huh? But, all links are not equal and it would be smart to try and get some links from what Google calls authority sites.
Let’s say you have a friend who is a online writer for the New York Times. He is writing about local bloggers and would like to do a piece on your blog. We can agree that the NY Times website is an authority and as of right now they have a Google Page Rank of 9. Getting a link from this site tells Google you are a real person and have an almost instant trust. These links are obviously better that a link from your friend who just started their blog too.
Inbound Links
Inbound links, once again are the most important! Another important aspect of your inbound links is relevance. A news site will have all sorts of content and just their authority will be nice, but imagine a website with a great page rank and has content that is relevant to yours. Now the link from that site is worth more, resulting in better SERP’s.
Commenting on blogs is a great way to get relevant traffic to your site. Also, if that blog is a dofollow blog you will get backlinks after a certain amount of comments. There are too many ways to try and get backlinks so I will not go through them all. I feel that you should be getting most of your backlinks through these easy ways;
- Commenting on blogs
- Submitting your posts to social media sites
- Organically, because you have great content
Internal Links
Internal links allow you to help assist Google with what your keywords should be using anchor text. Any chance you get to send an internal, relevant link to one of your posts, you should do it. (HINT: check out my links above)
Let’s say I have a post about Costa Rica. And I am writing a post about the weather in Costa Rica. I should try to find a way to link back to my first post from the second. Google will recognize the relevance in the two posts and give that anchor text a little more weight.
We are training Google. Training Google will take time, but it can be accomplished.
External Links
External links are where you need to be pay attention. In Google’s eyes when you send out a link to a website, you are telling Google that you trust that site. Trusting a site that is penalized by Google, may get your page penalized and it’s not worth it.
Always check out the site before giving a link. To check and make sure a site is not penalized by Google, you can just go to google.com and type in “site:domain.com” and see if there are any links. Another way to tell Google that you do not trust the site is to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to your external links.
Related Posts
- Links rel="nofollow" for SEO
- Link Building | SEO Tuesday
- Costa Rica SEO | A good of example of something that is much easier said...than done!
- Intro to SEO Tuesday
- Scheduling your Blog Posts
Hmm… apart from doing blogging for quite some time. I'm still not clear on what's the “anchor text” thing all about. :(
Any enlightenment on that? :)
Anchor text is the linked text. For instance, in your comment “Daniel Richard” is the anchor text. It's important to link to places using descriptive phrases (internally and externally) as it provides a good hint to your readers where the link will take them. That's why Google values it heavily, because it's useful for readers. Considering it as tagging a link. I always tell people to link outwards with good phrases rather than just the site name as it'll encourage others to do the same to you (which is good, Jim would rather rank for “awesome SEO tips” than “Jim Gaudet”, since the first drives more traffic and is more relevant to content).
Hey Daniel, Adam says it well. I think Matt Cutts gave an example one time about searching Google for “click here” and having Adobe Acrobat Reader as number one. This was to show the importance of the anchor text in the links. Most people would write To get AAR click here linking click here to adobe.com.
This has changed a bit since then and you really do not want just one phase as all of your backlinks. But switching it up is good, and sending to pages optimized for that keyword
Thanks Adam! I have been getting some more weird results from our Google images search testing. I am going to send something to you this week or next..
There are some nice tools that you can spot for similar sites and see their link streem, I use SimilarSites.
http://www.similarsites.com
There are some nice tools that you can spot for similar sites and see their link streem, I use SimilarSites.
http://www.similarsites.com