Developing a Link Building Strategy

Last week we outlined the need to create an effective link building strategy, here we aim to develop this a little further.

There are plenty of guides that suggest you create a link exchange with websites, particularly those with higher PageRank. More clever webmasters pursue links from related industries and also focus on ensuring that the Anchor Text in the incoming links is optimised.

Bad Anchor text linking:
Visit our website click here (in this example the anchor is on the phrase click here; this does nothing for you if you sell homes).

This will be better with good anchor text link:
Blogs Homes offer Homes for sale online (in this example the link is on the phrase "homes for sale" Google sees this as relevant and sees this as an endorsement from AN other that your website offers homes for sale).

Higher Importance Improves Ranking

Search engines rank, what they consider to be "important" websites, higher on their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The importance of your website is gauged using a number of algorithms key factors within the equation include;

• PageRank
  Using a scale of 0 -10 Google measures what it considers to be the importance of all web pages (You can download the Google Toolbar if you have not already done so). Each PR value between 1 and 10 is 6-times more important than its previous number. For example, PR5 is 6-times more important that PR4.
• Links from "Authoritative" Pages
  These are links that come from web pages recognised as having higher authority in a particular industry. These could be links from reputable industry sites or pages with a number of incoming "related-industry" links. Links from these authoritative sites add both, "importance" and "relevance" to your web pages.

Better Relevance Improves Ranking

Relevance is always measured in relation to a search phrase (query string); the more relevant that the search phrase to your website, the higher your website would rank. Factors that affect relevance are

• How well your on-page optimisation has been carried out
• The quality of anchor text on inbound links

Developing Your Link Building campaign

Your objective when developing a Link Building campaign should be to optimise for both Importance and Relevance through the development of a mixed-PR link building strategy.

• Inbound links using this strategy are gained from all kinds of web pages ranging from PR0 - PR6.
• Higher PR links (PR4 - PR6), help you gain importance for your web pages. Although these links are difficult to find and can take much longer to develop they do improve an important ranking consideration for your website.
• Lower PR links (PR0 - PR3), help you gain relevance for your website by maximising the Anchor Text value from inbound links. NB; higher PR links also add to your website's relevance, lower PR links are easier to find and therefore help set a good pace of your Link Building campaign.

Avoid "Bad Neighbourhoods"

Linking to "Bad Neighbourhoods" should be avoided at all costs. Bad Neighbourhoods are websites which are penalised by search engines, websites with spammy link pages, link-farm network pages or websites using dubious SEO techniques. Linking to these sites is likely to result in your website being penalised, ruining all your link building and promotional work.

Eskdale Solutions offer a range of link building solutions contact us for more information

Posted by Dan at 07/12/2010 20:39:00