The number of inbound links to pages on a site from other websites is one signal of the importance of your site relative to your competitors. But remember, quality links from sites with a good reputation and lots of visitors are more important than lots of poor quality links from untrusted, new or irrelevant sites.
Google now frowns upon artificial link building; therefore we need to earn link backs from quality websites. Link earning can be very rewarding as not only will it have SEO benefits, it will also help drive relevant traffic to a site.
There are many different ways to earn a link, below are some methodologies used to attract a valuable natural link:
- Useful tools that the site user may find valuable and share with their peers
- “How To” guides are a good resource and often get bookmarked and sent around
- Info graphics are a new way of displaying information via creative images, these are very popular, easy to digest and easy to link to.
- Video distribution; if you have a new product or service and what to talk about it, show it off or demo it then creating a video and sending out will help attract and engage users.
- Everyone likes industry news; by delivering news on a regular basis a site can build a loyal following and trust. Readers will also send around news articles to their peers via links.
- Social media – although links from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn may not carry any direct SEO value, they are known to contribute towards building a site’s trust. Also, your users may be on social platforms, so delivering your video, news, tools to them via this channel will attract them to the site.
The focus of any link acquiring campaign should be on acquiring quality and relevant links to the most relevant section of the website.
When instigating a link acquiring campaign we need to ensure the below criteria are adhered to:
Domain Diversity
A natural back linking profile is very important, by having many links from one domain will raise a flag with search engines. Back links should be from numerous sites and different pages within sites not just the home page.
Quality of backlinks
In order for a link to hold any value and pass that value to other sites it must be of good quality itself. Links from low quality sites and blogs hold little or no value; good links come from sites with quality content, regularly updated sites and from relevant parts of the website.
Deep Links
Links back to deeper pages of a website help search engine spiders find and crawl these deeper pages. Google gives more authority to links that take a user to highly relevant content, hence it is not always a good idea to point links to the home page. Deep links also increase conversion, as the user is directed to a highly relevant page that has some sort of conversion point.
Anchor text
Keyword anchor links used to be a good way to make a website rank for keywords; this practise has somewhat reduced over the past 2 or 3 years but if executed correctly this can still be beneficial from an SEO perspective.
To help the sites rank for product and service related terms they need anchor text containing keywords. But, we also want to maintain the links pointing with images and brand terms – this will create a good mix of terms and keep the anchor text profile natural.
