Pages within a website and across the Internet are connected through links. You have links on your website to navigate from one page to the next. You also have links to other sites you think your readers will find interesting. And finally, other sites will link to yours, providing Internet users one more way to find you.
While all three of these are important and impact search engine rankings in some way, the last type has the largest by far…which coincidentally, is the hardest links to control.
Basically speaking, the search engines’ concept is as follows: if high-quality sites are linking to yours, then your site must be pretty important and therefore, will be more inclined to show it higher in their results…you in effect receive “link juice” from other sites that link to you.
But it’s not enough to just get a couple of links and then sit still. Search engines like Google look at link patterns to your site as they build over time, not just a one-time snapshot.
So, building the right links in a consistent fashion can payoff tremendously – that much is clear. But how do I go about building strong inbound links without getting myself in trouble? Getting on Google’s blacklist isn’t much fun and hard to recover from.
Continue reading for one of the ways you can build high-quality links to your site naturally and check back again in a week for part II of our quick little link building how-to.
Variety is the spice of life – and links too!
There are all sorts of link farming schemes out there you can buy into – which is probably the first reason you should run away. This practice is known as reciprocal linking – you exchange links with other sites who will turn around and link to you on a mass scale…Google and others are on to this!
The key to successful link building is to cultivate a good mix of links over time.
Having 100 links with the same anchor-text doesn’t look natural to anyone, including search engines. When links come naturally, some may use your business name while others may use some kind of descriptive phrase for the anchor-text…they vary.
If anchor-text is the same for all links pointing to your site, it will be signal to the search engines that your links are being generated artificially, not naturally.
And consider the pages people are linking to and try to mix that up too…don’t have them all going to your homepage. Try to drive links to specific product pages, your blog, your press room, your articles and more. This will help get them ranking as well.
Also, you will want to try and influence the title tag for incoming links if any have one. If you can, you will want variety in the link text and title for links pointing to your site…again, it’s about growing your links in a natural way, not simply slapping a bunch of homogenous links up there and walking away.
Variety in your links is perhaps the most critical component of successful link building. Don’t have them all coming from the same place to the same place and so on.
Check back with us next Monday for part II of our quick little link building guide and even learn how you can easily find out which sites are linking to you.
In the mean time, take the above steps to ensure what links you do acquire don’t get you in any trouble and give you the most bang for your buck.
