Two of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo)
place a large importance on one way links to determine
rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the
more votes you have, the higher you will rank.
In this article I will be sharing with you some important
info on link building and some strategies to help your one
way link building.
Before we get started, it's important to understand the
fundamentals...
Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of
navigating from one webpage to another. An 'internal link'
is a link within the same website. An 'external link' takes
you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another
website. The term 'backlink' means when another website
links to yours.
There are 4 different types of links:
* URL Link - This is simply a website url that is a link.
* Text Links (aka static links) - This is the most common
type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is
a link)
* Image Links - An image link is simply an image that you
click on to navigate to another webpage.
* Dynamic Links - These types of links are in another
programming language called Javascript and while they also
take you from one webpage to another, they have 'extra
codes' to perform special functions.
(these types of links can appear in many different forms)
It is important to be able to recognize these types of
links, even if you are not familiar with web design and
programming. You don't have to memorize the codes, just
learn to identify each type of link.
Links provide navigation for human visitors and for
'spiders' (aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a
spider is a computer program that goes to websites and
gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit
and 'index' your website. This means that they gather
information about your site in order to list it in their
search results.
When the search engine spiders index your website, they
follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It's
important to know that search engines cannot follow
'dynamic links' and do not follow html links that have a
special code in them that says 'no follow'.
The place where 'no follow' is commonly found is in the
"meta tags" section of the website. Simply put, meta tags
are information that is for the spiders only and is not
seen by human visitors. You can see the code for any
website in your browser by choosing 'view source'. (From
Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From
Firefox choose View » Page Source)
If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another
website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the
link will not have any value from a search engine
optimization perspective.
What types of links should you get?
There are 2 types of links that you can get:
* One-way links - A one-way link is when another website
links to you and you don't link back to them.
* Reciprocal links - A reciprocal link is when a website
links to you and you link back to them.
One-way links are more valuable in the eyes of the search
engines. However, each link has its own individual value
based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and
around the link, how much authority the website that links
to you has, etc.
Also, it's important to know that you can get links that
have 'no value' in the eyes of the search engines, but they
bring you hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors...
Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the
better. However, building links takes time and energy and
if you focus on getting 'high-quality links', you will get
a bigger return on your investment. 50 high quality links
can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization
perspective than 1000 'low quality links'.
What's a high quality link? - Links that brings you Page
Reputation (which shows the search engines that other
related websites consider you to be important), and links
that give you PageRank. Sometimes both at once, sometimes
not...
To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain
links for targeted keywords. For this reason it's necessary
to start with Keyword Research.
If your website is about "bird watching", the first step is
to 'do keyword research' and find out which keyword you
should aim for. While you could just start getting text
links for the keyword phrase "bird watching", if no one is
searching for that - you won't get any visitors. There's no
sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no
one is looking for.
Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you
might want to pick a "lower hanging fruit".
Here is a great free keywords tool. (The numbers you see
are searches/day.)
Another important part is making sure your page is
optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are
focussed on building one way links to your site but the
links have anchor text which doesn't even appear on your
page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely
assuming that you have some competition for your targeted
keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn't
matter).
In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much
better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or
maybe you are building one way links to your site but they
are just url links and not anchor-text links. Another site
that has less links than you but better quality
(anchor-text) will be likely to rank higher.
Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have
anchor text which includes the primary and secondary
keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses
Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that
they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This
is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word
with their keywords. Their algorithm looks at all the words
on your page and how they relate to each other.
So, there's no sense in building one way links if your
content is not worthwhile. You want to optimize your pages
for your visitors first. Then, you can go through and
"sprinkle" your keywords. Then, go out and get one way
links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords,
ideally getting most of these links from websites that are
related to yours.
Yes, Google also looks at the relationship between your
website's content and the websites that links to you's
content. Fewer links to your business site from other
business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more
links coming to you from a site about video games..
Don't make these link building mistakes:
* Don't spend all your time getting one way links from
sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page
Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites
with no PR.
* Be careful about buying links or you can get banned.
Especially be careful about Site Wide links. If your
website only has a few backlinks one day and the next day
you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.
* Don't spend all your time building one way links that are
url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.
* Make sure the links you get are actually worth something,
don't get "No-Follow" links.
Happy Link Building!
----------------------------------------------------
Jason Storm is an SEO Expert who consults for
small-business owners who want to increase their search
engine rankings by using content optimization and link
building strategies. Visit his site
http://Affordable-SeoServices.com & blog
http://OneWayLinkBuilding.org/info/ for more info &
articles.
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