Tag Archives: rank
Link Building – How Important is It?
What is all the fuss about links to your website? Why such a push on link building services? What in the world is link building? In this article I will discuss what link building is, the importance of it and how to incorporate it into your Internet Marketing Plan.
Link building is the process of getting links to your website from other sites, especially high traffic, industry specific sites. Getting links to your web site used to be an easy task, just get as many incoming links to your site as possible, quality and nature or the links was unimportant. Then link relevance came along; search engines now take into account the quality and relevance of your site’s incoming links. This makes the process of link building a much more complicated program. With all of the other tasks that business owners have, link building may not be high on the priority list. It may be best to hire a professional Internet marketing firm to help.
Some concepts to know when embarking on a link building campaign:
Page Rank: is the value that the search engines give to a web page. It is usually on a scale of 1 to 10.
Link Popularity: is the number to links pointing to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines consider your site more important and rank it higher the more “incoming” links that your site has and puts weight on those sites as well.
Building link popularity helps to gain higher page rank for your web site. The higher the page rank, the higher your site will appear on the search engines with competitive keywords. The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN use link popularity to determine how important your site is in order to give it a rank in search results. The more incoming links a site has, the more important or valuable it must be.
In the process of link building, quality is more important than quantity. It is important to choose quality sites to link to yours. Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products. For example, if you sell insurance, a link from an insurance information site would benefit your business more than just a link on a general “catch all” link site.
Probably the most important benefit of having a high number of quality links to your site is the effect it has on the search engine rankings. Most of the major search engines use “link popularity” as a main factor in determining where your site should rank. If your site has a lot of high quality sites linking to it, the search engines will think it is a popular site and give it a high page rank. Building quality and relevant links has two advantages; you gain visitors from the linking site and you also boost your page rank with the search engines.
A complete link building program involves generating links to your site from a variety of sources. This includes directories, social networking sites, blogs, even writing articles and press releases. Directories are one of the most comprehensive ways to generate incoming links. They are designed to promote links and are sometimes fee-based. Social networks and blogs have become a great way to generate incoming links to your web site. It does take patients and skill, however, to utilize blogs and social networks to generate links; it may be best to leave this to a professional SEO company to do for you.
Besides social networks, blogs and directories, article sites are another way to create incoming links to your site. Article sites usually only allow links in the resource box of your articles, not in the text of the article itself. The links generated here are permanent links, unlike directories and blogs where links might be deleted. Article sites rarely delete articles. Article writing also makes you the “expert” on the subject you are writing about, making it more likely that people will want to visit your site. Article submission can be a tedious process, best left to the professional SEO company.
Link Exchange-How it affects page rank
We need to constantly keep innovating in the fast changing world of the internet. There are a lot of new innovations that come up to help in expanding the reach of the internet. Visibility is a very important feature. Here link building plays a very important role. A link is a used to connect to other sites. The host site will show the link to the relevant site and one can navigate to it easily by clicking on it. Now page rank is one of the most important criterias for popularity. When a person searches for information of Google or search engines, the top sites will have more chances of being visited. Hence page rank plays a very important role here.
Link Exchange
This is not a new concept. It is very popular because it has a direct bearing on the page rank of the site. Google looks into the linking strategy of the site before allotting a page rank. Hence it is very important to maintain a very good link record. It should have relevance, quality and ease of functionality. Link exchange directory sites will help a lot in assisting to find good links. There are many one way linking is preferred to reciprocal linking. Linking to a site which has a higher page rank than you is a very beneficial to the site. This can be done effectively by using a link exchange directory.
Linking effectively
A link can make or break a website. It is very easy to be pulled into a link farm. Hence it is very important to be vigilant while approving a link exchange request. There are many sites which offer attractive options while requesting for a link. These should be dealt with very carefully. Providing one way links to sites which are not relevant to yours does not affect page rank. Maintaining a good categorised link directory is very important. Reciprocal linking should only be done with sites which are relevant to your site. This is one of the cardinal rules that need to be followed. If not there is a high chance that your page rank will hit bottom.
What to avoid
Do not submit link requests to link farms and free for all link directories. It is good if we get our links from a link good reciprocal link exchange directory, this will endure credibility and good value.
What is link anchor text?
By anchor text, we are talking about the text of your link, some links have the web address as the text, but some links have actual words that are linked. The later ones, are the ones that you are after. We know that it is easiest to go out there and start building as many back links as you can and use the same text over and over, however this is not the preferred method of Google’s to rank you so, Mix It Up!
You can say that more powerful link anchor text than the site title would be a better choice, at least use of the company name points those pages out clearly for the site visitor. If the company name includes a targeted keyword, some added search engine benefit is included as well. In any case, the better link anchor text will assist in maintaining the overall site theme. Note that the footer anchor text places some extra keyword density on the page.
Another tip to vary anchor text is to point links to your internal web pages using different keywords and different anchor text. The goal is to get more links and to help your internal web pages to rank well. The search engines will considered that links are natural and pointing to your.
Google’s Webmaster Tools facilitate this optimization by letting website owners view the most common words in anchor text linking to their site. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. Google/Yahoo bombing is the practice of placing terms you want a given page to rank for in anchor text that links to that page.
An infamous, large-scale example of this same test involved the phrase “miserable failure.” Some enterprising bloggers got together a few years ago and decided to link lots of sites to the official biography page for President George W. Bush at the whitehouse.gov site. The goal, of course, was to make that page show up in the 1 position whenever unsuspecting (or in this case, many suspecting) searchers typed in that phrase. It worked.
Make sure all the pages within your web site link to each other. Create a site map that lists all the web pages. Use anchor text in the description of your link. When Google visits your site it can easily spider your whole site using the site map.It’s difficult to get good rankings from blog posts because they typically don’t contain backlinks. You can remedy this by linking the keywords (anchor text) in related posts to the page you want to get good rankings for.
Another practical measure is to vary the target webpage by linking a specific page to a given article. In other words, don not solely use your root domain as the target site. For instance use hyperlinked text from an Ezine article or other non-video directory to route readers to the specific video-containing post (e.g. at domain.com/video-about-article) that accompanies the text. Your readers will surely recognize the extra care given to your linking.