Tag Archives: strategy
Anatomy of Inbound Link Building
Link building is one of the most important and most effective methods in SEO. Employing a solid link building strategy is one of the best ways to increase organic traffic and boost your search engine rankings as well. In this article I will go into the anatomy of the link building process so you can gain a better understanding of how inbound links work and how to tweak your strategy for maximum results.
Dofollow vs Nofollow
There are a couple distinct differences in inbound links. There are dofollow and nofollow links. Both feature advantages and disadvantages. Dofollow means that any link juice will be passed on from the site through the link to your site. A nofollow link is the exact opposite. Traffic and visitors can get to your site, but search engine spiders will not follow the link and your site will not receive any “link juice.”
It is important to know the difference when you are building inbound links to your website. You will be putting in the time and effort, so be sure that you are being rewarded for your work. One good and fast way to check is by adding the SEO for Firefox extension. This handy tool will help you decipher if links on a particular page are dofollow are nofollow.
Anchor text
Another important factor in your link building strategy is using targeted anchor text in your inbound links. Each page on your website is a doorway page and an individual opportunity for new visitors to find your site. A good link building method that produces powerful results is using your target keywords for the page you are building links for in the anchor text of the link. For example, instead of having your link say yourcompany.com or click here, you could have your keyword hyperlinked.
Link diversity
Link diversity is another important aspect. Link diversity helps your link building strategy look more natural to the search engines. This means finding multiple different ways to build inbound links to your website. Find a good mixture of industry and authority sites to link to you and use a combination of 2-3 of your targeted keywords for that page. Mix some nofollow links in as well.
Continuity
Think of link building as an ongoing campaign with no end date. By now your competitors are seeing value in SEO, so you should never stop building inbound links to your website. It takes a lot of links to rank well for your desired keywords and it will take continuous improvement to keep your rankings.
Anatomy of Inbound Link Building
Link building is one of the most important and most effective methods in SEO. Employing a solid link building strategy is one of the best ways to increase organic traffic and boost your search engine rankings as well. In this article I will go into the anatomy of the link building process so you can gain a better understanding of how inbound links work and how to tweak your strategy for maximum results.
Dofollow vs Nofollow
There are a couple distinct differences in inbound links. There are dofollow and nofollow links. Both feature advantages and disadvantages. Dofollow means that any link juice will be passed on from the site through the link to your site. A nofollow link is the exact opposite. Traffic and visitors can get to your site, but search engine spiders will not follow the link and your site will not receive any “link juice.”
It is important to know the difference when you are building inbound links to your website. You will be putting in the time and effort, so be sure that you are being rewarded for your work. One good and fast way to check is by adding the SEO for Firefox extension. This handy tool will help you decipher if links on a particular page are dofollow are nofollow.
Anchor text
Another important factor in your link building strategy is using targeted anchor text in your inbound links. Each page on your website is a doorway page and an individual opportunity for new visitors to find your site. A good link building method that produces powerful results is using your target keywords for the page you are building links for in the anchor text of the link. For example, instead of having your link say yourcompany.com or click here, you could have your keyword hyperlinked.
Link diversity
Link diversity is another important aspect. Link diversity helps your link building strategy look more natural to the search engines. This means finding multiple different ways to build inbound links to your website. Find a good mixture of industry and authority sites to link to you and use a combination of 2-3 of your targeted keywords for that page. Mix some nofollow links in as well.
Continuity
Think of link building as an ongoing campaign with no end date. By now your competitors are seeing value in SEO, so you should never stop building inbound links to your website. It takes a lot of links to rank well for your desired keywords and it will take continuous improvement to keep your rankings.
Hotel-Owned Website Receive Limited Exposure on Major Search Engines
Before hotel proprietary Websites can begin to significantly make an impact on reducing the slide in market share of online room sales from third party travel sites they must identify and understand e-consumer search behavior. Windham and Orton (2000) found that 80 percent of respondents or Internet users in their study expected to turn to the Internet more often than current practice for making online purchases. More importantly, sixty-five percent regularly visited a search engine to begin their Internet search activities with travel purchases among the tenth most popular product purchased online. However, there has been mixed messages as to how e-consumers and e-businesses can maximize their efforts and expand their capture rate in the online market respectively. Greenspan (2003a) found that 56% of Internet users give up their search before going past the second page of search engine results. Moreover, over a quarter will move onto another search engine site before refining their keywords. Even with the potential of creating a competitive advantage through the development of proprietary brand Website, hotel companies have missed opportunities to generate traffic on their branded Websites by not considering a strategy to improve their Website visibility in search engines (CyberAtlas, 2001b).
To further examine this concept this author conducted an exploration of finding proprietary lodging brand Websites through search engines using intuitive keywords. After identifying the top seven search engines being used by e-eonsumers in 2003, this researcher ran a search using keywords to identify how e-consumers can easily locate hotels for booking rooms online. The seven most popular search engines used today in order of their popularity are Google, AlltheWeb, Teoma, Yahoo, Alta-Vista, MSN, and Lycos (CybcrAtlas, 2001a).
For each search engine, a common keyword was used to identify the results of hotel proprietary Websites returned from the search. Four keywords were used and included “hotel,” “hotels,” “lodging” and “travel.” When using “hotel” as the keyword Yahoo returned the most proprietary lodging Websites in the first two pages with 15 out of 40 links. All the Web and MSN returned only four and six proprietary lodging Website links respectively within the first two pages. Similar results occurred when using the keyword “hotels.” Surprisingly, when the keyword used was “lodging” only Teoma (12) and MSN (6) returned any links to proprietary Websites. The results were even more discouraging for proprietary lodging Websites when using the keyword “travel” which resulted in no hotel-owned Websites found in the search results within the first two pages. It seems clear that one pan of the Internet strategy that lodging brands need to address to overcome the lack of market share in online room bookings is to get more exposure with the popular search engines when using intuitive keywords.
When searching under the keyword “travel,” Expedia and Travelocity came up within the first two non-sponsored listings in each of the seven most popular search engines. Given the current state of affairs, e-consumers in search of hotel rooms on the Internet may very well find that using third party travel agents represents the most efficient search strategy in terms of time and cost. Hotel-owned Websites must begin developing a better strategy to position their Websites on Internet search engines to drive customers to their Websites. Conventional wisdom seems to contend that a large section of the e-commercial marketplace gravitates toward the sites that listed in their searches and ultimately purchase rooms online based on price alone (Starkov, 2002).