Beginners Guide to Link-building for SEO (Part 4 of 5)
The web is a network of interrelationships where 'links' play a key role in creating those relationships. A link is classified as almost anything that you can click-on that sends you to a new page or address on the internet. It can be an image or text and can be styled in a wide variety of ways.
Links create this interaction of information, whereby pages of content are connected. This is where the importance of links stems from, as a link to another page is a sign of it being credit worthy in your website's online neighbourhood.
So why is Link Building Important for SEO?
Link-building for SEO reasons is all about raising the importance of your website in the eyes search engines. But it also has other benefits. Links from other sites can be exposure for your site's services and products, they can provide extra visitors and as more websites know about you they too are more likely to link to you...returns on link-building is typically a cumulative thing.
Your Website Link Profile and Integrated SEO
When a website has links, we call this the link profile. Analysing your website and your competitors link profile is a very important part of SEO, as this essentially tells you what it takes to rank in your market. Like all market's, some are more competitive than others, and so too are they different regarding what is typical link-building activity. If you can get a good understanding of what draws good quality links to your competitors website's and apply this similar logic to your own (bettering it of course), then you are on the right track to building a successfully optimised website.
Competitor analysis is very important when we look at keyword research/analysis and the perfect links for SEO. No doubt this is starting to create quite a list of tasks as part of your SEO activities but if you learn anything from this series make sure it's that your SEO activities are indeed integrated. This does not mean using your chosen keywords exclusively, but rather, creating a sense of meaning using a range of keywords across the discussed ranking factors.
Search engines use these ranking factors to mathematically calculate the relevance and relative importance of your website via search engine algorithms. These algorithms have become increasingly sophisticated it is a very good idea to read around the topic as much as possible before embarking on developing your link profile as you could waste your time building link pages for instances thinking that you could rank highly via this method in a competitive industry.
To get links, answer: why would a site link to yours?
Ultimately, if you can confidently answer the question, 'why would another site link to yours?', then you are in a great position to start link-building. This questions usually requires that your site (or at least a part of your site) is:
- Helpful information and advice
- Funny / quirky
- Good value / special offers
- Controversial / challenging
- Grateful for something / donations
Link-out for link-building
Naturalness in link-building is a very important factor. Unnatural link-building activity can be when there is just one page on the site where there is outbound links pointing to other websites. Instead, of having all the outbound links skewed to one page on the site, it might be more natural to offer good quality resources spread across the site. There are however pro's and con's of such activity:
Pro's of Linking-out: Linking to another other websites might draw the attention of other webmasters who might be grateful for those links, of which might create dialogue between you and them, or they may of course reciprocate with a link back to your site*. Your website builds a reputation as a source of great content and recommendations so people keep on returning. There is research that suggest that people trust websites more that link-out too.
Con's of Linking-out: You lose a visitor that might have stayed on your site. You 'lose' link-equity from your page/site to another page/site (this is the value that the link passes that could have stayed on the site).
Ultimately, this is something that you must decide, but as a general rule, I think it is more healthy for a site and more productive in the long-term to link out - both for SEO and marketing reasons.
The Links Page is not Best Practice
Link pages are those pages that have a load of links pointing out to other websites. So many link-builders simply approach other webmasters for reciprocal links. However this is not best practice link-building for many reasons, but why is this?
- The content on the page is typically unrelated and very light on the ground (more related content is preferred).
- You are sharing the page with lots of other (often) unrelated links.
- The link-equity that is passed from that page / site is shared with lots of other links.
- A links page can be easily identified by search engines and as a result can have their weight diminished.
Link-out for link-building
Naturalness in link-building is a very important factor. Unnatural link-building activity can be when there is just one page on the site where there is outbound links pointing to other websites. Instead, of having all the outbound links skewed to one page on the site, it might be more natural to offer good quality resources spread across the site. There are however pro's and con's of such activity:
Pro's of Linking-out: Linking to another other websites might draw the attention of other webmasters who might be grateful for those links, of which might create dialogue between you and them, or they may of course reciprocate with a link back to your site*. Your website builds a reputation as a source of great content and recommendations so people keep on returning. There is research that suggest that people trust websites more that link-out too.
Con's of Linking-out: You lose a visitor that might have stayed on your site. You 'lose' link-equity from your page/site to another page/site (this is the value that the link passes that could have stayed on the site).
Ultimately, this is something that you must decide, but as a general rule, I think it is more healthy for a site and more productive in the long-term to link out - both for SEO and marketing reasons.
The Links Page is not Best Practice
Link pages are those pages that have a load of links pointing out to other websites. So many link-builders simply approach other webmasters for reciprocal links. However this is not best practice link-building for many reasons, but why is this?
A links page very rarely meets the perfect link for SEO criteria that I would advise, if you do intend to use it as part of your site's marketing activities, ensure that it's built for users as much as search engines: does it provide genuine value to your users?
*reciprocal links are not spam, but they may well be devalued if they are straight link-swaps between 2 link pages...another reason why a link page is poor practice as they are often for this purpose.
Posted By: Ben
01 March 2009