Link Building Tips

Beginner Level

Inbound links to your site can help increase Google Page Rank and are a VERY important cornerstone to your SEO strategy. Simply put, the more websites that link to ou the higher your organic rank can be. However, these links should always reflect quality, not quantity.

There are two primary types of inbound links:

Reciprocal Links: Reciprocal links are simply links you are exchanging with other websites. Think of it as a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours philosophy. Just be careful not to get carried away. Once you begin, you will be getting tons of link exchange solicitations. Carefully choose link partners who have a good website whose content and audience are relevant to your own.

One-Way Links: One-way links are just as they sound, one website which links to your site without you having to post a link in exchange. These are often considered more “valuable”. The trick to one-way links is creating insightful content on your site that other sites will want to link to. You can also achieve these by linking from blog posts, press releases and even placing links on social media sites and in online directories.

So now you know what inbound links are here are a few tips to define your strategy:

Exchange links with sites that have a high page rank (PR):
PR refers to PageRank, a trademarked term from Google that assigns a numerical value (0-10) to determine a websites importance. This numerical value is determined by many factors, inbound links to the site, quality of the site from where the inbound links are being provided, keyword relevance, and actual visits to the site. A PR4 site has greater “value” than a PR1 site. So at the end of the day, the higher the PR of a site, the greater quality you will get from that inbound link! For example, over 100 inbound links from a PR1 site is equivalent to 1 inbound link from a PR4 site.

Creating Inbound Links:
When creating inbound links to your site, whether one-way or reciprocal, display a variety of titles, descriptions, and URL’s. Don’t use the same title and description for every link, and always try to link to internal pages within your site, not just the homepage.

Internal Linking:
Internal links within your site (ie. Links from one page to another) are very important. This internal linking structure not only helps users navigate through your site with ease, but it also helps engines crawl your site as well. To maximize “crawlability”, these internal links should be keyword rich (as should your content) and link to other pages with keyword friendly URL’s .

.edu and .gov Links:
Links on these sites are like gold – as they are very hard to get. This is a whole post in and of itself, which we will circle back to soon. An easy tip though for .edu links is to see if you can place a link to your website within the online Alumni directory of your College or University.

Dead Links:
So, you have been building links for a little while and along the way some pages on your website were either renamed or removed. Hopefully you have a custom 404 page in place to catch any websites who are still linking to dead pages. An easy remedy is to run a page not found report using webmaster tools (on ny major engine) and build 301 redirects for those dead URL’s to the most relevant content page on your site. Remember engines will only follow a permanent redirect, such as a 301.

What to watch out for:

• Don’t over do it. Engines will catch on if you suddenly have too many inbound links in a given timeframe. They also frown upon too many reciprocal links.
• Buying links. Just don’t do it.
• Link farms: websites that hyperlink to one another and are often considered SPAM.

Yahoo/Bing Search Alliance & More!

Intermediate Level

On August 24, 2010 Yahoo organic results began being powered by Bing as part of the Yahoo/Bing Search Alliance in the US (other markets to follow, with complete transition by 2012). If you receive traffic from Yahoo organic listings now, especially if the Yahoo traffic is higher than Bing organic traffic, this switch could impact your overall organic traffic values. Every engine has different algorithms, and thus different optimization techniques. Since listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change (according to comScore), it’s important to take a look at how well your site is optimized for Bing. Here are a few tips:

What to do first

• First make sure you are using Bing’s webmaster tools to submit your site, submit an XML site map, see what pages have been indexed on Bing, measure back and inbound links and see what keywords are performing. There is a wealth of information on here for marketers and developers, so it should be your first stop.
• Review your Yahoo organic traffic and identify the terms that are working. You may need to go back to previous analytics reports, but you want to find any differences in rank for these keywords now that results are powered by Bing.
• If you run paid ad campaigns on these engines, compensate for any potential organic loss by adding keywords to your campaigns.

How Bing ranks your website (from Bing Webmaster Center):
Bing website ranking is completely automated. The Bing ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as webpage content, the number and quality of websites that link to your webpages, and the relevance of your website’s content to keywords.

Optimizing for Bing:
The good news is that optimizing for Bing is not too much different from optimizing for other engines. We’ve compiled a list below of some SEO techniques that are good for all engines and some that are more specific to Bing. The most important thing is to keep checking your sites performance using Bing’s webmaster tools and identify any areas of improvement.

• Continue to develop keyword rich, orignal content that is geared to your audience; obtain high quality inbound links and develop your site’s architecture in a way that crawlers can understand.
• Fix any broken links on your website or broken tags within the code of your website.
• Make sure you allow MSNBot to crawl the pages of your site by specifying so in a robots.txt file or meta tag.
• MSNBot searches websites for links to other websites. So one of the best ways to ensure that MSNBot finds your website is to include valuable content that other website owners want to link to. (from Webmaster Center)
• Keep web page size reasonable. Bing recommends covering one topic per webpage. An HTML webpage with no images should be under 150 KB. We’ve also heard a minimum of 300 words is recommended.
• •Make sure you create an HTML and XML site map, submit the XML site map to Bing via webmaster tools.
• Each page on your site should be accessible by at least one text link.
• Each webpage should be 1 to 3 clicks away (flat hierarchy).
• Avoid link farms and hidden text or links on your web page.
• Bing crawls up to 69 characters in the title tag and 150 characters for the meta description tag.
• Domain Age: Bing puts more value on domains that have been registered for a long period of time.
• Bing likes pages that link to each other which have similar topics. meaning your target page will receive a boost if the page that is linking to it has a similar topic.
• Bing displays the H1 tag in the preview box. So make sure the tile tag and H1 tags of each page are different. Put the wording of choice in the H1 tag.
• The first paragraph of text on your web page will generally be displayed, make sure it is keyword rich and gets your point across.

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