In part one of my link building tips we talked about how we want to build links naturally and how search engines want to see the progression of your link build strategy. Let’s continue with some more tips you should be aware about when as you move forward with your quest to receive inbound links.
Avoid run-of-the-site links. These are links where every page of a site links to your homepage such as links on a site’s footer or on a blogroll. When you have, say, 1000 incoming links all originating from subpages within the same site, it appears to Google that your link count is artificially inflated.
Before we talk about linking to the same page consistently I would like to discuss how your website can been seen by the search engine six different ways.
Let’s use my favorite example site, Frank’s Golf World at http://www.franksgolfworld.com. The search engine can see this as:
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http://www.franksgolfworld.com
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http://www.franksgolfworld.com/
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http://www.franksgolfworld.com/index.html
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http://franksgolfworld.com
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http://franksgolfworld.com/
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http://franksgolfworld.com/index.html
That’s right. And, if those who link to you use six different URL formats to point visitors to your “home” page then your PageRank is being diluted by a factor of six — not good! Now the search engines have developed some ways for you to help keep this in control over the past year but the best defense is to make sure you are standardizing your incoming URL-format in order to consolidate your PageRank. Doing so will produce the maximum relevancy-boost possible from your incoming links.
Getting your keywords in your text that links to your site is extremely important! I love getting any quality links but a link that does not have your most important keywords inside it really is half has good IMO. I say this because the boost in keyword relevancy is significant enough that it’s worthwhile to contact everyone who is linking to you with a specific request regarding the text being used in your link.
It would be much better for people to link to Frank’s Golf World as golf equipment or golf clubs then Frank’s Golf World. Notice how I put one of my top keywords in my domain name? This was done exactly for what we just talked about. Remember from a search engine’s point of view the word inside the link builds the theme of your site thus the search engines “think” this is what your site is about and will rank you high for those terms.
Building quality links is not just about getting as many links as you can to your home page. You need to get links into pages within your website. We call this deep linking and I recommend going for 40% or more of your links linking to pages deeper within your site than the homepage. These deep links usually are more content related to the pages linking to them and this adds credibility in the eyes of the SEs.
A few years back Google had come out with an attribute tag called the nofollow tag and the reason behind this was to try to limit the amount of blog spamming that was going on. By using this tag you are basically telling the search engines that the link included in the nofollow tag should not be considered a “vote” and pass “link juice” from the originating site. So all the other search engines finally agreed to adapt this tag and all is happy in search engine land. Funny thing is the three major search engines do interpret these links differently and this is where it gets confusing. As a general rule, find links to your site that are followed but if you find sites that are on topic it is fine to get links from them even if nofollowed.
Part 3 will start getting you ready to find these links and how to get them.
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