Comprehensive guide to Organic, Natural, Search Engine
Optimization. Page 5
SEO Tutorial
Page 4SEO Tutorial page 5 continued from page 4
Link Building to gain link popularity is a must for a great
ranking
Back links to your site are an economical way of increasing your rank since they
don't cost anything.
The
quality and quantity of the “back links” to your site is one of the BIG factors
in determining your rankings in the search results. You need to obtain as many
high quality back links as you can. One way links, meaning you don’t link to
them, just them to you, are of extra value. The engines figure you must have
some quality content if sites link to you without requiring a link back. So it's
worthwhile to have an effective link building strategy.
There is nothing wrong with trading links with other sites. If the other site
is a site related to the topic or topics on your site, then Google will count it
as a good link. However, if it is with an unrelated site, Google will just not
count it. Even if it’s from a known spam site, you won’t be penalized; the
link just won’t increase your link popularity.
If
search engines penalized sites for bad incoming links it would be too easy to
manipulate the search results. Just start up a spammy site and put links up to
your competitor’s sites. That’s why you don’t get penalized for those unwanted
links.If
at all possible try to get the site that links to you to use some keyword in
your anchor text. Link anchor text (the blue underlined text) is extremely
important. A link to John Lund’s stock photo photography site with the anchor
text “ John Lund Photography” is nice, but far better would be “Unique Stock
Photos of Animals” would be far better.
If
someone is searching for John Lund’s photography website it won’t be hard to
find, but having John’s site show up for the search term “ unique stock photos”,
“stock photos of animals”, or even “unique photos of animals” will be greatly
enhanced by having those keywords showing up in the anchor text of links to his
site. And more economical than advertising on the search results pages by a long
shot.The
next chance you get to shape the anchor text you might use “Funny Stock Photos”,
and with another “Pictures of funny animals”. Mix
it up and use lots of variations and modifiers to help with the long-tailed
keywords people will be using to find your site.
Although you seldom have a choice about where you link will be placed on the
other site’s page, but it would be best for the spiders if it was in the middle
of a paragraph of text related to your site’s topic. Even better is if you can
get the link pointed not to your site in general, but to a specific page dealing
with the same topic. This is called “deep linking”, and it is very effective at
increasing your link popularity and convincing Google
that your page is important. It’s good for your site, and especially good for
that particular page. Remember, every page in your site is a potential entry or
landing page, and should be optimized. Linking is an important part, a very
important part of the optimization process.
There are a number of ways to obtain links. If you have lots of really high
quality content then you will pick up one way links naturally, and there will be
webmasters contacting you who will want to trade links. If you are planning on
trading links you will probably want a links page or, as they are often called,
a resource page.Don’t bother trading links with another site if their links page where your link
is located cannot be visited by clicking a link on the sites’ home page.
SEO Tutorial Page 6
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More about linking