Link Building

What’s Your Starting Point?

There are many link building tactics. However, link building must be strategic in nature. You must consider the nature of the website being promoted and its starting point. Here are three common starting points. Understanding your starting point (where you are now) will help you determine where you want to go and how to get there.

A Signal That Shouts Out About the Quality of Your Content

Let the Search Engines Know How Important Your Content Is

You may have an amazing and delightful website however not many people will see it if other sites aren’t linking to it. To have in-coming links sends an important signal to the major search engines and creates traffic in and of themselves.

Ten Important SEO Linking Terms

For Strong SEO Performance You Need to Know Them

If you have a website or blog and you want it to be found in search then you’ll need to know some of the key terms related to search engine optimization.

Here are 10 SEO linking terms that I think anyone with a website or blog needs to know.

The Importance of Links to Your Website

A Website Needs In-Coming Links to Rank High In Search

This blog post will focus on the importance of links to your website. First off you need to realize that and estimated 75% of Google’s process looks at the links coming into your website pages from other websites. Google studies the link profile of your site and all its pages and ranks sites and pages higher that have a better link profile.

My Top-10 Link Building Tips for 2013

Link Building

1. Hire a Competent Copywriter

Don’t expect to get worthy links unless you also have great copy. All of your website content must be top shelf. Use words carefully and creatively. Make your copywriting delightful and this means to use a competent professional copywriter. Get your copy right. If you want some help with your copywriting then consider the services of Heidi White a Freelance Copywriter in Vermont.

What is Link Velocity?

This is the speed at which you acquire links to your website. This is important as you always want to acquire links in what appears to be a natural way.

I have seen small websites that have acquired 200 links in a single day. I have even seen a small local business site gain 200 links on New Years Day. I have a hard time thinking about how a small local website could get 200 link in a single day and on New Years Day as well.

Another factor associated with the natural look of link velocity is that if a website has gained 20 links over a 6-month period and then over a 3-day period gains 100 links then this may raise a red flag at Google. The Link Velocity associated with the 3-day time frame does not look natural for that specific website. There may be many sites that gain 100 links over a 3-day time frame but this is not natural for this particular website based on their history of link acquisition.

Link Velocity can also look fishy when there is very little new content being produced. A website that creates fresh content and then also has a link velocity profile that meshes with the content creation profile has two component that mesh and that look natural. Th link acquisition and the fresh content coincide. This looks natural.

What looks natural is based on the specifics of the website. Items such as age of website, historical rate of link generation, content creation rate versus link velocity all mesh together.

Another factor could be the type of links that a website has historically acquired versus a new type of link. For example if for 2 years it can be seen that links have come from blogs and the total is 250 links (essentially all from blogs) and then for two months you gain 100 additional links but none of these links come from a blog then this may raise a flag.

Link Building has to be an essential part of your SEO Strategy and we can help devise a SEO and Link Building Strategy.

What is a Fishy Link?

Penguin is a new version of the Google algorithm. It is intended to sniff out and then trash “fishy” links. This begs an important question. How does Google define a fishy link? How will Penguin catch these smelly fishy links?

I want to help you to understand what is the thinking behind a fishy link.

Here are some concepts:

• If you have too many unnatural or spammy inbound links pointing only to your home page then this is cause for concern. Have the links point to multiple relevant pages as much as possible.
• If all of your links a perfectly worded exact match text links then this may not look natural. Be careful overdoing it with exact keyword phrase links all going to the same page. Gain some non-keyword phrase in-coming links.
  If your have a large portion of your links coming from the comment sections of blogs or forums. Get links from a variety of sources.
• If you have a large number of links from the same IP address with the same keyword phrase. Get as many links as possible from as many relevant sources as possible.
• If a large percentage of your links come from low quality sites. Get as many high-quality sites to link to you as you can.
• If a large portion of your links are from low quality directories. Again, establish variety in your link network.
• If you have links from link farms and get caught then this is trouble. Just don’t do it.
• If you have too many unnatural footer links then this could be considered fishy. Avoid SEO companies that employ this kind of link building.

Beyond this Penguin wants to see links built up over time. If it detects a large number over a fairly short time frame then it may pay closer attention and if you violate a few of the above items then with the extra scrutiny your search position may not improve.

Does the Google’s Link Operator Tell You Anything Meaningful?

The simple answer a NO! Typing link:www.yoursite.com into Google’s search box often won’t even show you any links. It certainly will not show you all your links. When it does show you some, they’re usually not the best ones.

Don’t bother to use this command because it is mis-leading at the very best. While there are some helpful tools that can find some backlinks, there is no foolproof method for finding out about all the links that point to your site or to your competitors’ sites. The good news is, just because you can’t find them all doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Keep making a great site with great content that delights your visitors and also continue to create fresh web content. Then work to get the word out in as many ways as you can.

Keep building your link profile and link network. Do not worry too much if you cannot generate an accurate list of all your links. As you create great web content and gain in-coming links you will see your site rise in search and you will see your traffic grow and this will be proof enough.