The single most important, time consuming and difficult part of optimizing a website for organic search is link building. In the SEO equation, the quality, number and relevance of links pointing to a website can have the biggest impact on that website’s ranking. Plain and simple, websites cannot rank for competitive search terms if they do not have quality inbound links.
The logic behind why so many search engines place an emphasis on links is pretty simple. The search engines typically see each link as a way of one website vouching for another. It’s often been said that each link represents a vote for a website. Thus, an assumption is made that a website with many votes is a good website and thus, should appear higher in the search results than websites without as many votes. Of course, there are certainly flaws in this rating system but it’s foundation is logical, or, was logical at one time.
Either way, here’s what you need to know about building links. In future posts, I’ll discuss detailed strategies for getting votes for your website.
Link Quality
All links are not created equal. Once you understand the logic behind behind determining good links, it’s pretty easy to apply to your SEO strategy. So what makes a link high quality?
1. The link comes from a good website. Let’s say there is a website that has been running for years, has lots of inbound links and has tons of quality content. This type of website typically looks reputable to the search engines. If this same website links off to another website, the search engines will them, to some degree, assume that the website being linked to is fairly reputable because a known reputable site has voted for it by linking to it.
2. The link comes from a related website. This is simple. A good link for any website to have is a link from a related website. For example, a car website would want links from other car websites. A boat website would want links from other boat websites. Using this logic, if a car website links to another car website and a boat website, the other car website will benefit more because the relationship of content. Of course, the benefit comes from the relevant traffic gained too, not just from the search engine rankings.
3. The link comes from the government or accredited university. Hands down, the Holy Grail of links come from Uncle Sam and universities around the world. Since these institutions are credible and don’t often link out, any links that do go out can have a strong influence. Of course, these are the hardest to links to get but there are strategies for doing so. Unfortunately, they usually involve offline activities and networking.
When trying to identify good website to try to get links from, take a logical approach. Ask yourself, “Who would I want vouching for me”? In the same way that you’d want a reputable source to write a letter of recommendation or make a business introduction for you, a link should be thought of the same way.
Quantity
That’s right, quantity helps too. While it would be nice to think that only link quality was important, link quantity still remains a factor. We’ll review legitimate ways to get the quantity of links you receive up in future posts.
Link Text
This is easy. Imagine you’re a search engine and you notice that every link pointing at a certain website says “fried chicken”. What would you guess the website is about? That’s right, it’s probably contains information related to “fried chicken”. Known as the anchor text, the text of the link pointing to your website is extremely important in helping the search engines understand what your website is about. The lesson here: When you get the opportunity to gain a new link, try to get the link anchor text to say something related to your website.
Building links is absolutely the most challenging part of SEO. You will fail many times before succeeding so keep at it. The hard work will payoff.
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