Importance Of Link Building 101

Importance Of Link Building 101

The ability to increase the number of links pointing to your site is one of the most important contributing factors when it come to your position in Google's SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).

There are numerous SEO strategies one can implement to increase their website’s visibility, such as: meta tags, on-page SEO techniques, rich content, keyword density, and link building strategies among many others.

Think of link building as word of mouth advertising. It is one of the most influential and determining factors essential to building a solid business and promoting your business to a targeted market.

Every time you submit your site to a directory, you increase your link popularity as well as improving your chances of ranking higher in SERP’s. It is important to submit your site to directories that deal with similar topics/products that relate directly to your services and products. Steer clear of general directories, listing in unrelated directories, or exchanging links with sites that have unrelated content.

Search engines algorithms are continually revised and updated over time. In the not so distant past, one could manipulate the SERP’s by artificially inflating the number of sites that linked back to their own, i.e., photography sites exchanging links with non-related sites such as nutrition or dieting web sites. In such cases, there is absolutely no benefit for either party, as newer, revised algorithms give no SEO value to non-related reciprocal links exchanges.

It is good practice to only trade links or list in directories that pertain to your site, i.e. wedding photographers should exchange links, and list their website in directories that have a wedding photography or photography category somewhere in their directory structure.

Whether you have a blog or static web site; the more quality and relevant links directed at your site will help improve your SERP ranking. Before exchanging links with another webmaster you should thoroughly review the other person’s website. Make sure it loads quickly, that it doesn’t contain multiple broken links, and that it doesn't use nofollow tags for its outbound links.

Anchor text is the hyper linked words on a page; the words you click on when clicking a link. Here is an example, Photography Directory in which  "Photography Directory" is the anchor text. Anchor text should give the viewer information about the content that page or link contains. It also tells search engines what the page is about, and if used wisely it will help boost rankings in search engines, such as Google.

Lets say for instance, you own a wedding photography business in Tacoma, Washington and you wish to improve your SERP rank for "Tacoma Wedding Photography", you should use "Tacoma Wedding Photography" as your primary anchor text when submitting your site to directories and when exchanging links.

The over all importance of anchor text holds tremendous SEO value and can really boost ranking for certain a keyword or keyword phrases within the search engine results pages. Keep in mind the SERP rankings are extremely difficult to achieve when vying for general keywords such as ‘Wedding Photography’. Rather than trying to achieve #1 rank for ‘Wedding Photography’ you should concentrate you efforts on achieving page one placement for localized searches.

Let’s say you own a portrait photography business in Louisville, Kentucky and you want to target brides in your local market. You should use anchor text that utilizes your top keywords and keyphrases, i.e. ‘Louisville Wedding Photography, Louisville Wedding Photographer, etc. Securing a page one placement in the SERPs using a localized keyword campaign will be much easier to achieve than trying to take page one for general terms such as ‘Wedding Photography’.

Be aware that some directory pages and link partner programs add nofollow attributes to their site's links page giving your anchor text no value at all. Search engines that support this attribute literally do not follow the link, or do not index the link, essentially excluding it from SERP ranking calculations, thus making the link presence hold no value. Nofollow is an html attribute used to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam. Nofollow tags are also used to prevent those who place their link/s on other sites, from leeching off the other web site’s pagerank.

A great tool that can be used for evaluating your website’s links is: http://www.linkdiagnosis.com