Search Engine Optimisation Process Part 5: Link Building

Link building is a crucial part of the Search Optimisation process. When completed correctly it can transform the amount of traffic a website receives.  In this section link building is explained along with Page Rank, and On-site link building techniques.

Technical Link Terms

To understand the link process we need to understand some technical terms:

• PageRank - It is a great source of debate and very important Web Pages are given a number between 0-10, 0 being the lowest.  The goal is to achieve a score of 10.  By having links from sites with a higher Page Rank you begin to receive their influence “Google/link Juice” which increases the likelihood of your Pagerank increasing in the future. PageRank is a signal of trust.Page Rank is a Google Invention.  Google state – PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
• Link Popularity and Backlinks -  These are the same thing, the number of links on the internet pointing at your web pages.  Be aware search engines measure these links in different ways.  Above all it’s very important to get quality links.Links from established sources Government websites (if possible) and pages with high PageRank should be amongst some of your link building aims.   Quality over number of links is important, Google is by far the most used Search Engine in the UK so it’s important to follow their Best Practise.

Internal SEO

Before searching away from your site for links, optimising the structure of the site will help to enhance any new links you do receive.

Accessibility and Usability

• The site will need to be optimised to give access to robots and crawlers, coming from the search engines. For more information on Search Engine Friendly Structures.
• The site will also need to be optimised for human visitors.  By planning and having your site structure tested and built for your visitors, employers and customers you can guarantee they will receive a fast and effective service which will encourage conversions, word of mouth recommendations or online recommendations and reviews.  Need more information read Usability and SEM 101 by Ron Jones.

Current On-site Links

When the search engines arrive at the home page of a site they trawl through going through each page via a HTML link.  Pages that do not have internal links on a Web site will not get indexed.

Pages that have links but are not of any real value can be blocked from the search engines.  The Shopping Cart page is a good example, on most  websites the shopping cart is not a good page for a first time visitor to land on.  Removing this page can be achieved in 5 ways to make sure you could use all five methods:

• use disallow against the shopping cart page in the robot.txt page.
• use the noindex attribute along with the robots attribute.
• use the nofollow attribute in any links (anchor tags) that go to the shopping cart.
• check the shopping cart is not listed in the XML Sitemap if it is remove it.
• go to your Bing, Yahoo, Google web (master) accounts and remove the url from your site.

By removing the less important pages and linking the most important to the rest of the site has a positive affect.  You have told the search engines which pages are most important and the pages which already have high page rank will slowly improve the rank of the pages they are linked to.  Usually the home page is the strongest page so any pages linked to the home page will begin to feel the benefit.

How do I create linkable content – “Content is King”

You will see this cliché alot when people refer to content and Search Engine Optimisation but it is so true “Content is King”:

• The best method to create links is to produce something which a visitor will see as a benefit or something of value e.g Great Content.
• If you offer a great service people will talk about you and come to you.

12 Link building Ideas Using Your Web Content

1. Create a Blog and update on a regular basis make it interesting and people will return.  If you sell a product and your site doesn’t change regularly creating a blog is the perfect way to talk about the product, company, market changes, employee events, offers, promotions anything that may be of interest.  More information Blogs can be found at Blogs and Blogging.
2. Making your Content relevant using your researched Keywords. See Keyword Analysis Research.
3. Add more credibility to your on-line presence.  If potential customers don’t know who you are (e.g the web site is a UK business and the visitor is American) they will have more confidence linking to your site if you include a Privacy Policy and a Terms of Service, business address, business telephone number, tax number, business logo.
4. Make your content easy to understand. Do customers understand business speak/industry speak.  Is your site for a world-wide audience not just the UK? Many visitors may have English as a second language.  Keep it simple, use spelling and grammar checking tools.
5. Create helpful resource lists about your subject/product, these are very popular if the title is catchy and will give value or a benefit to the reader for example:
   • Top 3 Link building Tips
   • 101 ways to improve your Link building Techniques
   • How to Improve your Search Results and Increase Traffic
   • What is SEO – 10 Top Tips.
6. Create lists around your industry for example:
   • Top 5 thought leaders/Pioneers
   • Top 10 industry events/Future events
7. Write Interesting Articles about your industry add a teaser (title and snippet of text) on your blog with a link to the main article.  If you are a professional with lots of experience you may hold some very interesting information.  Send to iSnare, GoArticles and Ezine Articles these will return traffic if written well.  Track these articles and offer more exclusive content.
8. Create a Survey or a Poll it will have to be interesting to your target group.  This could be a great way to gather information leading on to an article for your site, which could then be posted to industry websites or magazines.
9. Create a monthly competition people love to get things for nothing, and if the competition is fairly regular it’s worth returning and telling people.
10. Promote Special Offers there are lots of websites specialising in special offers and promoting these to their customers.  Pizza Express run continuous offers where you have to visit the site or an affiliate to print a voucher.
11. Make a Video could be a tutorial, talk about industry changes, product help or tips.
12. Downloadable content – Create Podcasts, slideshows, images, pdf’s people love to download interesting free stuff.

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The Search Engine Optimisation Process Help List – 6 Key Areas

The links below need to be followed in a series (one after the other).  The next section is Part 6 SEO Service which is a round up of sections we have covered and tips for the future. If you need any help contact me on Twitter @briancee1.  Enjoy!

1. SEO Tools – Check your Site
2. Keyword Analysis Research
3. Web Content Writing – Web Copy
4. SEO Web Design – Search Engine and User Friendly Structure
5. Link Building – The Natural Way
6. SEO Service – Revisiting, Fixing and Optimising your site.

Related SEO Posts

To keep you in touch with relevant topics on the site below are links to my most recent SEO posts.