10 tips to help you get the most out of your link building

Link building has long been a cornerstone of Search Engine Optimisation. It’s one of the main ways that you can build the value of your website in the eyes of Google. Search Engines need links in order to find your website; and they need links to work out how important your website is. Links can give your website ‘authority’, a key goal of SEO.

Since you have to do link building, here are my top 10 things to remember when carrying out your link building.

2 amazing free tools for link assessment.

Let’s start with 2 free tools to assess the value of a domain/or page:

The old but always amazing SEO Book Toolbar for Firefox

The Brand new Open site explorer from SEOMoz -don’t forget to create a free account to extend the access!

1. Choose quality over Quantity

It’s not about the sheer volume of links to your website. It’s about where those links are coming from. A few high value links will push your site higher than many low value one.

But how do you work out what is a ‘high value’ link and what isn’t?

2. Assess the number of outbound links of the link-giving website/page.

Outbound links are links that direct the Internet user to another website.

If the website giving you an inbound link has many (20+) outbound links, the authority that it passes to you will be lower than if it just has a few.

If the website giving you an inbound link has many inbound links itself, the authority that it passes to you will be higher than if it just has a few.

Remember this equation for the Link Giving website:

Lots of inbound links + few outbound links = Great website to get a link from!

Also, as mentioned in the “Design and content” guidelines section from Google, the “100 outbound links maximum” recommendation is also a good one to follow.

Zillions of free tools exist to assess number of OBL but SearchStatus for Firefox is our tool as it can do many other things!

3. Make sure you are using targeted anchor text

Your inbound links must built using keywords that you want to rank highly for. These links can then tell Google not only how important your website is, but what keywords it should rank you for. Make sure you vary your anchor text however, otherwise Google will be suspicious. Use three different keyword phrases, and occasionally your website name too. Image links need to have anchor text in the ALT tag of the image.

4. What is the link-giving website all about?

The best websites to get inbound links from are those that are an authority in your particular market. If you sell glasses, then you want inbound links from editorial websites that write all about glasses, lenses, vision etc. High value links come from websites and pages that are relevant to your website. Also, we have to stress that point 3 and 4 are linked: ignoring the anchor text when evaluating the topicality of the on-page content would be just plain stupid.

5. Have a look at PageRank or better, MozRank but take them with a Pinch of salt!

PageRank is the ‘value’ Google used to place on a page. Although pretty Obsolete as a “precise” metric, it gives a broad idea of a page authority.

You can see the PageRank of each page by looking at the green PR bar on the Google toolbar. Whilst it’s not the be all and end all, and whilst the bar is often out of date, it is at least a measure of the ‘importance’ of that web page in the eyes of Google.

That said, we would advise not to use PageRank. The main problem is that it could up to 9 months for the PR data to be updated. A site could i.e have suffered from a penalty from Google in the meantime.

Mozrank would be a better option as they use roughly the same information but updates it more frequently.

Mozrank can be tracked w/ many tools including SearchStatus (see it does many things!)

6. Where on the page is your Link located

Links coming to your website are best when high up the page or buried within editorial. Links from footers or sections called ’sponsors’ or ‘partners’ are of much lower value.

7. Link-giving website domain

Links from websites with some domain name extensions are worth more than others. Google values most highly links from .com, .co.uk (in the UK), .edu and .gov.uk (in the UK) domains. Others are worth less (but not worthless!)

8. Don’t ignore links from Social Network websites

Although most of the links on social media Networks (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon etc…) are no followed (due to shortened URL which are redirects), People have to think about the SEO authority that will come from editorially given links resulting from the social media exposure.

Also it seems that these ‘active web’ links are becoming taken into account to a great extent by Google, so bear them in mind.

9. Don’t ignore forums or blogs

Take some time to participate in and build links from relevant forums and blogs. Make sure they ARE relevant though – that’s the key. Aside from bringing some SEO value these links might actually be followed by genuine users.

I couldn’t stress enough on the fact that links on forums (if not no followed) carry little SEO value. They would hence be a relevant strategy only if they bring quality traffic to a site –which is generally the case when you gives good advice… on time!

10. Make sure your inbound links are ‘followed’.

Website owners can add some code to their links that instructs the search engines to effectively ignore them. Check the source code of the link giving website. Find your link and check that it does than have the value rel=”nofollow”.

Okay… that’s a bit Old School! Here are 2 handy tools to save you a lot of times by automatically highlighting the “no follow” attribute:

For Firefox: Guess what? SearchStatus… again!
For Google Chrome META SEO inspector: http://goo.gl/ju9U
For IE: uhm…sorry?

And that’s it!

Link building is an important way to build the authority of your website, and tell Google what your website is all about. But it can be time consuming too! Follow these basic guidelines to make sure you build links in the most effective and efficient way. If you want Euston Digital help with your link building campaign then get in touch.

Charly Wargnier

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Tags: google, Link Building, pagerank, SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “10 tips to help you get the most out of your link building”

Porsha Lobell Says:
March 28th, 2010 at 9:57 pm

Hello just came across your site and i thank you for your article it was informative. I am curious about doing link building for my site too. Have you used the scrapebox.com tool? If so is it good? If not then what is the best program? Thank you.