Website link building is, debatably, the most crucial aspect of a complete link building and search engine optimization campaign. Google and other search engines analyze page rank on the basis of how many links are pointing to your domain and individual pages. The principle behind this is that search engines want to direct searchers to websites that are active and doing well. The best way to evaluate a website’s quality is through the number of people who find it useful enough to share it with other people. This translates into the instances of links of your website on other pages. Therefore, what you have to do is to ensure that the link of your domain or web page is visible on multiple third party pages. Most internet marketers have an already devised system for building links and, needless to say, every campaign or strategy would consist of a variety of variables and techniques. It is also likely that you have come across many blog posts and articles which list out different techniques of link building. However, despite being seasoned link building experts with complete link building campaigns many of these seasoned experts overlook the four fundamentals of link building.
- The importance of Anchor text:
All the major search engines attach a lot of importance to the anchor text of your link. Anchor text is nothing but the text on which the link is built upon. For example, if you have a website that deals in selling and buying antiques form the countries of China, Japan, and Indonesia then your aim should be to build your links using anchor text like ‘Asian antiques’ and related variations of the same. There are two considerations when it comes to the anchor text being used in a complete link building campaign. The first is the relevance of the phrases or words used to the target web page i.e. your domain or one of the sub pages on your domain. This, as is obvious, means that if you have an insurance website then insurance policies would be more relevant than insure and insure more relevant than policies. The second aspect of this complete link building analysis deals with the content surrounding your anchor text. In simpler terms, the web page on which your link exists needs to be relevant to your website or web page as well. For instance, if you are planning to use your insurance anchor text and link on a page dealing with leather shoes, then it is advisable that you forego this plan. - Quantity and quality of links:
There is an age old debate among website link building experts where one side says that quantity of the links and content is more important than the quality of links and content, while the other side says the opposite. There are practical proofs of both strategies giving solid results, which is why the debate is still raging on. The quantity of backward links seems to matter if the quantity is really high because low quality links carry less link juice than high quality links. Most major search engines use a concept known as ‘reasonable surfer’ which, basically, deals with a link being evaluated on the basis of what it means to a fictional reasonable surfer. Therefore, things like font, placement, location, source page, relevance and user behavioral dynamics, which are considered as functions of quality, all play a major role in the link being evaluated. With website link building when you go for quantity, you basically compromise on these things for an extremely high number of links. Alternatively, when you go for quality, you have to either spend a lot of money or settle for less numbers of links. In practical terms, if you were submitting 10 or so articles per week, then you would be able to pay special attention to where they go and how they are used. Alternatively, if you were submitting 100, you would not be able to give the same attention to the process. However, at the end of it all, the resulting performances of both these techniques are still comparable. Hence, if you are wishing to achieve complete link building, then you should aim at balancing the two sides. Using the same example given above, instead of going for 10 or 100 articles, you go for 50 articles to create a balance while at the same time utilizing on-page search engine optimization. - Variable source pages:
The diversity of the source pages in the website link building where your backward links are placed will also play a very significant role in how effective your campaign is. This means that the pages which are pointing to your website need to be housed with different root domains. Thus, three sub pages under the xdomain.com would not be as effective as one page each on xdomain.com, ydomain.com and zdomain.com. This takes away the older strategies which used to be based around link exchanges with domain owners and replaces them with the qualitative and genuine website link building strategies. Even if this technique may be more difficult than the older strategies, they are still more beneficial because not only do they improve your link building endeavors but they also give a boost to your click through traffic. - Trustworthy neighborhoods:
Finally, source pages which are pointing towards your website need to be situated in trustworthy and safe neighborhoods, as per all the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. For instance, if you have a website that provides news of some kind then the most trustworthy backward link you can get for it would be from some major news website like BBC or Wall Street Journal. Granted, these examples are extremely difficult to achieve in real search engine optimization practices, but they still get the point of reliability and trustworthiness across.
The above mentioned four pillars of complete link building strategies are ideal for website link building experts to evaluate if their strategies meet the fundamental principles of link building and are in fact increasing their traffic in measurable ways. However, it should also be noted that even though basics are important, some innovation can go a long way in setting you apart from your competitors. Therefore, while you pay attention to the basic, make sure that you look into advanced as well.
