Variety is important.
Finding the best link structure
It is also important the way the link is put together. As we said in a previous post, the anchor text that is linked to your site will be used by Google to help it understand what your web page is about and what search terms it should rank for.
I may want to rank for the search term ‘Melbourne SEO Services’. If so, my goal is to create incoming links that contain those keywords. For example:
David Jenyns is the owner of Melbourne SEO Services.
In code, that would read:
David Jenyns is the owner of <href=’www.melbourneseoservices.com’>Melbourne SEO Services</a>
A less useful, but still reasonable link could be:
David Jenyns is the owner of Melbourne SEO Services –Click Here
When you can specify the anchor text, make sure you use the primary keyword phrase for the page to which the link is pointing.
A great suggestion is to choose a domain name that contains your primary keyword. If someone links to your site using the domain name, it will contain useful anchor text. For example:
David Jenyns is the owner of www.melbourneseoservices.com
Google will pick out the three words ‘melbourne’, ‘seo’ and ‘services’ in the domain name and register them as the anchor text of that link.
Even if people do use your preferred anchor text, they’ll do this in different ways:
David Jenyns provides the #1 SEO services in Melbourne.
Visit MelbourneSEOServices.com for more details.
David Jenyns is the owner of MelbourneSEOServices.com
Each of these links contain the primary keyword phrase and are highly effective, but are not as targeted as a link that uses the anchor text ‘Melbourne SEO Services’.
You don’t want all your links pointing to the homepage. When people go to your website, they will link to a specific article or product page, not just your homepage. You need to mimic this behaviour.
When you are building links, have 50% of them linking to your homepage and 50% to other high profile pages. In this way you will create a natural appearance and will also allow lots of pages within your website to rank, not just the homepage.
You need to have some variation in the anchor text of your incoming links. It would not be natural if all your links contained the same anchor text and Google would immediately become suspicious of this and would penalize you.
You should accept every link, unless it comes from a dodgy looking website. But it is best to accept links from a popular website and use relevant anchor text.
If you have reasonable Onsite SEO, you will outrank the competition by getting more, high quality links. I’m now going to outline how you can get all the links you will ever need.
The lowdown on ‘nofollow’ links.
In 2005, Google came up with a plan to combat blog comment spam and called it ‘nofollow’. When this attribute is added to a link, Google sees this as an instruction NOT to follow the link.
The end result is that any link containing this attribute will provide no SEO benefit to the webpage it points to.
However, don’t reject all ‘nofollow’ links, as this would not be natural. But don’t spend much time cultivating these types of links.
A good example of ‘nofollow’ is Wikipedia. People used to spend a lot of time trying to build links on this site. However, Wikipedia now uses ‘nofollow’ on all external links and thus its usefulness in SEO terms has disappeared.
Like with anchor text, someone may choose to use nofollow, or they may choose not to use it. Don’t worry, people will still learn of your existence through a ‘nofollow’ link by clicking on it manually, and who knows some of them my even add a link to their website that doesn’t use ‘nofollow.’
So don’t waste you time trying to build links on a site that isn’t going to benefit your SEO. You can see the ‘nofollow’ attribute by viewing the link from within the source code. It will look like this:
<a rel= ‘nofollow’href= ‘www.website.com’>Click Here</a>
Now to Start
Now you know why links are important and how to construct them. The next step is to get on with the link-building process. You will find that there are many different ways to build links.
The huge number of options may intimidate you. Or you might begin to feel comfortable with one particular method of link building and stick with this to the exclusion of all others. This will make your incoming profile look unnatural.
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