subject: Search Optimisation | Seo Technique [print this page] Link Building Strategies Link Building Strategies
The Role of Inbound Links in SEO
While on-page optimization is a good first step, you will ultimately get much more leverage by having links from other sites to yours. Inbound links used to just be a source of referral traffic. Now, they influence your search engine rankings as well.
Google was the first search engine to use links as a significant ranking factor. They viewed a link from one site to another as a "vote" for the target site. The more votes you have, the more authoritative your site is considered.
Specifically, there are two main benefits gained through each link:
1. Better SEO authority of the linked-to page and increase in authority of the site as a whole
2. More relevancy of the page for the keywords that are used in the link"s anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. To give an example, let"s say a page was linked to in the following ways:
ICT-Quotes SEO Company
SEO Expert ICT-Quotes
The second link (often referred to as an "anchor text rich" or an "anchor text specific" link) is more likely to help Bob"s store rank for the keyword phrase "power tools."
Note that not all links pass value. Webmasters can add a "nofollow" attribute to an outbound link in order to achieve this. Links from some popular sites such as Wikipedia, for example, are all nofollow. The way to verify whether a link passes value is to check its HTML. This is achievable in different ways through different browsers but is generally doable.
Some Fact about Link Building:
(1)Ranking for highly competitive head terms typically requires a more diverse source of links pointing to the appropriate page that targets the term. The links will need to use the corresponding keyword as the anchor text as often as possible.
(2)Pages that target less competitive mid-to-long tail terms don"t typically require as many external links. Instead, sites can rank for these terms by gaining authority through strong, trusted links, often to the front page of the site. Solid information architecture and good on-page keyword targeting will then provide the relevancy signals needed to rank for these terms.
Most of the link building tactics discussed later in this chapter can be used either to target specific head terms or simply to build the authority of the site, depending on your specific needs.
