There is a perception out there that linking out to high authority sites is a good website optimization strategy and will help your website perform better in the search engine rankings. Perhaps you’ve seen it where a website, down in the footer, will link to higher authority websites such as CNN or google.com. The SEOer or webmaster does this because they think it somehow increases their ranking.
Here at Melbourne SEO Services, we believe people are over exaggerating its effects. That is to say, in our testing, we haven’t seen it significantly affect rankings.
I think this myth may have arisen out of something Matt Cutts, from Google, talked about. He was asked the question, should you encourage people to post on your blog since you’ll potentially send links to other websites? Read More>>
It’s important when building links back to your website to do it in a consistent manner. Let’s say you’re building a whole lot of links back to your website and you’re using the URL as the anchor text for those links. It’s important you are consistent and always use the www version. Although you can link back to your website without them, and it’ll still work, it’s not a good idea for SEO reasons.
For example, you may want to link to melbourneseoservices.com and you could do this with either URL http://melbourneseoservices.com or http://www.melbourneseoservices.com. Clicking either of these will take you to our homepage. That said, I would choose the www version as the best link building approach and here’s why, search engines see both pages as two separate versions. In fact, I have seen different pages ranks between the www and the non-www versions on some websites!
As an extra precaution, chat to your webmaster about this, but you can drop something in your htaccess file that will do a 301 redirect from all non www URLs through to the www version. That way, if any links do sneak through, you’re going to get that SEO benefit funneled through to the correct page.
Anyway, this is just some food for thought. To find out more tips about website link building follow us on twitter, become our Facebook friend, and subscribe to our RSS feed!
When building links, how much should you vary the anchor text?
First things first, it is important to bear in mind that no matter what you’re doing online, you should try to replicate, as much as possible, what happens in nature. That is to say, would it be natural, when linking to your home page, to have all the inbound links saying the same thing? Of course not!
Surely, if you think about it, if you had them all the same this would be a red flag to Google that you were trying to do something underhanded. So, here are some rules of thumb. About fifty percent of the links you build to your home page should be the actual URL. So for example, if we were building links to our website, Melbourne SEO Services, we would use www.melbourneseoservices.com.
About thirty percent of these links I would suggest you use the actual keyword phrase in the anchor text. This would be the words “Melbourne SEO Services”, the main key phrase we’re trying to rank for. Read More>>
When you’re starting an online SEO campaign you would naturally want to implement a quality link building strategy. You might then wonder if you need to have links coming to your site only from sites which have the same or a similar theme? For example, if your site is about dentistry, should the links you build be from sites about health, teeth whitening and so on?
We’ve done some testing and found that this is not the case. Google doesn’t seem to impose a penalty on sites with links coming from off topic sites. In their eyes, the more links, the better, regardless of whether those links come from relevant sites or not.
With that said, I think you need to try and get into the mind of Google a little, and imagine what could happen in the future. Read More>>
At Melbourne SEO Services, we don’t believe in hard and fast rules when it comes to SEO. Truth is, we’ll never know the exact Algorithm that powers the search engines. For this reason we set out to create a method that replicates what happens to popular sites naturally. In essence, Google aims to find the most relevant websites based on popularity (especially with the new Google Caffeine upgrade recently!).
So how do we do it? Well, over the course of the past 7 years we have developed a method we like to call The SEO Method. This is the very method that we use for our own sites, and our clients, and it has proven time and time again to be effective in not only ranking, but dominating in Google.
So what’s the secret? At its center, you’ll find gradual link building key… Read More>>
Arguably the most important stage in any SEO campaign, website link building is how you make your website become more popular. Simply put, you want to get as many links to your website, using your targeted keywords, and from a good range of sources.
*Please note: Website link building needs to appear ‘natural’. That is to say, it wouldn’t look natural to go from zero links to ten thousand overnight. Similarly, it wouldn’t look natural if all the links pointing to your website came from one place or if they said the same thing. In short, you want a good range of one-way links sent to different sections of your website that gradually build over time.
If you’re building links yourself, the easiest way to do this is by publishing good quality articles and then syndicating these on other websites. To find out more about this method, search ‘article marketing’ on Google.
Some of the more advanced methods of link building we use include:
- Press releases
- Directory submissions
- Blog and forum marketing
- Web 2.0 promotions
- Video marketing
- Building additional websites
There are many more ways to build links, but we have found those listed above to be the best return on investment.
Watch the video below to find out more about website link building:
