Search Engine Optimisation - SEO

The weight of which the SE’s put on incoming links is changing all the time. What hasn’t changed and essentially will not, is that they are an essential part of any sites SEO campaign.

The composition of a ‘good link’.

• Anchor Text - Always ensure that the link text contains the keyword(s) you are trying to rank for. This passes relevance to your page for those keywords.
• Indexed - Ensure that the page that is linking to you is indexed in the SE’s. If it’s not, it’s useless - if the SE’s can’t follow the link, it can’t associate the link text with your page - unless it’s a high traffic website which will bring you visitors direct.
• Crawlable - Some webmasters request reciprocal links and then place “nofollow” tags on the link to your site. Again, the SE’s will not pass any relevance, trust or LJ to you via one of these links.
• Relevance - Make sure that the sites you are requesting link to you are of the same niche or similar. This improves the impact of the link.

Do Your Homework

A crucial factor, often overlooked when beginning a reciprocal links campaign, is that it does matter where the other site links to. The below example;

Your Site -> Site B -> Spammy Bad Neighbourhood.

This can get you into trouble. With ‘Site B’ linking to a bad neighbourhood, it could well mean Site B becomes part of that, which in turn can hurt you. Ensure that whoever you are linking to has a similar linking strategy to yourself. Two minutes of research via Yahoo Site Explorer will enable you to get a better idea about your target site.

One-Way, Reciprocal and 3-Way Links

The best links to obtain are undoubtedly one-way.

This as the SE’s see them, is the most natural way of linking and as such, receives the most importance. So, how do we get them? The buzz word here is ‘Link-Bait’. Attracting webmasters to link to your site due to a unique, interesting topic / approach /  feature. Free stuff always works too!.

Second best is 3-way. These are Site A -> Site B -> Site C -> Site A, creating an effective circle of links. These used to and still can be seen as one-way links by many SE’s, though the front runners are of course, getting smart to the idea of 3-way linking and devaluing them to the same ranks of reciprocals.

Reciprocals are seen as the least value, although they do still hold some weight and so are worth pursuing, but not at the expense of time working on good link bait. The SE’s do not see these as natural and you are passing out of your site as much LJ as is incoming. Just ensure the anchor text is good!

A Sites Link Profile

SE’s know what type of sites it crawls are. It knows a directory from an information site - and so they should. This recognition of a sites theme and purpose allows SE’s to build a ‘link profile’ for your site. That is, it knows if you have just submitted to directories and 999 of your 1000 links are from spammy links - same goes for blogs and forums etc.

So it’s important to get a good mix in their, include directories, blogs, forums, similar sites and whatever else you can get - just ensure you don’t overload of low grade spammy links - it won’t work.

The best sites to receive links from still remain .gov and .edu links. All others are treated equal, although some still believe .org hold slightly more weight.

So get thinking, get that link-bait up and get emailing those .edu and .gov sites!