How you should be Link Building

Posted by Emma Selley on Monday, June 9th, 2008

Posted in: featured, link building, seo.

When people start link building they often don’t think about it correctly and end up with links on pages that won’t actually mean anything. Before you even think about adding your link to a site you should create a plan of action.

What search term are you aiming for?
This should be the first thing you ask yourself. It’s better to get 100 links with your search term in the anchor text, rather than 100 links that say “my first website”. Search engines take into account what appears in your anchor text and decides whether it’s relevant or not to what people are searching for.

The term I’ve chosen for this site is “Web Design Blog”, and at the moment it is about 80th in Google for that search term. Although it isn’t great, it would’ve been a lot lower in the results had I had all my link anchor text say “my first website”.

Decide what search term you’re aiming for and then you’re good to go.

Where should you add links?
You should try and add links to sites that are similar in niche. If your site is about Web Design there isn’t much point adding your link to a site about Fishing Tackle. It just doesn’t make sense - it doesn’t go. Search engines take into account sites that are linking to you and whether or not there is any relevance in that link. You’re far more likely to rank higher if your link is on a page about your niche.

Also a good place to go for adding links is forums. Again, make sure it’s a forum similar to your niche. When you join a forum you have an option to add a signature with every post. If you add your link to your signature, then for every post you make on that forum another link is created to your site.

Where shouldn’t you add links?
A page with a PR of 5 is usually a great thing and I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to have a link there - but when it has 1000’s of links already there just isn’t any point. A PR5 page with a 1000’s of links is leaking page rank to every single link on that page, that’s a PR5 spread over 1000. It doesn’t mean that it’s passing a PR5 to every link, it means it’s sharing the PR5 with 1000 sites, which basically means it’s worth less than what a PR1 site would give you.

Another bad point about this is that the links on that site are about anything (adult related, fishing tackle, football) and it really isn’t beneficial to you to have your site associated with meaningless links and topics.

Any other pointers?
Make sure that when you’re adding links to other sites and forums to get your spelling correct. As I said earlier the term I’m aiming for with this site is “Web Design Blog” and if I keep pushing it it will get further in the search engines: but it won’t if I suddenly start adding links that say “Web Dsegin Blog”. Google and other search engines don’t spell check your links, nor are they capable of mind-reading what your word is supposed to say! So always make sure you double check your spelling before adding links to other sites.

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3 Responses to “How you should be Link Building”

1. Julia from Fast Blog Finder Says:
   June 10th, 2008 at 8:36 am

   Hello Emma, thank you for a great article. I completely agree that one should approach link building process wisely. Not any site is worth to add a link to. Links should be placed on relevant websites. The anchor text does matter too. Absolutely, the anchor text should contain target keywords. But if te anchor text repeats through all the links, it doesn’t do good either. the anchor text should vary from link to link. This way link building process seems more natural to serach engines.

2. Emma Selley Says:
   June 10th, 2008 at 9:48 am

   Julia, that is a very good point, and one that I should’ve pointed out in this post.

   Nevertheless, I always try to target one main search term until I’m happy with the result it has in the search engines, and then try and concentrate on other search terms

3. ipod Says:
   September 13th, 2008 at 2:24 am

   I agree with you. Variety is key.

   You are aiming for one keyword. That is fine, but to get high on that keyword you should have links with multiple related keywords.

   If you want to target the word soup don’t get every link with anchor text of soup. Have links like

   Soup recipes
   tomato soup
   how to make soup
   soup ingredients

   Target longtail keywords and eventually you will begin to rank for your target keyword too.

   John

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