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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.17 -
Link Building 101
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
Understanding Links
Any work done on your website construction that affects its ranking is called "onpage"
or "onsite" optimisation. Any link-building done externally that involves
pointing links back to your site is called "off-page" optimisation. Before going
any further with our off-site optimization training, it’s important to fully
comprehend our tools, here they are links.
 Now we
are going to learn what links got to do with SEO, what we should expect out of
our inbound links, and more importantly, what kind of links are wasting our time
and efforts.
Linking and SEO
When people talk about SEO, they only think of inbound links. Some become even
greedy and start to stop linking out, nofollowing their outbound links, and
other dirty practices.
They are the kind of people who take it all and give nothing back. Though it may
seems like a good idea for short sighted people, I strongly believe that there’s
much more to gain by being natural and honest.
An external link is like a testimonial that you appreciate and refer what’s on
the other side. Most of the people who don’t link out are afraid to lose their
“link juice”, what they fail to see is that there’s a lot more to benefits than
it seems to link out.
Linking Out
History has show to us countless times over and over that the people who gain
the most are people who give the most. In SEO and on internet in general, when
you link out to a site, one benefit you can gain from the search engines is
network association, and if that site is an authority one, you surely want to be
associated with it, even if it is indirectly.
When you link out, your visitors and your readers respect you more and find you
more trustable and in turn are more willing to link to you. Google and
other search engines also expect that that an authority site would link out to
another authority website, and in fact it would seem strange if no links were
outbound. Linking to other sites and pages is the essence of how the
internet works, and would be a ranking factor in most search engines. Just
don't over do it! Less links out is generally
better. I wouldn't link out to more than 2 or 3 links per page, and would
never link out to over 50 links on my resources page.
Being Linked In
As I explained earlier, giving a link to somebody is like giving a testimonial
or recommendation for this page. For the search engines, it would be counted
just like casting a vote.
The more votes a page would get, the more it would appear to be appreciated and
trusted by the internet users, thus the better the search engines should rank
this page. This concept is true with all the search engines, but especially with
Google, which even has created a scoring system called PageRank.
As you understand this, it becomes clear that our goal as SEO is to acquire as
many backlinks as possible. Now, just like everything in the world, when it
comes to SEO and link building, quality over quantity always prevails.
Each quality backlink we will acquire will have influence over our Link
Authority and/or our Link Popularity.
Link Popularity
Link popularity refers to how many links are pointing towards our specific page.
Although the concept is simple, there are some simple rules to follow
in order to maximize benefits from our work:
• Pages with high PageRank score provide more popularity value, also called
“link juice”.
• Multiple links coming from a single domain are highly discounted and hardly
bring more value than having just one.
• Link popularity is more about how many links from different domain name source
you are acquiring than how many links in general you have.
• Only links that can transmit “link juice” will affect your popularity score.
• Relevant links (coming from the same category topic) will carry more
popularity than irrelevant links.
Link Authority
Link authority refers to what the links pointing to your pages are telling the
search engines. Put simply, it refers to what anchor text is used by the
person linking to your page.
The anchor text is the small piece of text used when you create a link:
This anchor text tells the search engines what your page is all about.
Understanding this concept, the more people link to your pages using your
keyword, the more the search engines will consider that your page is relevant
for that specific keyword.
Using proper Anchor text is the key to successful off-site optimization.
Keep in mind that the search engines like things to be or look as natural as
possible and abusing keywords in your anchor text may lead to an over-optimization penalty.
The best way to prevent this is to vary your anchor texts and make them look as
natural as possible. This is also another reason why I recommended you
earlier to optimize your post using multiple keywords, this way; you’ll be able
to provide much more varied combination of anchor texts giving it the
necessary “natural” feel that Google likes so much.
I recommend you to have your anchor texts with a length of 2-4 words long in
average.
Unhelpful Links for SEO
As I explained earlier, all links are not helpful for SEO, and some people are
ready to play some dirty tricks with you.
“nofollow” attribute
Links that have this attribute attached to them do not pass link juice at all,
you won’t benefit from it. It looks like this;
<a href="http://www.domain.com"
rel="nofollow">Worthless Backlink</a>
Meta Robot instruction
Another method used is to add a line in the <head> of the source code of a page
with the following meta command; <meta
name="robots" content="nofollow">
Any link on such page will not pass link popularity at all.
Robots.txt file
Even trickier are people placing this kind of instruction in a robots.txt file;
User-agent: *
Disallow:/your-page-with-link.php
No cache or with old cache
Regardless of the PageRank of a page, you want to check the cache history of
that page;
If the search engine can’t cache the page, they can’t keep record of your link
being there; likewise, if the cache of a page is old, over 2 weeks it’s
likely that the search engines have stopped to crawl this page for whatever
reason; this means that your link won’t be crawled and noticed even if is
follow and a high PR page.
No PageRank
Pages with no PageRank can’t help you improve your link popularity for the
simple reason that they don’t have any to give
Also keep in mind that what count is the PageRank score of the page you’ll have
your link on, not the PageRank score of the site linking to you.
If a site has PageRank of 6, but it links to your from a no PageRank page, what
you get is a worthless link from a no PR page, not a link from a PR6
page.
Exercise
Read and re-read this lesson until it all make sense to you, the understanding
of those concepts is what will make the difference in your competition
for the top ranking position for your keyword.
Link building is one of the most important work you can do in SEO, and it’s
extremely time consuming. It’s very easy to waste a lot of your precious
time building useless links for your site. Learn to identify quality links, and
how to avoid useless one for your own benefits!
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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