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Good Linking Strategies for SEO Ranking |
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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the latest buzz word amongst webmasters and internet marketers. Everyone’s competing for that top spot on the search engine results page, but with so many racing to overtake the one in front of them, website owners are becoming desperate and are ‘clutching at straws’ to try to beat their competitors.
What Constitutes A Good Linking Strategy?
A good linking strategy comprises of three core parts: Internal links (links within a website to related content), Inbound Links (links from other websites citing your website) and External Links (links from your website to external authority or expert websites whose content compliments your own.
Internal Links
Before embarking on a search engine ranking project for your website, ensure that you have given substantial thought to your linking strategy. Ensure that you have created a strong layer of generic landing pages and carefully align these pages vertically or horizontally to the relevant themes ensuring that the important keywords or key phrases that have been selected for those themed pages are distributed across the page in a natural, spam-free manner.
External Links
Too many websites are creating pages with hundreds of external links to other top ranking or authoritative websites. Google will only count the first 100 links, so anything more than that is not going to be considered. Search Engines place emphasis on websites that are considered authority websites (or experts) and as such, when linking to an external website it is more important to establish if the website is in a clean neighbourhood (not on a server with other blocklisted websites) and more importantly, that this website does not participate in linking farms.
Inbound Links
Similarly, it is imperative to establish exactly who links to you. When websites offer to link to your website - or simply just link to your website without you even knowing - find out if these sites have a clean record and are not involved in link-farming or live on bad servers. When a good clean authority website offers to ‘cite’ you on their website, accept the link and request that they link to you using your keywords or key phrases as part of their anchor text.
Linking Myths
There are a number of ‘myths’ that are still being tired and tested by website owners every day. Link swapping is just one of them. It is alarming to still find so many website owners (and top publishers) offering to barter a link swap as part of their so-called ‘linking strategy’. A quality linking strategy is just one of the very strong legs that will keep a good website ranked highly on search engines. Experienced SEO analysts such as Bruce Clay has confirmed that, although link swapping may not get you blacklisted, it certainly won’t help your rankings either. The internal link simply cancels out the external link to the same website.
Another popular technique practiced so frequently by website owners these days is to buy as many links as they can on other websites with high page ranking. (This is the ranking that Google gives to pages out of 10 in order to demonstrate the overall importance of a website. A high ranking out of 10 does not necessarily help a website’s rankings). Search Engines (such as Google) are highly intelligent and can identify when a link exists on a website that is predominantly seen by its spider as an advertising website, and as a result it automatically assumes that this link has been paid for thereby offering little or not credit as part of the websites ranking score. Unfortunately this too does not help a website’s ranking on search engines.
Gillian Meier - Internet Marketing Strategist & SEO Analyst at Blue Magnet Web Intellect says: “It is not about how many highly ranked pages you can link to, but rather about how many quality websites you cite and how many authority websites are citing you.
© Copyright Blue Magnet Web Intellect
July 2007
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