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Four factors to consider when link building for search engine optimization.

No search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is complete or effective without a well-planned and executed, multi-pronged link building exercise.

Quite simply, search engines follow the scent of links to identify appropriate web pages and sites to crawl, index and rank. One can have all the good content that one can conjure up for a page, but if there aren’t (enough) “in-bound” links to the page, chances are that it will remain condemned to total obscurity, aka, search engine invisibility.

May be there was a time, light years ago (figuratively), when links did not mean as much; putting in hordes of keywords on a web page and stuffing the important meta tags with those same keywords simply did the trick in getting a site ranked high. Google changed the game forever by bringing in the concept of “Page Rank” - an indication of Google’s importance of a page based on, among other things, the link popularity of the page. Other search engines have grown smarter as well, factoring in link popularity into their ranking algorithms, thereby rendering link building imperative to SEO success.

It is also important to understand how the search engine spiders crawl the Internet to index fresh pages to understand why links from external sites are important for a website. The search robots “jump” from one link to another, and thus, one site to another. Obviously, different websites are crawled at different times; therefore it is only logical that if a site has links from a large number of external websites, the chances of it being crawled more frequently increase significantly. Getting pages crawled and indexed is obviously the first step to greater search engine visibility.

Use internal link building to get enormous value

One aspect that seldom gets mentioned in the same breath when discussing link building is the importance of internal link building. As websites grow with the addition of more content pages, the opportunity to cross link and cross market pages increases significantly. However, in the rush to get links from external websites, this aspect is often ignored.

The benefits of internal cross linking are significant. For one, they provide easier accessibility to pages that may otherwise be too buried in the navigation schema or information architecture of a site.

Secondly, one has greater control on the internal links, from deciding where to place these links to what the anchor text should be. Moreover, this sort of link building can be done much faster than getting external inbound links.

Internal links can be built from various locations, be it from primary navigation, secondary navigation, site “breadcrumbs”, within body content or even footer links. Obviously, one location that the link must definitely find a place on is the site map, which should itself be linked from the home page.

“Choose thy neighborhood”

Where one gets links from will have a large consequence on the effectiveness of the link building campaign. A few good links from high quality, topically relevant and reputed sites will have much more weightage than getting a very large number of links from irrelevant and low quality websites. What’s worse is that just as people are known by the company they keep, the kind of sites that link to a website may have a bearing on how a search engine perceives the site to be. This “perception” (of course, all controlled by search algorithms) can affect search engine rankings adversely.

Since it can be very difficult to get links removed after they have been obtained, it is important to ensure that there is an established quality assurance and quality control process in place in identifying the sites that are being approached for getting inbound links.

Use the right anchor text when building links

Until about a year or so ago, the prevalent wisdom was that if the goal is to optimize for a particular keyword, then all the anchor text linking to the web page in question should use that keyword or keyword phrase. However, that seemed too unnatural to be valid for too long. After all, the objective of any natural SEO project is to make everything seem natural or organic.

Not only that, search engines are increasingly reported to take into account the words preceding and succeeding the anchor text to detect attempts at manipulating the link popularity.

Therefore, it is very important to write anchor texts carefully and use various different combinations when building links, whether internal or external. One should also pay greater attention to the text surrounding the anchor text to give it a very natural “environment”.

Also, since search “long tail” (keyword phrases that are usually more than 2-3 words long) marketing seems to be gaining more ground with suggestions of better converting traffic, search marketers are well advised to consider using “long tail keyword phrases” for their anchor texts.

Control the pace of link building 

The operative word in search engine optimization is “natural”. Therefore, building links at an unnaturally fast pace may trigger red flags and potentially cause a website to be penalized.

Therefore when embarking on a link building campaign, search marketers should try to make it seem “evolutionary” by building links in a staggered manner or at a controlled pace.

The key to controlling the pace at which inbound links are generated is in using a combination of link building methods at different stages of the link building campaign. We will discuss some of the recommended link building strategies in part 2 of this series on link building.