How Building Quality Links To Your Website May Dominate Your SEO Strategy

PageRank and Link Equity

When I wrote “stronger” links, I am referring to a higher PageRank. PageRank is a mathematical formula from Google which assesses the quality and quantity of links to a webpage. This formula determines a score from 0 to 10 to rate the value and authority of a webpage.

Each of your webpages receives a small amount of PageRank “points” when they are created. A webpage’s PageRank points are different than the PageRank 0-10 scale. These points can reach the hundreds of thousands in top websites and can be distributed other websites through links. Each page of a website has a certain amount of points which can be passed to a single webpage through a single link or multiple websites through multiple links. There is a maximum amount of points that can be passed. Let’s imagine that your webpage has 100 points and two links. 50 points would go to one webpage and 50 to the other. It isn’t exactly 50/50 because of the finer details of the mathematical process behind the PageRank point distribution, but it is close to it. What tools can we use to determine PageRank?

Moz leading the way

Tools from Moz.com, such as the Open Site Explorer, can help you get information about links to your site. Open Site Explorer has a metric called Page Authority which is their estimate of Google’s PageRank. This is calculated very closely to what is believed to be used by Google.

In addition, Moz has a metric called Domain Authority which is an estimate to a site’s overall authority which uses calculations different from Google. Part of these calculations include the relevancy of a page link compared to the site being linked too. If your page is selling soft candy and there are home improvement or gym workout webpages linking to your site, you will not receive the same scores and points if, let’s say, Hershey or Nestle. Make sure you are trying to get links from authoritative sites in your market!

The "Do Nots" of Link Building

Matt Cutts, former head of the Webspam team at Google, says, “It segments you into a mindset and people focus on the wrong things.” He said this to warn people about being too focused on getting rankings because many people do things because of the ranking even if it makes no sense from a marketing perspective. The system works much better if you promote your business effectively. Matt Cutts also warns people about using guest blogging to establish links. Too many people have used this tactic with low quality information just to gain a higher ranking with Google. However, when used correctly, guest blogging can really help your link building on quality sites.

A method of gaining rank that is sure not to work is voting for yourself. Votes which are not editorially given will not help your ranking. Artificially inflating the votes you received will not work as well.

When in doubt, ask yourself, “Would I have invested time in this link if Google did not exist?” If the answer is “no” then the link most likely doesn’t have much value. Or you could ask, “Would I show this link to a client as a quality and authoritative link?” Simply put, if you have to argue about it, it probably is not a very good link. How about paying for a link?

Paying someone to put your link on their site doesn’t work because it is not editorially given. But what about trading links with other people? What if these people are also in your market? This is common practice and can be seen with sharing likes on social media. Google does claim that they can recognize when the links have been traded and gives those links virtually no value. However, when there is a very strong connection between companies in relevancy, there is value to trading links.

More "Do Nots" of Link Building

Google’s Penguin algorithm update automatically lowers rankings for sites that have many non-editorial links. Stuffing a bunch of links into a press release is a tactic that aims to get more editorial links. This method has been proven to fail with Google’s newer algorithms. There are a number of sites where you simply submit your article to an article directory.

These directories were used in older SEO techniques but now is considered voting for yourself in most cases. A little bit of directory link building in more authoritative sites such as DMOZ and Bestoftheweb could add a small value, but just remember that these links are not worth very much.

Establishing links to countries where you don’t do any business is also a red flag. This goes back to the point we made earlier; don’t establish links that are irrelevant to your business just for the sake of gaining links. Speaking of this point, don’t go and blanket chat forums with your link. We all see this on popular forums and video comments. You can still make a very relevant comment in a very relevant forum. This could be a good strategy in small doses, in fact. Just don’t be to spammy.

Good Link Building Tactics

We talked about stuffing links into a press release as a poor link building strategy. But don’t exclude press releases as a poor tactic overall. Press releases are good when picked up by the media and shared on social media or their website.

A very popular mixed media tactic to build links is with Infographics. Infographics are pack a large amount of information in a small graphic. The impact of a well-made infographic is often underestimated. Just make sure the Infographic is relevant, accurate and easy to understand.

Widgets are a way to increase links. An example of a widget would be a small application that gives you your mortgage rate or a small quiz game that can be put on a website. Some SEO tacticians have used widgets to add links to a site that a website owner did not editorially place which contain anchor text that the owner doesn’t control.

Be careful with widgets! These should not be used unless they are highly relevant but when used properly, they can be a real asset. Normally you would place “created by (your site) somewhere in your widget or around it to link back to your site. Take caution in using too many widgets this way. Google may not consider this a valid citation. Widgets should be fun, engaging and useful.

Web Feeds

Syndicating your content correctly is another good link building strategy. Syndication is content on your site published on another site. Usually, a web feed from your site is used on another site. A web feed is a summary of your website’s newly added content. This makes it easy for people interested in your new updates to not have to keep coming back to your site to know about content updates. The web feed is embedded with links back to your website. It is not good practice to do this on a high scale, but if the website promoting your feed has a higher authority, then it can be very beneficial. Just make sure the website that links to your feed is not linking to your homepage, but the page with the information. You may have heard or seen RSS Feeds around the web. RSS feeds are a type of Web Feed and is explained very well with this Youtube Video:

Don’t limit yourself to only one link from a certain site. Many marketers believe that multiple links from the same site will not be as valuable as a single link. Well, imagine that your published an article for the Washington Post. It would be quite impressive, but imagine that instead of an article, you published a whole column. It would be more impressive, and search engines try and see it this way as well. They want to value content in the same way as you would.

Social Media SEO

SEO from social media is really a topic of its own. There are many additional content marketing techniques and viral marketing techniques that are unique to the social media platforms. If you want some more information on how the power of social media link building can skyrocket your online business click HERE.