By : Admin

Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time, revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. Whilst most people understand that links are important, they generally don’t understand why this is so. In a nutshell, a link to your site has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is better than a link from a site having a completely different topic. An important site’s link to yours carries more weight.

All the thinking webmasters worked diligently to build links in order to subvert the search engine rankings and gain an advantage to themselves at the expense of everyone else. Google simply don’t approve of willy-nilly link-building schemes, and have recently tightened the screws a bit more, in two notable ways.

Bad Links

Some links are bad. For example, if you are a car sales company and you’ve got dozens of completely irrelevant links to international hotel sites. These links are nothing but useless crap. These links are going to help you in no way!

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links are still of some value, providing the link titles are explicit, and if the page they link to you from has a higher Page Rank than the page from which you link to them. The concept of a link to you being a vote for you, and being added to your sites Total Vote Count has a flip side. A link from you to someone else essentially deducts one vote from your total vote count… meaning its value is minimal when compared to a 1-way incoming back-link!

One-Way Outward Links

You’ll be hemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be smart about it, because there is nothing to be gained by you from linking to any site that does not link back. So make sure your links include the “nofollow” attribute that tells Search Engine’s that the link is not a vote by your site for that site!

Link Content

This is mission critical because Google and others have decided that they can’t trust you to be honest about your site! Google decided that it is essential that there is some external correlation between what you say your site is about, and what other people say your site is about. This is done by analyzing the words in the Link Title on all links pointing to your site. Bottom line here is - if a keyword phrase does not appear on links to your site, you will not rank for that phrase!

For many established sites, this is the main reason they might have experienced a noticeable decline in rankings in the last few months. Older sites will have a majority of incoming links based on their business name, and not on their activities / products / services / location etc.

Backlink analysis reveals this shortcoming rather quickly and it is possible to remedy this by building 1-way incoming back-links using multiple Title or Description combinations that contain a good spread of relevant keywords. It does require some keyword research, and it is tedious - but if you don’t do it, you are certainly not going forwards, however, your competitors might be.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit