SEO and Linking Campaigns
Be Careful Who You Associate With
Page links are critical when you’re attempting to elevate your natural search engine rankings. You may already know this, but did you know that changes in search engine algorithms have made who you link with more important than how many links you have?
Put simply, Google and the other big search engines are making it harder to manipulate your ranking just by adding inbound links.
When you do link building for your web site, you should focus on your “linking neighborhood” and who you are associating with. What many shortsighted search engine marketers view as a hassle can become a great asset to your company if you follow a few simple optimization techniques.
Search Engines Are More Sophisticated
In theory, the search engines are becoming more sophisticated in their analysis of your site’s inbound linking map. As you probably know, Google’s PageRank algorithm, as originally set out, uses a democratic approach to analyzing the value/authority of a page. Each link to a page is a “vote” for that page - the more votes a page has the higher its importance. Combining PageRank with content analysis of the page, Google ranks pages and displays them in the results. However, this connectivity approach to calculating a page’s importance was, at first anyway, easy to manipulate, resulting in less relevant search results.
To maintain quality search results, Google continually updates and modifies their search algorithm. You can monitor that by reading their patent applications and research papers.
For example, the “Hilltop Algorithm” article (see related article entitled: “Hilltop: A Search Engine Based on Expert Documents”) discussed a refinement in page ranking - a sort of “corrected PageRank” - in which the topical relevance, or “authoritativeness” of your linking partner was taken into account when ranking pages. Your pages are ranked according to the number of “experts” that link to your page, relevant to the original search query.
A Google patent application, in March 2005, entitled “Information Retrieval based upon historical data”, discusses, in part, using historical, profiling data to refine the analysis of your site’s inbound links. The patent mentions concepts such as the “staleness” or “freshness” of your linking partner’s documents and content, the speed of your inbound link gain, the percentage of similar anchor text, the age of the linking partner’s page, the disappearance and reappearance rates of links, “link churn” and many other time-dependent variables.
This type of document profile pattern analysis would allow Google to detect both “spammy” and authoritative link growth behavior.
New Strategies for Linking Success
There are two factors you should keep in mind when calculating the success of potential links on your search engine rankings: (1) who you link from and (2) the theme of the page from which you link. For instance, if you sell greeting cards, linking from a site about golf doesn’t carry as much weight as links from sites within the greeting card industry or from business or trade association directories that list information about greeting cards.
In general, links from sites that are considered industry experts carry much more weight than links from irrelevant sites. Thus the importance of linking neighborhoods–linking with other sites relevant to your industry and from sites that are expert or authoritative.
Okay, enough theory. How do you use this information to enhance your natural search engine rankings? Here are some ideas:
High Quality Directories are still a good bet. In some cases, these can be trusted or expert sites. You may have to pay for the listing, but it is a good investment. You are listed in a topically relevant page with other sites related to yours. Some directory ideas include:
- www.dmoz.org
- dir.yahoo.com`
- www.business.com
- sbd.bcentral.com
- dir.whatuseek.com
- www.cannylink.com
- www.joeant.com
- www.chiff.com
- www.botw.org
.edu and .gov Sites - Many SEO experts believe that having links dispersed across top-level root domains demonstrates to the search engines that your site is a trusted authority. Use this to your advantage. Find educational and governmental sites to link from. Write and submit articles to these sites and include links back to yours.
Trade Publications - These are great sources for relevant links. For instance, Out of Bounds has a link from a niche online publisher in our industry (Internet Retailer). We are listed in their directory of search engine marketing agencies, which adds relevancy to our site for search engines and our customers.
Industry-specific online publishers - Can you find online publications in your industry? Even a paid link, or a online display ad, may be worth considering.
Member/Industry Trade Organizations - Member organizations offer many benefits. Are there any relevant associations you can join? A good example for someone in our industry - search engine marketing - would be to obtain (join the association and pay the fee) a link from the home page of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO). Their home page has a PageRank of 6 and is highly relevant.
Your Customers/Vendors - Although most will likely not be 100% topically relevant links - and only if it makes sense to your business and your customers - get links to your website from your satisfied customers and preferred vendors. Most companies will gladly add a link to your site if your respond in kind. Especially those that value the work you do.
3rd Party Hosted Content - In this case, what you do is develop content, articles, white papers, manuals, FAQ’s, or other subject related content that is distributed on other websites, and you embed links back to your site. In this case, you are establishing yourself as the expert in the subject matter. An example here could be if you sell business greeting cards and you write a few articles on “Using a Business Greeting Card Program for Client Retention.” These articles have a link back to your site and the articles are hosted, for example, on a business partner’s site, or an online publication in a niche industry.
Social Networking/Bookmarking/Tagging- Here, you add tags to your articles, images, and other content in your site’s library or resource center. Define tags to social bookmark sites such as: del.icio.us, flickr, technorati. You may be able to build some viral link building activity this way.
Linking Toolbox
There are tons of tools out there that you can use to help in this process. To help you find and analyze linking partners, and investigate who your competitors are linking to, try some of these tools:
- Link Harvester- Great tool from Aaron Wall for finding linking partners
- Hub Finder - Another great tool from Aaron Wall to find “hubs” or authoritative documents in your industry
- GoLexa - Type in one of your search phrases and get competitor’s linking information
- Google “Related” Command - use this to find “Hub” sites within Google
- Link Suggest Tool - Tool to find linking partners within your subject matter area
These are just a few ideas, but as you can see, you are only limited by your imagination and your time! By taking a methodical, long term, strategic approach to your link building campaign, you will be able to increase your search engine visibility and keep it there for a longer period of time. And, as always, the best link building strategy is centered around having good, interesting content on your site so that people WANT to link to you! Good luck with your link building efforts!
