The single most important thing you can do to increase natural search rankings is establishing as many high value incoming links to your site as possible through a link building campaign.  Given the fact that search engines measure a site’s popularity by the quantity and quality of links that lead back to the website, link building is not only an excellent way to drive traffic but it is a critical factor towards improving search engine ranking.

The following details link building best practices and the steps one needs to take to implement a successful campaign.

Create a natural incoming link structure

Search engines value the natural acquisition of links to a site and strongly devalue links that they perceive as being acquired artificially.  If a search engine determines that one is gaming the system through the artificial acquisition of links, the site risks being penalized, hence losing its ability to rank well for targeted keyword phrases.  Therefore, it is extremely important to recognize the difference between what is perceived as an artificial versus a natural link.  If the anchor text (the text displayed in the hyperlink when linking to a specific site), varies from link to link then search engines are more likely to identify the link acquisition as natural, whereas if the anchor text is identical in each backlink, then one risks being perceived as acquiring artificial links.

Additionally, the percentage of reciprocal links versus one-way links to you site is an important factor to consider. A high percentage of reciprocal links will trigger a red flag that links have been acquired artificially, suggesting the site is not adding value to the search engine user.  To ensure a site’s increasing link volume appears natural, it is important to maintain low percentage of reciprocal links.

Lastly, the rate at which links are acquired is taken into account by the search engines.  Increasing link volume must appear as a natural progression, instead of happening all at once.  Placing 10 quality inbound links to your site a week is a better strategy than placing 2,000 links in one day.  The search engines will notice link volume spikes that were unlikely to have happened due to Internet users’ true interest in your site’s content and deem them as unnatural.

Get quality incoming links from quality sites

Establishing inbound links are not useful unless those links come from reputable, popular sites. Because some links may hurt your site, or have no effect on it at all, it is extremely important to properly evaluate the quality of links so that your SEO efforts are maximized.

For starters, be sure that links to your site are listed on other high quality Web sites. If a website that is ranked highly in the search engines links to you and has many relevant inbound links to it, it will share some of their link juice (ranking power created by quality and volume of links) with your site. This is more powerful than having an incoming link from a website that only has one or two inbound links and is not recognized by the engines. Furthermore, try and identify Web sites that share a common content theme with yours and avoid Web sites that may be offensive to readers, such as sites that feature adult content or those that slander public figures.

Get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links

Descriptive anchor text gives the search engines clues as to what your site’s content consists of and makes them more likely to crawl and index it.  As an example, if you are selling computer software, it will be exponentially more valuable to have the anchor text of an inbound link read “computer software solutions” than simply listing “click here.”  It is also important to closely match a link’s anchor text to the targeted keyword phrases of the page you are driving traffic to. 

Go for deep links

A deep link is defined as one that points to a page other than your homepage.  Make sure that some of your incoming links point to sub-pages within your site, instead of only directing traffic to your homepage.  This allows one to optimize for more pages and provides an argument to the search engines that the whole site is of value versus just the “front door.”

Ensure that the URL format of your referring links is consistently identical

Do you know that…
your-site.com
your-site.com/
www.your-site.com
www.your-site.com/
…are four different URLs even though they direct the Web visitor to the same Web page? If this is the case with your site and those linking to you are using different links, you are diluting your page rank—not good! Do everything possible to standardize your incoming URL structure in order to help produce the maximum relevancy-boost possible from incoming links. This topic is further discussed in a previously posted blog: What is URL Canonicalization?

Remember that improved rankings are your goal

Focus your time on building a link strategy that will generate the highest rankings in the engines. Be sure your title tags match the anchor text of offsite links and focus on targeting high pagerank sites that can share some of their link juice with your website. Be patient! Though this can be a slow process a focused and steady approach will yield long term success.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Link Building, Rise Interactive, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.