SEO Truths: Not all Links are equal
Anyone involved with SEO knows that Link Building is essential for maintaining good listings. But, you may or may not be aware that not all links are equal.
I often get clients tell me they ‘don’t have enough links’ because they’ve spoken to someone ‘who knows about SEO, who says they need more links’. Now, they may have a point, their backlinks may seem slight on first looks, but what they may not be aware of is that it is quality, not quantity that we look for in link building.
Anyone can buy hundreds of links but in my experience this is often a pointless and costly exercise. There is no point building links for the sake of it. You need to look at each link for it’s own individual merit and how it will benefit the site in question.
How do you know which links are best?
- Relevancy
I put relevancy high up on my list of attributes I believe links should have. This is because a link from a relevant source is much more powerful than a link from somewhere unrelated. - High PageRank Source
If the page you link from has a high PageRank (PR) then some of that PR will ‘leak’ out to your site. - How many other links are on the page?
I often have to ask myself this question, because the fewer the links out the stronger the link will be. PR gets divided up amongst all the links on the page, so a page with a PR 4, but with only one other link will be much more powerful than a link from a PR 6 page with 40 links out. - To ‘Follow’ or ‘Not to Follow’
That is the question… A ‘follow’ link is more powerful than a ‘no follow’ link. ‘No Follow’ was originally created as a backlash against spam commenting on blogs (which still goes on, unfortunately). That isn’t to say that ‘no follow’ links are useless, they do have their place, and I think show that your link building activities are ‘natural’.
Where do you find ‘good’ links?
I think one of the best places to start for link building is your competitors backlink profile. Check Yahoo Site Explorer, and drill down the list of links. There must be some places amongst the list that you can approach for links.
You could also start to ‘think outside the box’ at this point and think of similar industries to your own where you could get links from – remember relevancy is important.
Another place to look for links is from your suppliers, do they have a website? If so, could you ask them for a link?
What keyword do I need in my link?
This question has a simple answer… ‘The Keyword you are optimising for, of course?’ But I would elaborate a bit further here, don’t link everything back to the homepage, make sure you link to your internal pages where possible as well. This will strengthen your domain and help support your website.
I would also add that if you only optimise for one keyword, then it would be a good idea to create a few keyword combinations with that one keyword in and link build using variety. This is because a large amount of keywords with the same anchor (link) text going to the same site will trigger ‘alarm bells‘ at Google HQ, so avoid this by maintaining a healthy amount of variety in your link building activities.
So there you are, next time ‘someone who knows about SEO‘ tells you that ‘you don’t have enough links’ tell them: ‘it’s quality over quantity’. And remember, one quality link can be worth a lot more than a hundred ‘bad’ (useless) links.
