Set Your Link Profile On A Solid Foundation

The building of a good link profile can be the most stressful period of an SEO campaign. Almost everything else can be done within your site, where you have complete control. Link building, however, is part of your off-page search engine optimization, where you have no control at all.

The difficulty involved in link building is what sets a lot of site owners into a panic. As with most things SEO, having a professional on board can reduce stress levels, and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult Australia for help, but it is always a stressful time. Some of that stress can be taken out of the process if you concentrate on your foundations.

Foundations are always a good thing to focus on when it comes to search engine optimization. They can provide a guideline of where to take your SEO. Concentrating on these areas gets your optimization off to a good start by building from the ground up. For on-page SEO, the foundations are your site’s structure and keywords. For off-page SEO, the foundations are influential sites.

What are foundation links?

Foundation links are the links that can provide a support base for your link profile. ‘Foundation sites’ may not always directly provide link juice to your website, and they’re often overlooked by newcomers to search engine optimisation for this reason. Regardless of their direct value, these links provide invaluable indirect support. They are important to your site’s reputation around the net.

Internet marketing has been aware of the worth of foundation sites for quite some time, and a good internet marketing campaign will feature foundation links as a matter of course. This is because setting up links on sites with high visibility establishes your site’s presence in the internet community. A good SEO campaign can learn from this.

Who provides foundation links?

There are two main types of foundation sites. First of all are the general foundation sites, ones that pretty much every business benefits from having a link from. These include Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, as well as general social bookmarking sites like Delicious. These sites might not provide much assistance to your search engine optimisation plan, as many of them have ‘nofollow’ on their outbound links.

The second level of foundation sites are those specific to your business and industry. These include local and industry directories, Chamber of Commerce sites, associations, conference sites, forums and other major sites in your industry. These sites often provide direct support to your SEO campaign, but may be a little bit harder to get a link from.

How do I find foundation sites?

The general foundation sites are easy to locate. The ones specific to your industry can be a little harder to find. Start out by making a list of all of the associations and groups that you know of. Then, augment that list with a simple Google search. A good technique is to search with ‘[industry keyword] conference’ or ‘[industry keyword] hobby’.

Related posts:

1. The ideal link profile
2. Building your link plan
3. Three signs of a quality link source
4. The elements of a link
5. How To Plan Your Link Structure

Tags: Keywords, off-page content, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO campaign, Yahoo SEO

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 8:35 am and is filed under SEO Linking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.