Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Specialists

Posts Tagged ‘links’

The ideal link profile

Monday, November 8th, 2010

Every site’s link profile is necessarily different. It’s the nature of sites, and the nature of SEO. As always, though, there are some commonalities between truly powerful links profiles, and it behoves every site owner to know about them.

If you’re accessing search engine optimization services, your SEO consultant will be working busily on your links profile. It’s a good idea to ask them about any areas you’re unsure of, for future reference. You can discuss links with our team at SEO Consult Australia. Getting bogged down in the specifics of your site, however, is actually going to be detrimental in the long term. It’s important for every site owner to know roughly what a good links profile looks like, so that they can continue to shape their own even as the site grows.

What does the ideal link profile look like?

There’s a fair amount of debate about what an ideal links profile should contain. The following represents a consensus of a sort, with types of links listed in order of importance:

  • Authority links with relevance to the keyword of the linked page.
  • Authority links.
  • Relevant links of a decent quality.
  • A couple of paid links.
  • Relevant links from sites on par with yours.
  • Free directory links, article site links, and other miscellaneous easy links.

As you might guess, the difficulty of obtaining the links is completely the reverse of their position in the pecking order. Authoritative, relevant links are incredibly hard to obtain, but you need fewer of them if you can bolster your profile with links of lesser value. A profile bursting with authoritative links is what you aim for, but a well-rounded links profile is what you should expect.

What does an abysmal link profile look like?

When it comes to terrible link profiles, it’s hard to say whether it’s worse to have one full of bad links or one without any links at all. They’re pretty much on par, although a truly horrible link profile does have the potential to come back and bite you in the rear.

Of the two examples, the one most site owners will be familiar with is the lack of links. This is not exactly easy to remedy, but it’s not that hard either. Start to build up your links profile by seeding links for yourself, and work to build relationships within your industry.

The second kind of abysmal profile is one that contains not just a bunch of low-quality links, but a large number of reciprocal links and maybe a link farm or two. This kind of links profile can do damage to the site, particularly if there’s any evidence of the site trading on its rankings to obtain links from others.

A third type of horrible links profile is one that contains a majority of paid links. This might work well in the short term, but as Google uncovers the sites selling the links, you lose your investment. Your links profile needs to be well-rounded to be of value to your search engine optimization in the long term.

Weave a Web of Relevancy

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Search engine optimisation is essentially about making your pages as relevant as possible to searches on your chosen keywords. This is not as straightforward a matter as it might at first appear. While your keyword research should give you an idea of the various related words you can use to build up relevance in your content, you can never really know if you’ve done enough.

Boosting your relevancy to your chosen keywords isn’t a matter of simply putting the right words in the right places. The search engines have become increasingly sophisticated over time, and now a number of factors play on the relevancy of a site to a word. In order to show that your page is truly relevant to the search term, you need to leave a number of clues that can be read in a number of ways.

How to build your page’s relevance to your keyword:

1. Use a number of related terms. Your keyword is just a part of the search equation. In the English language, words have a number of connotations. The way we interpret them depends on whatever’s at the forefront of our minds at the time. For example, anyone overhearing the word ‘avatar’ five years ago would never have connected the conversation with an image of lithe blue beings in a lush, psychedelic forest. These days, other connections are virtually impossible.

The influence of interpretation is what makes thorough keyword research so vital. You need to be able to predict which words the search engines are going to associate with your main keywords. To do this, you can go to the source, for example with Google’s Wonder Wheel search option which reveals connected search terms. For related keywords with longevity, however, it’s better to do some customer research and see what your target user group thinks.

2. Form links with your link anchors. Once you have a web of related terms, you need to establish them on your pages. You also need to support the page through links with related pages. You can do this to some extent with your site’s hyperlinks. Your SEO consultant is likely to advise you to hyperlink throughout your content to related pages in your site. You can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about using internal links to SEO advantage.

3. Ensure inbound links are relevant. One of the biggest mistakes sites make is in automatically directing inbound links to their home page. You’re not helping your search engine optimisation campaign in doing this. Neither the search engines nor internet users appreciate following a link to a page that has no relevance to their hunt for information.

Your inbound links will provide more support when they lead to relevant pages. For example, if your animal health site nets a link from the World Wildlife Fund’s ‘looking after domestic animals’ page, that link is going to provide a certain basic amount of value to your link profile. If the link leads to your specialist ‘how to look after your pet’ page, the link’s value increases.

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