Importance of linking
Linking is a very important part of SEO. Websites need to be linked to if they want to be found on the internet and gain traffic. When a website is newly created it takes some time to be indexed in the search engines, being linked to from other websites makes this process accelerate. Search engines think the more websites linking to your webpage, the more important your webpage will be. Getting quality backlinks improves the importance of your webpage.
When talking about linking you must know there is a difference in linking.
- Inbound: When a website links to your page. Keywords should be used in the anchor text differentiating from meaningless words.
- Outbound: When linking from your website to another. Be sure to link to quality sites and use proper keywords which describe the website your are linking to. Search engines think webpages linking to each other have relevant content.
- Internal: When linking within your website to all the pages.
Quality Backlinks
Considering inbound linking or backlinking you must remember that having a lot of backlinks from pages with no relevance to your website or being overpopulated with links contribute almost nothing to your site’s ranking. Definitely the latter should be avoided as linking farms are not that popular with Google them selfs. You might want to spend some time acquiring quality backlinks as they are of great importance.
Quality backlinks include coming from a page:
- which is relevant to your subject
- that has few links to other pages
- that has a high pagerank (only for google)
- which is an authority site
- with has diversity in IP
Acquiring quality backlinks can be done by
- creating quality websites with quality content and naturally others will link to you.
- Asking related websites to link to you by sending a personal message, although not everyone is willing to do this for free.
- Pay for quality backlinks but remember to check the relevance of that website to your content.
- Posting comments on blogs and replies in forums which include your a link to your website.
Backlink anchor text
The anchor text is the text someone clicks on to open the hyperlink. Besides the fact that backlinks should come from quality sites they should also contain meaningful words in their anchor text, preferably the main keywords used on your website. When refraining from anchor text as “Click here” and use the keywords instead you give more value to the backlink for future visitors and search engines. Avoid the use of images as links, it might look pretty but does not contain an anchor text necessary for Google.
SEO Deeplinking
When other websites place backlinks to your website they mostly do it to your main page and hardly to the inner pages of your website. Every page on your website needs to be linked to in order to get indexed. Links should be created from your main page to sub pages and from sub pages again to their sub pages. Actually every link from within your site is a backlink and cause every sub page is a page as any other it needs backlinks to be noticed. When people start linking to different pages on your website their pagerank will increase and so will the overall rating of your website.
Linking Strategies
When creating links to your site you want people to be linking to your site without having to link back to that same website, this is called one way linking. With one way linking you get all the points divided by the amount of links on that page. Most link building experts look very hard for these type of links.
Acquiring one way linking might not be easy and most people seek help in getting links by submitting their site to directories (websites linking to other sites and categorize them), pay other sites to link to you or have good content people want to link to. Instead of acquiring one way linking people find it more easy to create reciprocal links where they find websites to link to their site by providing a link back. For a long time reciprocal links where the way to go till Google decided to lower the value of links that are reciprocal what makes them less popular.
An alternative to the reciprocal links is three way linking where you set up linking between 3 websites instead of one. When linking from site A to site B, from Site B to site C and site C links back to A you create three one way links. When the sites are from relevant topics then this strategy becomes very powerful in SEO as they pass their PR to websites which will indirectly have effect on their own PR.