Saturday, February 28th, 2009

1) Varied anchor text

Acquiring links that contain the keywords you’re targeting in the anchor text of the link is a proven method of increasing your search engine rankings. Nevertheless, only concentrating on building links with the same anchor text can have a negative impact on your rankings. The search engines see all of your inbound links and can analyze them to determine if there is a natural variation in the anchor text.

Recommendation: Roughly 70% of your inbound links should contain your relevant keywords in the anchor text. The remaining 30% should be allocated to variations that contain your relevant keywords, less relevant keywords/phrases and variations of your company name.

2) Acquire links from related pages

A backlink is usually beneficial from unrelated pages of content but is much more valuable from related pages. The search engines are able to determine the relevancy of your content compared to the content of the page and website the link resides. The search engines also take this one step further and check the inbound links to the website your link resides and determine the relevancy of those links to both your content and the linking website’s content.

Recommendation: The quality of inbound links will help your rankings increase by a larger margin than links from non-relevant pages and websites. These links are harder to acquire and will generally cost more but they are well worth it.

3) Vary the position of links (top of the page, inside body text, footer, etc.)

The best backlinks are usually “inside body text” links. Although, the search engines still need to see natural variation in the position of your backlinks in order to determine that you aren’t artificially increasing your rankings through link purchases.

Recommendation: Acquire links from different positions on websites. Utilizing different types of link building methods and services will usually help you achieve this goal and provide greater variation in your link profile.

4) Build links gradually and naturally

The search engines know when you receive inbound links. An unnatural increase in inbound links can prompt a human review of your backlink profile.

Recommendation: If you don’t have a large number of existing backlinks, don’t acquire too many links at once. Gradually increase your acquisition of backlinks each month until you have reached your optimal monthly budget for link building. It is even better to build a small amount of links every month than it is to purchase a certain amount of links for a short period of time and then stop building links all together.

5) Varied PR value

The value of Page Rank isn’t what it used to be in the search engines. Nevertheless, there still is a small correlation between the PR of the page that a link resides and the value it provides to your link profile.

Recommendation: Don’t only acquire links from websites with high PR or low PR. There needs to be a natural variation in the PR of the links in your profile. The ratio of low PR to high PR links will always be much greater and should remain that way when you’re acquiring links. Only acquiring high PR backlinks could have a negative effect on your rankings.

6) Good Neighborhoods

The search engines organize every website into neighborhoods based upon their link profile and their relationship between other websites. You want your website to be in a good neighborhood and preferably in a high quality neighborhood. Usually your link building practices will determine the quality of your neighborhood. You also don’t want to link to websites that are in bad neighborhoods.

Recommendation: Place some outbound links on your website to high quality websites in your vertical. When acquiring backlinks, make sure the links aren’t coming from suspect verticals such as gambling websites. Try to acquire as many backlinks from high quality websites in your vertical. One of these links could make an enormous difference in the determination of your neighborhood and your ability to rank better in the search engines. If you are unable to acquire a one-way link from these websites, a reciprocal link will also provide great value.

7) Links from different C-class IPs

Severs that host websites have unique C-class IPs. Some websites are hosted on dedicated servers and others are on servers that are shared by multiple websites. The search engines detect the C-class IPs of the websites that link to your website. More than one link from the same C-class IP will not provide the same value for your link profile.

Recommendation: This is difficult to determine when you’re doing link acquisition. The best recommendation we can give you is don’t expect the same value from links if they are placed on multiple websites owned by the same person or company. Generally, you won’t run into this issue with normal link building methods.

8) Age/Trust

Links from old websites are better than links from new ones. Certain websites also carry a higher trust rank in the eyes of the search engines.

Recommendation: You want a mix of new and old websites in your link profile. Websites with higher trust rank are usually the same websites that are leaders and popular resources in your industry, great links, if you can get them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 11:36 am and is filed under Brian Ratzker, Link Building, SEO. 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.