In preparation for a presentation this week on the importance of link building and steps to an efficient and effective link building strategy, I am putting together blog posts this week which reflect my philosophy on link building, and what I have learned over the years.
Is it all too often that a company embarks on a link building campaign before making sure their web site is ready for the influx of links which will assist with search engine rankings. Many companies expect, despite the quality or relevance of their web site, that numerous anchor text rich links from relevant sites will immediately boost their search rankings after 3 or 4 months.
If the target site itself is fully optimized, or somewhat search engine friendly, then the benefits of link building will substantially increase.
Give Your Site a Tune Up
Like you would do to your vehicle before a long road trip, before going about a link building campaign, give your site an inspection and tune up. Here are some quick steps :
1. Make sure some of your desired keywords are in your title tag, in content h1 tag and within your site content. This may sound basic, but you’d be surprised as to the number of sites which do linking building and have overlooked basic SEO principles.
I suggest running your site through Website Grader to get a good idea of what it may be missing. Website Grader will compare your site to your competition, identify correct usage of keywords and also look for duplicate content issues such as using the same title tag on each page, which can kill you search rankings.
For some tips on basic on-site SEO read these :
- 12 Basic On-Site SEO Tactics for Optimized Results
- Don’t Sour Your Link Juice By Forgetting Basic SEO
2. If your company is planning on making changes to its internal URL structure within the next 3 months, then hold off on link building until then. Do not spend a fortune with a link building consultant or company and then change your site’s entire design or URL structure. It makes much more sense to wait because even though a 301 redirect will help transfer the link juice from the old URL’s to the new ones, direct links are much better.
3. Run Xenu Link Sleuth on your site. Link Sleuth is one of my favorite SEO oriented tools on the market and its free, just download the tool onto your PC and run a quick link check on your site. What Link Sleuth does is check web sites for broken links, images, outbound links, files … etc. to find parts of your site which are broken.
If your site has numerous issues such as broken pages, broken links, broken outbound links and missing images or script; your link building and SEO campaigns will only go so far and your ranking will hit a plateau.
Why? Because Google thinks your site is under construction if you have too many broken pieces. And Google does not want to serve broken sites to their users.
The Time Has come to Clean Up Your Own Backyard
One thing you can do, or have a linking professional embark on, is making sure that your site is getting the most value out of its existing links. The answer to linking can be right under your nose, you just have to look down and figure out what the smell is.
Look into the sites you have partnered with or traded links with in the past.
How do they link to you? Do they link using your company’s URL, or with a descriptive word about your company?
If they link to you using your company URL (eg. GetWidgets.com) then they should be contacted and asked to change the link to “Get Widgets”, which reflects your company name and is now a valuable and keyword rich link.
The way sites link to you can also be controlled by your branding. If you brand yourself as GetWidgets.com, chances are you will be linked to using that text. But if you take advantage of the valuable keywords in your company name by branding yourself online as “Get Widgets”, then you can influence the way bloggers and publishers naturally link to you.
I’m working with a couple of companies right now, and have so over the years, which have attracted tens of thousands of natural backlinks from relevant sites in their field, but the majority of those links use the company URL as the anchor text.
Sometimes doing a little bit of link refurbishing to distribute the anchor targeted links amongst sites that already link to you can work wonders, redistributing the linking ratio and giving your site the needed boost and confidence to go out there and secure more targeted links.
Cleaned up? Good. Now you’re ready to embark on a link building campaign.
