When it comes to building links, many people chase authority as the holy grail of link building. The theory is that the more authoritative sites that link to yours, the better your search result rankings will be. And while authority does play a part in ranking results, it is by no means the only part, and some believe that relevancy, and not authority should be held as the strongest metric to strive for. As a relevancy-first link building firm, Page One Power deeply believes in the philosophy of relevancy over authority. Continue reading “Relevancy Link Building and Why it Makes the Difference” »
Author Archive | Justin Gilmore
Now that Penguin has hit and some of the dust has settled, you may be wondering which links you should be pursuing for your e-commerce site. The new update has changed some links that were previously good for SEO and made them detrimental. So which are still good and which should be avoided? Read on to find out which type of links to avoid when link building.
First it is helpful to review some of the major types of links that exist out there. Below is a short list.
- Directory links
- Blog Comments
- Guest Posting
- Article Marketing
- Profile links
- Content links
- Black blogs/blog networks
- Anchor text links
So which of these strategies should you avoid in your link building?
DoFollow Blog Comments
DoFollow blog comments are hard to find anyway, but those that exist get hammered by SEOs. You should avoid them or use them in a very limited fashion. A large DoFollow blog comment footprint looks very unnatural to search engines. Go for NoFollow blog comments instead to round out your backlink profile.
Black Blogs/Blog Networks
Black blogs and blog networks should be avoided at all costs. Recent updates have rendered these very poisonous to your backlink profile. If you have any of these in your link profile, you should work on removing as many as you can.
Exact Anchor Text Links
Anchor text links are still a great link to get, especially if your brand or company name is in them. However, if you have an anchor text profile that contains large amounts of exact-match anchor text, you’re going to have a bad time.
Links on Low-Quality Sites
You should also avoid links on low quality sites from now on as well. Recent updates have begun dropping the rankings of sites that have links on low content, low authority, and low quality sites. Make sure your backlink profile does not contain too many of these links or you may pay for it later on.
Keyword-Rich Anchor Text in Directories
Your goal with directory links should be to get your brand or company listed and not to get your keywords in anchor text. Do not target directories looking to get your keywords in anchor text as this looks unnatural on your backlink profile. Save keyword anchor text for guest posting or content links.
So now that you know what links you should avoid, you probably want to know which links you should be targeting the most. The answer to that question is guest posting and content links. These two strategies are very good sources of quality white-hat links. Guest posting is an obvious strategy, but content links are a bit harder to wrap your head around. Content links involve creating and hosting great original content and then having people link to it. This is a great strategy because people come to you for a link rather than you coming to them as with guest posting. This is really the crown jewel of link building.
So if you are undertaking a link building strategy, make sure to avoid the types of links mentioned above so you can stay on the good side of search engine updates now and in the future.
Author bio: Justin Gilmore is a Web Content Developer for Page One Power, a link building firm.
Anchor text is a crucial aspect of link building. Search engines have very specific ways of evaluating and categorizing anchor text within their search algorithms. Because it can get very complicated, many link builders struggle with getting anchor text right. But do not fret, because I have laid out the four most common anchor text blunders so you can avoid them.
Lack of Understanding
To get anchor text right, you need to have a firm grasp on how it works first. You need to understand how search engines treat anchor text when crawling pages and ranking them in search results. Specifically, you need to know what attributes that they consider to give them more importance. Search engines ascribe more importance to:
Anchor text that is placed high on the page
- Anchor text within large blocks of content
- The words immediately surrounding anchor text
Knowing how search engines deal with anchor text will help you to use them to the greatest effect.
Lack of Variation
Anchor text links back to your site are crucial for obtaining high rankings in search engine results. However, having too many links with identical anchor text can set off alarm bells in search engine algorithms because a natural link profile does not usually contain the exact same anchor text over and over. Search engines will pick up on this pattern, and may then brand your backlink profile as having too many “unnatural links”. Needless to say, this will have a negative effect on your search result rankings. It is best to have a few different anchor text words or phrases for each page to which you are linking. Below are some examples.
<a href=http://www.acmecookiebakery.com>fresh baked organic cookies
<a href=http://www.acmecookiebakery.com>fresh organic cookies</a>
<a href=http://www.acmecookiebakery.com>organic cookies freshly baked</a>
So remember to vary your keywords and anchor text phrases in order to maintain a more natural backlink profile to stay in the good graces of search engines.
Lack of Focus
Search engines look to anchor text to get a sense of what the linked page is about. So if you use vague or common terms for your anchor text, the value of those links is low because it is not giving search engines a good sense of what content the linked page contains. Trying to rank for very common and vague keywords is not going to do your rankings any good. Some examples of unfocused anchor text are below.
Try our fresh organic <a href=http://www.acmecookiebakery.com>cookies</a>.
Try our fresh<a href=http://www.acmecookiebakery.com>organic</a> cookies.
The key words “organic” and “cookies” are far too general for you to ever get your page to rank for. There are thousands of types of cookies and places to buy them. The term organic is even worse because it can describe anything from food to clothes to chemistry. So be sure to keep your anchor text focused and target very specific keywords.
Lack of Relevancy
Relevancy is a huge part of search engine ranking algorithms. Search engines crawl pages and use a variety of methods to determine what the page is about. Some of the key ways they determine this is from the meta description and keywords. Using this information, search engines can determine how closely pages and sites relate to each other. This is important because if you post a link using organic cookie anchor text on a website about automobiles, search engines will not see relevancy in that and will devalue the link accordingly. So make sure that your link and your anchor text are place on pages where they make sense to keep the relevancy factor high.
Author bio: Justin Gilmore is a Web Content Developer for Page One Power, a link building company.
Guest Posting: What NOT to do
During my time as a link builder, I have discovered many effective strategies for conducting a successful guest posting plan. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, link building is the final frontier, as it is the one aspect of SEO that is never finished. Link building is also the most difficult SEO strategy to get right. Guest posting exists as a strategy within link building, and it is often the bread and butter of a link building plan. So while I could regale you with stories of my successes at guest posting, I think it is more fun to shine light on my mistakes. So read on to learn what my experience with guest posting has taught me NOT to do.
Do NOT Underestimate the Task
Guest posting is an enormous undertaking that involves hours of researching, planning, organizing, communication, and writing. Do not take on the task of guest posting lightly, as your results will surely suffer for it. Getting a guest posting operation off the ground is going to take some time and effort as you develop a strategy, learn the ropes, and create an organizational and management system. Keeping track of your research and content is crucial to being efficient at guest posting, so great care must be taken when developing these systems. Failing to create a system to manage and record research and content is an easy way to waste valuable time and effort.
Do NOT Conduct Research Poorly
Research is the fuel that powers the guest posting engine. Without conducting research, you will have no clue as to the nature of the site you are trying to build links for. Even if the site is your own, you will need to know who you are in competition with for keywords. If you start looking for blogs to post on without doing proper research, you may find that you have targeted the wrong keywords or niche, which greatly reduces the power of your links, as they do not provide the relevancy that search engines look for. Knowing and researching your competition will give you insight into their link building strategies and will give you insight into how your own strategy should work.
Do NOT Search Ineffectively
Once you have fully researched your site, its keywords, the competition, and the audience, you will need to use this data to search for relevant sites for which to guest post. To do this efficiently and properly, you will need to know how to format your searches in order to find sites that allow guest post which are also relevant and high quality while excluding sites which do not meet these requirements. If you are inept at formulating a search that returns useful results, you will have to wade through all of the junk results in your search results which will reduce efficiency.
Do NOT Aggravate Blog Owners
Contacting blog owners to initiate guest posting on their blog is a crucial aspect of guest posting. If you are rude, waste their time, or do not offer them something that they can use, you will find your guest posting efforts are fruitless. Blog owners are the gate keepers of guest posting links, and you must engage them in a manner that is likely to lead to the links that you desire. Blog owners are concerned with one thing: traffic. The more traffic they get, the more successful and profitable their site is. To this end, you must offer them something that is likely to get them the readers and the traffic they bring.
If you can avoid the above mistakes when implementing a guest posting plan, you will be off to a great start to a successful link-building campaign. After all, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others than it is to make them yourself.
Author bio: Justin Gilmore is a Web Content Developer for Page One Power, a link building Company.
