Link Building and Why it’s important

Okay,

So now you’ve got your site ready to go: you’ve developed META information, created an excellent internal linking web, and written compelling and optimized SEO copy; however, you’re still missing a key component to Search Engine Optimization - External Links.

External links differ from internal links because they originate outside of your site.  Search engines view external links as a ‘vote’ for your site, meaning another website trusts yours enough to post a link to your site on theirs.  That means a lot to search engines, and the higher ranked the sites that link to you, the more credibility your site will have.

You hear a lot of SEO’s talking about the fabled .edu link, which allegedly performs SEO magic to your site.  It’s true that .edu links are highly regarded as link gold because .edu sites are considered the ‘most reliable’ of all sites on the internet, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to obtain the SEO links, as your site must generally benefit college students in some way, and few do.  So don’t spend too many hours searching for that link - chances are, unless you have a relevant site, you won’t find it.  .Org links come next in the heirarchy, followed by everything else (.com, .net, etc.). 

Essentially, there are two types of external links: one way links and reciprocal links.  A one-way link is a link comes from a site you do not link to, a reciprocal link comes from a site you do link to.  Reciprocal links are often part of an exchange, in which you promise to post a link in exchange for the posting of your own link on another site.  

While building links to your site you want to keep in mind that higher ranked pages are viewed as more credible in the eyes of search engines, and unindexed pages (pages that carry no page rank) are rarely viewed by search engines and carry little or no value.

I’ll discuss the process of obtaining links in the next post.

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly Professional SEO services, a Baltimore based Search Engine Optimization Company.

Internal Linking

Once you’ve developed all your SEO friendly content it’s time to create some internal linking within your site (this may also be done as your writing your site’s content).

Internal Linking refers to any link contained on your site that points to another page on your site, and it is a good way to help users and search spiders navigate through your site.  Internal linking is is probably the best way to get relevant anchor text links pointing to your pages.

The main purpose of internal linking is to pass ‘link juice’ throughout your site.  Link juice refers to the amount of search engine recognition your site has.  Inbound links are like referrals from other webmasters, basically saying, “we trust this site enough to post a link on our site.”  As in life, the more referrals you have the more reliable your business will appear.  So, link juice is the search engine’s way of measuring your site’s reliability.

A superficial way to measure link juice is to check a page’s Page Rank.  To do so, you can download Google’s toolbar.  Pages with higher Page Ranks pass more link juice than those with lower page ranks.

Passing link juice from one page to another and developing an effective linking structure is truly an art, and the larger your site the more difficult the process becomes.   The general rule I follow is to add 2 or 3 internal links per page of copy.   These internal links should use specific anchor text link to refer to the page to which they are pointing.  For example, this link: professional seo services, leads to my website.  The text within the link, ‘professional seo services’, is the anchor text.  Since you’ve already optimized each page for SEO, you have two or three relevant keyword phrases for each page.  Use these phrases in your anchor text when linking to that page.

If you add new pages to your site and want to ‘juice’ them (get them indexed and ranked quickly), then you can add a link to that page on some of your higher ranking pages.  This will ensure that the page is crawled by spiders and indexed in search engines.