Search Engine Optimisation
Best Tips & Ideas | Website Inbound Link Strategies

A link from a trusted, relevant website with the right keywords in the anchor textis like a vote for your website...but some votes are more valuable than others...

About 50.0% of search engine optimisation (SEO) is about creating pages and content in a way that is particularly receptive to search engines – great original content, formatted in a particular way with meta-tags, heading tags, bold or bulleted items, the inclusion of the keywords you are targeting in the right locations and more…the other 50.0% is about creating an internal and external link strategy that will raise the profile of your website.

Essentially, a search engine sees a link to a page on your website like a “vote” for that page (note that I wrote page, not website as a whole)...and some time ago, it was simply a matter of the more links you had, the higher up eh search engine results page you appeared.

Today, further advances have been made by the search engines, and in particular Google, where merely the volume of links is no longer the sole determinant…links must now be relevant, have a greater value if they are from so-called “trusted” websites or pages and the context of the page and the “anchor text” (the underlined blue text that the link is embedded in) also impact on the value of each link…”on theme” links carry significant weight and “off theme” links carry lesser weight (although ever no weight).

In fact, if all you did was link building, and negotiated with those linking to you to include a varied range of your keywords, your website would end up performing quite well with only ordinary on-page SEO.

Try this exercise: go to Google and search for “click here”…you will see that Adobe always comes up first. Why? Because literally millions of websites link to Adobe with the text “Don’t have Adobe Reader?" and then “click here” in the link anchor text…the same principal applies to all links and all websites…the more links that you have from websites that are of a similar theme to yours with your keywords in the anchor text, the better your website will perform.

Okay, so how do I get these links? We’re glad you asked…

Early on, start simply and try the following:

• ask your friends and associates to link to your new website, either from their websites or from their social networks such as digg.com, myspace.com or delico.us
• talk to you suppliers and ask them to link to your web site…your suppliers web sites are likely to be on theme (they supply your industry), somewhat “trusted” (don’t we all trust our suppliers) and will more than likely be happy to phrase the link text exactly the way you want (and if you add this request into your final negotiations it is difficult for them to say no)
• talk to local partners, attractions, business networking groups and neighbours and ask them to link to you

This will get you started and you can practice how to ask nicely and how not to ask…and to learn how to deal with rejection. Some will ask for a return link but the real art is to get one-way incoming links to your key pages, and not just your home page either.

All right…now that you have some momentum, what are some other ways to build your incoming links?

But, you know what the best link building strategy is?

It is building pages like this one…that people will find useful, want to refer to and want to list on their own website with a link to because the content is useful, relevant and contemporary. This “natural” link building strategy is slower, requires effort and commitment…but produces the very best results.

Link building is a never ending, ongoing strategy…every day, apart from our client website inbound link building,  one of our team spends an hour developing links to our own websites…you should commit to doing the same …two links per day comes to 360 or more in just a few months…and with great content, your natural links will rapidly grow too...

A note on how search engines evaluate links

All the search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN – all can see ALL incoming links to your website, but each search engine evaluates and “weights” links in a different way.

You will see that as of January 2007, this fairly new site has the following link count:

• MSN – search for: linkdomain:www.searchengineoptimisationworks.com.au
  Results: 1369 links
• Yahoo – search for: linkdomain:www.searchengineoptimisationworks.com.au
  Results: 386
• Google – search for: link:www.searchengineoptimisationworks.com.au
  Results: 22

If you enter the “search for” term above in each of the search engines (replacing our URL with yours), each will display how many of the total links they have indexed that they perceive as being valuable…but they do indeed see all the links available that they have spidered.

Why do we provide this level of SEO detail in our tips and techniques section? Can't you just go and start adding inbound links and your site will appear at the top of the Search Engine Result pages for your keywords?

Well…yes and no. Clearly we want you to know that we know what we are doing and how search engines work…and we also like our clients to be knowledgeable; it motivates us to exceed your expectations. By providing you with search engine optimisation tips and techniques in detail such as this, our clients understand better some of the ways we work to increase your website traffic and grow your online revenues....and how complex it can be once you start overlapping the many tachniques required.

The reality is…in the same way that you could probably do a great job of evaluatig a major legal contract from end to end, most smart business people recognise that you are better served by using a lawyer and focussing on your strengths. The same applies in the complex world of Search Engine Optimisation; you could do your own SEO work, but is that the best use of one of your most valuable resources, your time?