Keeping authority links coming

Wouldn’t it be nice if links would just stay built? If you could put all that effort in, and rest easy safe in the knowledge of a job well done? Unfortunately, we all know that things can’t be that easy. Even when you’ve got some great authority links up your sleeve, you should be working hard to keep more coming.

Here are some tricks you can perform to make that work just a little bit easier:

Look charitable

Donations are the way to buy links without actually buying links. Using your charitable donations strategically can net you some worthwhile links while you support your community. It’s a win-win situation.

Keep your content up

High-quality content does so many things for SEO, and one way link building is one of them. Talk to us about this at Linkbuilding.co.uk. Content plans should have a mix of content types, to attract the right sort of links. A mix of informational, entertaining and thought-provoking content should convince other sites you’re a good resource.

Check old links

One of the best things you can do for your link profile is to make sure that your old links are still working. Thinks like older directory submissions and negotiated links can easily go astray. Make it a part of your SEO maintenance to check back over your profile for broken links. When you spot one, regaining that link should be a simple matter of contacting the site owner. They’ll probably be grateful that you’ve picked up the fault for them.

Link for more than SEO

Obtaining the services of a link building company can be a huge help for your SEO – but don’t forget that links can do more than boost rankings.

Whether it’s your SEO agency building links as part of your campaign, or a dedicated staff member building your profile in-house, it’s wise to have someone looking after your links. With a little careful planning, their efforts can pay off even before your rankings start to rise.

*Social media rankings – Some links, such as your social media profiles, can rise in rankings before your own pages do. This is a good reason to get your profiles up to scratch.

*Social media traffic – Direct traffic is another reason to look to social media links. Social media sites are now competing with search engines in terms of traffic. Many companies find social media worth pursuing independently as a traffic source.

*Industry resources – Another source of direct traffic is your average industry blog. Most businesses target popular blogs because they work well for high quality link building such as we provide at Linkbuilding.co.uk. Traffic is an equally good reason to do some contextual linking here with guest posts or comments. Traffic from these blogs tends to be extremely well-targeted, meaning that conversion percentages rise.

For most businesses, none of these avenues are likely to outstrip the search engines in terms of traffic levels. This doesn’t mean that they’re not worth pursuing. When looking at link building, think about what your links can do for your site, not just your rankings.

Quality link building services for real results

When building links, it is important to consider which sites you want to build a connection with. It is obviously always better to go for sites which are in the same area of interest as your own. This is important for your human users, as they may likely follow links but will only stay on the connected site if it is as relevant as it first appeared to be. Also, when search engines crawl sites for indexing, you will lose favour with them if they do not believe your links are relevant or appropriate.

Instead of trying to devise link building plans yourself, a link building company will be able to discuss your needs and plan a suitable link building plan for your site. www.linkbuilding.co.uk provides high quality link building services which can help boost your online presence and generate a strong variety of backlinks. These can make an incredible difference to your rankings, as the more links search engines find linking to your site, the more authority they will attribute to it.

Using a link building company which provides reliable link building services can generate real results for your site. www.linkbuilding.co.uk can create a unique strategy for every site, which will seek to link it to a specific number of reputable, relevant sites. Hiring a link building company will save time and help to earn you greater authority with search engines, which has significantly changed the fortunes of many sites for the better.

When Was the Last Time You Did Some Keyword Research?

When a lot of website owners begin marketing their sites, they carry out keyword research. It is an obvious first step in development when looking for ways to communicate with your target audience and direct relevant traffic to your website.

Whilst researching keywords at this point is recommended and is beneficial, some site owners seem to think once this has been done once, this is all the time and attention their keywords need. This is a huge mistake that leaves many search engine optimisation campaigns struggling and ineffective.

Keywords play a significant role in search engine optimisation and so must be the most suitable, useful and appropriate words for a company at any given time. These words are featured in SEO content created, in titles and tags within the web pages of a site, in links to the website and in all other areas of SEO too. Keywords are hugely important when SEO link building and are what is needed if you want to communicate with your target audience effectively.

However, what some fail to realise is that the relevancy of keywords can change over time. Words that may at one point be really helpful within your SEO campaign and may attract the attention and interest of a lot of searchers and get traffic to your site, may have little affect at all on your SEO campaign at a later date. Words that may at one point have been of little use to you can also suddenly become hugely important and be just what you need to communicate with your audience at a different time. The keywords that are most useful to you can change depending on many different factors and it is important to always be aware of what keywords you should be using if you want your SEO campaign to be successful.

Regular keyword research is therefore necessary and is something those online business owners in the know are carrying out. Keywords are such an important detail within your search engine optimisation campaign you don’t want to let all your hard work, time and effort down by not using the most effective keywords available.

Keyword research does not have to be carried out every day but if you have not checked on the relevancy of your keywords for a number of months or even worse for a number of years, it is time to do so to ensure your SEO campaign is still on the right track. If you require assistance with keyword research or any other aspect of your search engine optimisation campaign this is available from professional SEO consultants and can be immensely helpful.

Interlinking: Your Top 3 Tips

Interlinks within your site are an SEO basic. They help to share rankings power between your pages, strengthen the use of keywords across your site and, of course, help site users easily navigate from one related page to another.

Despite all this, many site owners ignore the need for links in the face of all the other little SEO jobs they have to do. The inconvenience of going through content, carefully plotting out links, can overwhelm the seeming benefits.

If you’re struggling with the hyperlinks on your site when SEO link building, here are three tips to help:

Tip #1: Interlinking through your pages is important
It’s been said before, but here it is again: interlinks help your SEO. They are the one sort of link that you can completely control, and you should take advantage of this.

Tip #2: Keywords should be for linked pages, not linking pages
This is a very easy mistake to make. Concentrating as you are on the keywords for the page you’re working on, it’s easy to miss the fact that the links will benefit the page you’re linking to. It’s essential to start thinking of your keywords as interconnected, keeping in mind the way your keywords relate to each other. This will help you to create pages that boost the rankings across your site.

Tip #3: Other areas of the page are important
Another thing it’s easy to overlook is how the whole page affects the value of a hyperlink. The anchor text has an influence, it’s true, but things like the title tag and topic of the content also count. Being aware of how your keywords connect with each other can help with this.

What are Low Quality Links Doing to your Website?

A large number of online business owners think a link is just a link. They view all links as the same and believe all to be useful when trying to gain exposure and traffic for their websites. This is an inaccurate perception that can actually have a big impact on SEO and how their site performs in the future.

All links are not the same as they are generally divided up into categories representing links of high or low quality. High quality links are those which are relevant to a website, come from respectable and highly-ranked websites and are created in an ethical manner. Low quality links are those which are irrelevant, are possibly from spam sites and which have been developed using un-recommended SEO link building methods.

Even though more attention is being directed to the quality of links for those with online businesses, many are still unaware of the significance of high quality link building and are ending up with numerous low quality links to their websites. If you have low quality links established to your web pages, there are three things these links will be doing:

1. Directing inappropriate traffic to your website. When running a search engine optimisation campaign, the main priority of most is to direct those within their target audience to their website. This can be achieved using many different methods and effective link building is one of them. However, if your links are not from online locations that will attract the attention of those interested in a business like yours, they are not going to be able to send traffic of quality in your direction. Selling to those who are not interested in what you have to offer is considerably more difficult than selling to traffic which you already know to be searching for a business within your market.

2. Losing you respect with the search engines. The search engines have to explore and rank a massive number of websites each day and they use links to help them to evaluate the quality of a business. In general, if a website has links from other respectable and trusted sources it will immediately be more appealing to the search engines and will stand a good chance of obtaining a top ranking. If a website is linked to low quality and spam sites, it will not be regarded so highly and the search engines will be less likely to respect and trust it.

3. Wasting your time and effort. If you are spending your energy on building low quality links to your website then this is a terrible shame. Low quality links are not beneficial and your time could most definitely be put to better use in other aspects of your search engine optimisation campaign.

5 Real-World Link Building Resources

Did you know that your offline existence could really help you online? Many businesses treat their websites as a separate entity to their real-world existence. That existence, though, could hold the key to your online success.

Here are five ways you can use your real-world operations to help you build links for your SEO plan:

•    Vouchers. Luring customers through vouchers is an age-old marketing tactic, one that’s been transferred online. Many voucher companies, the ones you see on shopping dockets and in local papers, offer vouchers online as well. This means a link for you. Some local newspapers also do the same with their advertising offers.

•    Customer referrals. Not all of your customers will have a blog, but many will. Offer incentives to customers for publishing a review or mention of your business on their blog. The beginnings of this negotiation can be made with a simple mention of your referral scheme at the counter or on the bottom of your receipts.

•    Corner local press. Many local newspapers print their publication online as well. Getting a mention can get you a link.

•    Talk to business organisations. Most shopping centres have their own website, which you should be linked from if you’re within their premises. Local business associations can also be a good source of authority links.

•    Do a little real-world dealing. Your customers and real-world business contacts can be a valuable source of links, and usually all you have to do is ask. Talk to your business suppliers about featuring a link which directs them to your website from theirs. Tell customers to review you on particular sites if they like your service. A little persistence can help your link profile grow organically and benefit your wider SEO goals.

All businesses have valuable resources to bring to SEO, though many may not realise it. Talk to us at linkbuilding.co.uk about using your resources wisely.

Link Building is Online Business Networking

Business owners who are new to SEO tend to quickly absorb the fact that links are important. It’s not a difficult concept for someone in business to grasp, as the ‘links for authority’ system closely resembles the networking you need to do for business. What many people have a little difficulty grasping is the fact that SEO link building is exactly like networking for business. Once you grasp this fact, the process ceases to be quite so intimidating.

There’s no doubt that link building involves hard work. This can be a little daunting to businesses that are new to search engine optimization. When you think about it in terms of extending your business’s online network, however, the process becomes a little easier to approach. Not easier to do, but easier to approach.

Link building tends to happen in four ways. Here’s how they relate to networking:

1. Links that require little effort. In the business world, there are contacts that it’s all too easy to make. These tend to be industry associations, directories and other industry-related lists. These are easy contacts to get because their whole purpose is to be in touch with people in your industry. For search engine optimization, the same kinds of entities are going to be your easy links. Look to directories and industry groups when you first begin link building.

2. Links that require some effort. When you’re networking offline, there are some contacts who will be happy to hear from you but for whom you have to put a little effort in to impress. Submitting your details to a directory is easy. Other easy-to-get links require a little more effort. Things like submitting articles to sites or leaving comments on blogs require a little thought and effort, but are some of the easier links to get.

3. Links derived through industry networking. These are a little more complicated, because they involve the cooperation of others in your industry. Just as making contacts and developing relationships at an industry conference requires a little hard work and a lot of diplomacy, getting links through online sociability needs some time and effort.

4. Links that come to you. These are the most welcome of all links or contacts. These kinds of links happen once you’ve built up your reputation and are known as a quality resource in your industry. On the internet, this results in links being given to you without an invitation.

There is a fifth way to build links, and that’s to buy them. This wasn’t mentioned in the four ‘networking’ paths because buying links is kind of like paying a business associate for a reference. It can be beneficial, particularly when you’re just starting out, but there are risks involved and the danger of disapproval if you’re found out.

It’s a good idea to talk with your SEO company if you’re unsure about link building. Link building is an ongoing process, and it’s important to plan for the long term.

The History of Links

In the beginning, all links were created equal. Google’s initial system of judging links is a long way behind us, but its echoes continue to haunt the search engine optimisation industry. It’s important to know where link weighting has come from in order to understand where it’s going.

The introduction of PageRank in 1997 is a very, very long time ago now, but the beginnings of this system continue to affect how we perform search marketing today. When PageRank first began, like most of the algorithmic factors, it was comparatively simple. The system was fairly democratic. Links were viewed as ‘votes’. Each ‘vote’ had equal weight. It didn’t take site owners long, however, to figure out that seeding links all over the net was an easy way to get their low-quality sites to the top of search engine results pages. Something had to change.

The change, of course, was that Google began to give some links more importance than others. The ranking of linking pages became a factor in link weighting very early on in the process. It was perhaps this aspect of PageRank that helped the system revolutionise the search industry, which until then had had a heavy reliance on manual site submission and on-page SEO factors.

This early system of judging links swiftly became extremely complicated, taking in factors like the link’s anchor text, topic modelling, the behaviour of sites around the linking site and even human behaviour. The sophisticated tweaks to the algorithm can even pick up signs of paid links.

Giving links doesn’t mean losing authority

One of the prevailing myths about links and Google is that by giving links away, you’re essentially diminishing your authority. This comes from an earlier part of PageRank’s link analysis, in which it was strongly thought that giving away links ‘leaked’ the PageRank of that page. This idea has stuck around with annoying persistence.

There is still an amount of debate as to whether ‘hoarding’ PageRank is effective, but the more well-respected SEO link building professionals are pretty much in agreement that outbound links don’t leak PageRank. It’s a shame that this perception persists, because it discourages influential sites from offering links.

Why put site owners through this?

There are billions of pages on the net. For search engines to be effective, they have to find ways to find the right ones. When a search is based on the search term only, there’s no way to show whether the results are going to turn up a page that will be helpful or useless, spam-filled or genuine, written by a professor or written by a five year old child. Links are just another way to help sift through the billions of pages that are on the net.

The influence of links has changed a lot, but many site owners and even some SEOs are still caught up in the past. It’s important to realise that links are judged using a highly complex system!

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