Ah yes, there are two things to do when it comes to SEO - optimising pages & link building. Realistically, you should spend about 40% of your time on optimising pages, and 40% of your time on link building. The other 20% should be split with sorting out relevant areas such as google local, froogle feeds, and liasing with your client (should you have one). So I guess that’s three things.
Today I’m going to talk about Link Building. What links do you go for? What links should you go for? Building links is a tricky business, with an insane amount of time and money spent on building links, often from completely the wrong source. What links should you spend time on getting? And more importantly, what should you avoid?
Before I give my list, an explanation of some of the terms I’ll be using. Imagine the website is a website dedicated to - say - Liverpool Football Club (a fan site). Here’s the order that I will try and get links. I’m also assuming that all links will pass on google juice, as well as traffic.
- Authoritive Site in Relevant Niche - Pages such as the official LFC website, popular football news sites & blogs.
- Unauthoritive Site in Relevant Niche - Similar size fansites, player websites & fansites.
- Authoritive General Site - DMOZ, Wikipedia pages etc.
- Unauthoritive Site in Irrelevant Niche - Manchester Tourist Guides, Environmental Forums.
- Authoritive Site in Irrelevant Niche - Government sites on Global Warming.
- Unauthoritive General Site - General directories, personal blogs.
“Woah DMW!” I hear you shout, “You surely have 4 and 5 the wrong way around!”. No I haven’t, and here’s why (and also why I used Liverpool FC as an example).
A friend of mine was pushing a Liverpool fansite on google. He was doing pretty well, getting 200-300 hits per day, people were going through his site to bet on Liverpool FC (had a number of gambling affiliate sites) & buy things through Amazon & ebay.
His friend was working at the time for the local government authority, managing the Health & Safety portion of the website. As a friend, he placed a link on one page dedicated to fire safety within the local authority.
Two weeks later, the LFC site disappeared from the listings for “Liverpool Football Club” & other similar keywords. But for “fire safety in North Wales”, his site was ranked rather highly. It didn’t matter that everything on his site was optimised on Liverpool FC, Google assumed (because a governmental site was linking to him) that the site was about Fire Safety.
This was a few years ago now, so maybe Google’s ever changing algorithm has stopped this from happening, but it pains me whenever people say “oh, I want a high page rank link”, even if I accept because they’re relevant.
I really only search out 1 & 2 links. I usually get 2, 1 takes a little bit of work. 3 I often search for but there’s not that many. 4, 5, 6 are usually links which other people in their niceness give to me. I usually give them something back, usually a comment or advice, in return for their generosity.
What about you? What’s your Link Building List?
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