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Linking Building for SEO

Link Building Strategies for SEO (Podcast Show Notes)What is a link? Links from other websites into your website. Links are critical to SEO. Remember that the web is about links – that’s why they call it the web: Google’s PageRank defined: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance. Google’s search algorithm was originally designed to measure “back links.” Check Google’s original history: Backrub.

Ways to create links for SEO:

• Content produces links naturally (weeds grow in dirt)
• Press releases
• Syndicated content comprised of articles with your theme-specific and keyword rich content
• Blogs – content in blogs grows rapidly and attracts links
• Special requests – outsourced link building through experts like Find and Convert

Not all links are created equal:

• Relevance of the content of the page linked from
• The PageRank of the page linked from
• Importance of anchor text linking
• Importance of quality of linking page
• Mix up sentence or description with the anchor text
• Link to home page and inside pages to diversify the mix of back links

Study link stats as well as search stats:

• Yahoo: link:www.website.com to check the links back to this website.
• Set up Google Webmaster services to track links: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/.

Quality of links is very important. Build links slowly for specific keyword phrases. Build them at a pace according to the size of your website. Ranking improvements will happen eventually but it’s not an exact science. Improvements depend on quality of links anchored from relevant keyword phrases.

Be patient, give it time (3 to 12 months). Build links for many keyword phrases (diversify).

Link building is a must in any SEO strategy.