Tasha Harrison

It’s all very well building the links, but how does this fit in with your keywords and phrases?

Google uses links to find out how relevant your site is. Each link is like a thumbs up, which it then takes into account when ranking your site for each search. It judges each link based upon how relevant and important the linking site is.

The links also show Google what your site is about. It does this through the linking text:

The link text, ‘social media for theatre’, describes what the page that it links to is about. In this case it links to the play’s website, http://suchtweetsorrow.com.

For your own website, you want the link text to be either your chosen keywords or words that describe what your site is about. You can’t always control the link text and most often people link with simply the name of your company or site. However, if you have information on your site that people think is worth mentioning they are more likely to use descriptive text.

See ‘The Basics of SEO – Link Building‘ for more on link building.

The saying goes that links are the currency of the internet. As social media has expanded, your followers and fans have become the most important currency, but as far as SEO (search engine optimisation) goes links are still very important.

Making your links relevant

Link building is by far the hardest part of SEO, creating relevant links that the search engines will deem valuable. There are a few rules that are worth noting:

1. Build links on sites that have relevant content ie the site’s content is connected to yours.
   For example, your site sells swimming pool accessories, so an ideal link would be a site selling swimming pools.
2. Include your keywords and phrases in the linking words.
   For example, your keyword is ‘swimming pool filter’, so in an ideal world your link would be – swimming pool filter

Building Links

Getting sites to link to you is a time consuming process, so don’t expect to suddenly have hundreds of links. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do this, but here are a few tips:

1. Directory submissions – there are hundreds of free directories that you can submit your site to. These aren’t as valuable as a link from a blog or news site, but it is the easiest way to start out.
2. Contact other site owners – if you find a site that is relevant, drop the site’s webmaster an email asking if they will link to your site.
3. Product reviews – contact bloggers that you think might be interested in your products and ask if they’d be interested in writing a review. Remember to always treat bloggers with respect, many of the popular one’s are inundated with these kind of requests.
4. Create content worth linking to – the most effective and most difficult way to build links. If your content is interesting and/or useful then people will link to it.

Good Luck

Having done link building campaigns for a variety of different businesses there really is no easy way to go about it. It takes imagination and determination! Remember to always think, ‘Why would someone link to my site?’