Link Building Guidelines

Improving ranking within Google through link building

One of the most important factors influencing search engine placement of websites is the number and quality of the links into a site. These are known as inbound links.

For example, if site A has a link to site B, site B is said to have an inbound link from site A.

In some cases, a link to a site can ‘point’ to the home page of the site (for example, http://www.site-report.com/). In other cases, it may ‘point’ to an interior page of the site (for example, http://www.site-report.com/summary_report.php).

For a website to be listed within the search engines, it is important that it has at least one link into it from another site (an inbound link). The reason for this is that the major search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo and MSN) all follow links from page to page, and site to site when they crawl the Internet as part of their spidering activity (you can think of the internet as a massive spider’s web of ‘threads’ between pages.

Each link into a site (an inbound link) can be seen to be a ‘recommendation’ for the site. The more recommendations you have, the higher your profile. If the recommendations are from sites that have good recommendations that helps boost your profile higher. Therefore, when getting links, it is important to look for quality sites rather than large numbers of low-quality sites.

When looking for sites to get links from, it is helpful to look at competitor sites. If several competitors have links from the same websites, it may be worth targeting these ‘hubs’. To find these sites:

(a) Use Yahoo to find sites that rank well for the search terms you expect people to find your site for

(b) For each of the highest ranking sites, check which sites link to them by using the following command:

link:http://<site name> -site:<site name>

(c) Look at the sites to see if look like good places to get a link from.

(d) Keep track of which sites you have managed to get links from.

When link building, it is important to ensure that:

• Link building appears natural with links being added organically
• Link text is different for most links
• Try to set up inbound links to interior pages of your site as well as the home page of a site
• Try to get links from sites that do not require a reciprocal link back to the referring site
• Only get links on sites that are reputable and have some degree of related information.

It is useful to define a number of 'link ads' consisting of the following:

• Anchor/Link text
• Description
• Landing/target page

When recording link building, it is useful to ensure that the following information is recorded:

• Directory name
• Page link requested on
• Date of submission
• Page rank of page
• Ad detail:
• Anchor/Link text
• Description
• Landing/target page