Monday, July 21, 2008

Inbound Links and a Diversified Link Profile

Linking is a wide-ranging topic because there are many types of links, reasons for links, and because of the special relationship that exists between links and content.

Good linking relationships and practices are necessary in order to achieve superior SERP (ie. search engine results pages) results and desired web search visibility. It’s important to have a working understanding of all the different link purposes. The objective of this blog section is not to convey every single aspect of linking (ie. How to Link), the objective is to point out how linking relationships fit in to the broad picture.

Inbound Links

Inbound links are live hyperlinks published on other domains that lead direcly to your site. Common sources of inbound links are hyperlinks from websites published by other webmasters, web directories both paid and unpaid, blogs in the blogosphere, online press releases, article distribution services, newswire services, social media sites, Wikis like Aboutus.org, links that you initiate and links that other webmasters initiate voluntarily in seeking a reciprocal link exchange, and unfortunately in rare cases there can be malicious links that need to be uncovered and identified originating from from Black Hat SEOs that seek to damage your online reputation.

The link hierarchy concept places value on the different types of link building techniques.

One great source of BOTH targeted traffic and inbound links is Article Distribution Services. Writing good topical articles and publishing them in Article Directories is a solid strategy for linking. Our favorite article directories include: Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, and Articledashboard.com. There are a multitude of worthy free sites to publish your relevant articles for your industry niche.

All Links Are Not Created Equal

Inbound links are needed in order to get your website spidered. I believe good inbound links provide more value than the results from submitting to search engines. You want links: from web pages with high Google page rank (PR), from web pages gaining PR, from web pages with as few outgoing links as possible, from web pages with similar topic content. You want links: with relevant surrounding contextual content with keyword anchor text. You want links from a site’s home page if possible, next in priority is from a site's internal pages. You want links from sites having good incoming link popularity and link authority - which creates for you a high link equity backlink! Site-wide links (ie. ROS, run of site links) from each and every page of a particular site leading into your site could well be seen as spam so this practice should be avoided. You want links pointing to your single top-level keywords pages, but just as important to move your site up in relevance you want deep links leading to your internal pages with your long-tail keywords which establishes a more natural appearing link profile.

With the right kind of good inbound link reputation links you will likely not need ongoing submissions of your site to the major search engines. I usually submit the home page one time to the major search engines and then never submit again. With good search visibility your existing content and fresh content coming online will be discovered naturally and indexed.

Diversified Link Profile

A diversified link profile is needed where your inbound links originate from five or more types of content (ieg. social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, blogs, other web sites, directories, articles, press releases, and RSS Feeds. By examining your competitors’ links in the your competitive analysis phase you can get a reasonable idea of your competitors' most valuable sources for links links as they're generally listed in order of priority in the search engine operators reporting results.

You can also set up your own Google Profiles page to add to your online visibility. We have set up a Google Denver SEO Consultants profiles page for example to help our link profile.

Examining Competitors' Links

Uncovering your competitors' web links is easily accomplished using the different SEO Tools and search engine operators that are free and easily accessible.

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