Usually you will have one to three primary pages that attract the most search engine hits and site visitors, and you also have one or more web pages that lead to the most business transactions or conversions. The more important a particular web page is, the more link juice you want pointing to it –from both offsite sources and through internal linking (eg. on-site). An Advanced SEO knows the difference between insufficient links, and overdoing links in high volume which is spam.
Link Juice
Link juice is the terminology for passing value and emphasis from one web page to another through web linking. Webmasters need to ensure their content and links are published and designed in order to pass link juice to your most cherished web pages through link attributes such as keyword anchor text, varied anchor text, and a higher volume of hyperlinks as compared to links incoming to less important web pages. This process of designing internal link juice will educate the search engines on which web pages you want to be most important focus for your site. If both you’re unique content and incoming links are good enough, the search engines are likely to reward that web page.
One method to increase the link juice leading into your small business website is to undertake a link building campaign.
Web Page Spidering or Crawling and Algorithms
Web pages are spidered or crawled by bots and evaluated by computer software called algorithms. The objective of an Advanced SEO is to stay in compliance and within guidelines of all major search engines and also serve great web pages to visitors. Since algorithms are non-public documents you need to have a good intuition and feel for what is right.
White Hat SEO
Beyond the algorithms, in some cases your content could be evaluated by a search engine human editor. If your web pages are blatantly and obviously spam they can be manually penalized and knocked down in SERP results or worse. White Hat SEO practices, good copywriting, and good linking practices will avoid the problem of manual penalties. Be sure to keep within the Google webmaster guidelines.
Graphical Images, Alt-tags, & Good SEO Practice
For example with off-page elements using best practice for images, on your web pages make sure to label your image alt-tags accurately and appropriately, and not load your alt-tags with keyword spam. Describe the image or construct a short sentence for the alt tag. Larger images on the page will be seen as more relevant with a higher prominence, as compared to smaller images. For example a large sized header image with appropriate keyword alt tag will deliver prominence and can be good web site design. I try to have several images on a page to make the page more interesting to visitors and to incorporate alt tags and images that are very relevant to the page keyword focus.
Showing posts with label Link Value. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Link Value. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2008
Web Directories & Web Linking Concepts
There are easily about thirty to forty great directories that pass page rank value and link juice, and are actually worth the money and time submitting to. I always choose quality directories over quantity of directories because any technique used in unusually high volume can be considered spam. The best web directories are human edited and have large quantities of inbound links that are already indexed in Google. Some free web directories are worth submitting to even with the associated downfalls and additional requirements such as requiring a reciprocal link back. Usually free web directories take longer -multiple weeks or months to approve your submission making them less desirable versus paid directories that review quickly. Try not to submit to more than one web directory hosted on the same Class C Block IP address. In short both paid and free directories can be of value, but paid directories accelerate indexed backlinks.
Deep Linking Directories
The first couple of months on a new site linking campaign I will consistently submit to valuable directories, then in the coming month(s) submit to the remaining list of great directories that have good deep linking features included. I keep an updated list of great deep linking directories that provide links to your site's internal pages.
Fundamental Web Linking Concepts
There are fundamental reasons for links that should be stated. You want your site spidered regularly and indexed in the search engines; you want sufficient link popularity meaning a high quantity multiple-keyword incoming links to compete with other sites that have already established their search visibility; and you want highly focused keyword anchor text links passing value and supporting the most difficult search queries you're trying to rank for.
The Right Links & Less Desirable Links
You want a higher quantity of links that are narrowly focused for your top level keywords, and you also want a lesser quantity of links supporting your long-tail keywords or secondary keywords identified in your H2 tags. Less desirable links are those that are positioned in the header, footer, or margin of a web page, or links that are surrounded by blank space, sponsored content, links going to other outside low Page Rank sites, or links originating on non-indexed low-value pages. You want links that have keyword anchor text supporting your keyword and page ranking objectives -links that originate on good web pages.
More desirable are contextual links that are surrounded by topical word content making them more beneficial to your site and more relevant. Natural Links imbedded into the natural flow of body and sentence content that don’t appear so blatant are best, whether originating on your site or an external web page. Don't forget to mix up your anchor text with different sequences of keyword(s) order.
In general I have found that directories, blogs, and your own content are the best sources to begin establishing the kind of links you need.
Deep Linking Directories
The first couple of months on a new site linking campaign I will consistently submit to valuable directories, then in the coming month(s) submit to the remaining list of great directories that have good deep linking features included. I keep an updated list of great deep linking directories that provide links to your site's internal pages.
Fundamental Web Linking Concepts
There are fundamental reasons for links that should be stated. You want your site spidered regularly and indexed in the search engines; you want sufficient link popularity meaning a high quantity multiple-keyword incoming links to compete with other sites that have already established their search visibility; and you want highly focused keyword anchor text links passing value and supporting the most difficult search queries you're trying to rank for.
The Right Links & Less Desirable Links
You want a higher quantity of links that are narrowly focused for your top level keywords, and you also want a lesser quantity of links supporting your long-tail keywords or secondary keywords identified in your H2 tags. Less desirable links are those that are positioned in the header, footer, or margin of a web page, or links that are surrounded by blank space, sponsored content, links going to other outside low Page Rank sites, or links originating on non-indexed low-value pages. You want links that have keyword anchor text supporting your keyword and page ranking objectives -links that originate on good web pages.
More desirable are contextual links that are surrounded by topical word content making them more beneficial to your site and more relevant. Natural Links imbedded into the natural flow of body and sentence content that don’t appear so blatant are best, whether originating on your site or an external web page. Don't forget to mix up your anchor text with different sequences of keyword(s) order.
In general I have found that directories, blogs, and your own content are the best sources to begin establishing the kind of links you need.
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
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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