If you work in an area where good white hat search engine optimization means hitting page 3 with your on-page efforts but you just can’t seem to get your pages ranked any higher then it is possibly to push those pages further up in the listings. You need to undertake an ongoing relevant link building campaign. .
Link building is not as difficult as some people make it out to be. It isn’t enough to seek out a large quantity of links. Quality links are just as important and developing a “trust factor” for your company. But what is meant by “quality link”?
The quality question in link building is not so easy to answer. Like on-page SEO, there are a number of factors that affect a link’s quality. All of them affect link quality to varying degrees and when you measure the aggregate of their affects you could walk away with a higher quality link using different variables on any given day of the week. In general, however, link quality is determined by some or all of the following criteria:
- Relevant anchor text
- PageRank of the page being linked from
- PageRank of the site being linked from
- Relevance of the web page linking to you
- Relevance of the website linking to you
- Age of the linking web page
- Age of the linking website
- Age of the link itself
- Link diversity (After a couple hundred links, one more link from the same type of website that all your previous links are from becomes less valuable whereas a link from a different type of website increases in value)
- Overall authority of the web page linking to you
- The linking website’s overall authority
- Anchor text variance (just like link diversity, after awhile the value of a certain anchor text decreases with overuse while other anchor text value may increase)
Building inbound relevant links to a page over time that has moderately good rankings when you want to push it up in the rankings requires some careful thought as to the anchor text you use in your links and the pages that you seek links from. You want to be careful not to choose bad neighborhoods. Depending on the competitive landscape of your niche, it could take a few hundred links or several thousand relevant in bound links to develop a solid trust factor in the eyes of the search engines and to build your rankings and visitors over time.
Premium WordPress Themes – New Directories
Web directories are a great source of link building as part of your long term blended approach to search engine optimization. They always have been and always will be. And there are always new directories popping up to take place of the old ones that are dying. Most directories just don’t stick around for long. So you can build 100 back links from online directories and within two years half of those are no longer in existence. They’ve died because the directory owner has decided to maintaining a directory is too hard and time consuming. Many directory owners go in it for the money and when they find out that you can’t make a lot of money from a directory without putting in some really hard work and long hours they end up quitting. Your links die and dead links don’t do any good.
That’s why it’s important to keep building links by submitting your site to new directories as they pop up if they are relevant in nature and are white hat. It is time consuming, but necessary. So many webmasters abandon the directory submission process and by doing so kill their link building campaigns. That’s why they never rise above a PR 3.
But you don’t have to do that. You should always be looking for new directories to submit your websites to. If you submit to enough directories you can beat the link attrition rate for your site. Remember, you will lose so many links each year to old sites dying. You have to replace those with new links. You do that by staying ahead of the attrition rate.
The best way to stay on top of new directories as they come out is to subscribe to Google Alerts. You’ll get an e-mail every time your keyword is triggered by a new site. Subscribe to alerts for “directory”, “web directory, and “website directory” and every time a new directory goes online you can go up and submit your website. Do this enough times and you’ll always grow your links faster than you lose them.
Premium WordPress Themes – Link Limit
Does Google have a 100 link per page limit? No. Not according to Matt Cutts. In fact, Google’s never really had a 100 link per page limit. As Matt says, the reason Google gave for that 100 links per page thing was because of a limitation in Google’s indexing quality. That limitation no longer exists, but even if it did that’s not the point anyway.
Spam. That’s the point. User experience. That’s the second point.
Link farms used to be quite popular and after awhile they quit being effective because too many users would show up on a web page, look at massive amounts of links, and leave. No clicks. No scans. No reads. Just bounces. Google figured out that users didn’t want to see a page full of links.
But what if you have 250 links on a page that is composed of three columns of text where each column is content broken up by heads, subheads, photos, images, and other graphics, laid out with tables and CSS and meets all the standards of W3C, looks attractive, and is functional. In other words, it’s not just a page that consists of link after link after link after link until your eyes go hyperlink blue.
What if a savvy webmaster put together a really useful set of resources on a particular topic and it was broken up into subtopics, each with a separate header and an associated graphic with text wrap around, an introductory summary followed by 10-25 links, and a lead-in into the next subtopic? Getting the picture?
See this example of a page with 109 links before the section titled “Join the Conversation”. Now suppose this page had 20 chapters and twice as many links. Would it be a useful page? Absolutely. And I don’t think Google would have any issue with it. As long as you aren’t using blackhat search engine optimization techniques with hidden text and links, stuffed keywords, and such then you should have a good page of solid content. The number of links is irrelevant.