Posts Tagged ‘off-page factors’


Link Building & SEO for Google

August 05, 2010, Drew Khoury

Clients often wonder how “Link Building” works, why they need to have it, and how to get the most out of Link Building. There are a few basic guidelines that you need to follow to get positive results from Link Building campaigns and we’ll have a look at them in this post.

There are two main categories to consider when Link Building, On-page factors and Off-page factors.

On-page factors include the following:

  1. (well written titles with matching keywords present and prominently featured) & unique meta description tags
  2. Google individual page keyword density, and site wide keyword density (occurrence of a word across all pages on a site). Note: Search Engines are less sensitive to specific thresholds these days, but the basic principle still applies.
  3. Volume of content (# of pages on the site, and keywords across all pages)
  4. Internal Link structure (well styled CSS menu’s and ideally CSS page structure)

Websites can suffer from not having much content or from having content that isn’t very relevant or focused. This can often be the case for new websites that don’t yet have a lot of copy or sites that haven’t yet put information about their business on their website. Taking the time to write copy for your website is an investment that can really pay off as keyword destiny and volume of keywords are half the battle for on-page SEO. Articles that are specifically focused on keywords can be created for clients to help with volume of content and content density. Article generation, together with link building can be used together to propel keyword rankings.

Off-page factors include the following:

  1. Lots of links from 3rd party sites pointing to your site
  2. Links from sites which themselves are considered authoritative / high PageRank
  3. Links where the anchor text of the link contains the keyword being optimised for
  4. Links from sites and pages which are on topic

The key here is volume of links and links that take advantage of targeted keywords.

Recently Google have placed a strong emphasis on frequency of content updates on a site as well as freshness of links.

When it comes down to the page rank for incoming links you have a number of choices. Typically, you’re able to get lots of links which have varying page rank at an affordable rate OR you’re able to get fewer links which have relatively better page rank at a higher cost.

Typically high pagerank links come via:

  • privately negotiated paid links or;
  • naturally occurring incentives for other high profile sites to link to you based on the value of your website or its information, or tools, or relevance to their audience or;
  • paid links (text-link-ads or similar), or;
  • link triangulation deals or reciprocation deals

It is very rare to be able to simply request a link to your site from a very high page rank 3rd party site or page – and get the link with nothing offered in return (who would have thought, there’s always a catch!).  We don’t engage in paid link strategies for clients, as if found out – Google may penalise you.

When you sit back and look at the way Link Building works, it does indeed make sense. Search engines such as google will review all the links coming into your site, along with the content on your site and give you a rank compared to other sites on the web. There are many factors that come into play to determine who should appear first, second, third etc but the main message still holds true…

Build targeted links to your site, do it on a regular basis, with content on your site which is keyword-rich and updated as often as possible. The more links, the better, and the more you can hone in on your keyword niche the better.

Happy Googling!

 

Search Blog