Link Building: Friends in High Places
Among the best SEO practices lies a smart link building strategy painstakingly put into place by an experienced search engine optimizer. Too dramatic? Not even. With link building, the quality score assigned to your site by the search engine truly does depend on who links back to your site. Non-relevant or brand new, non-established sites boasting a link to your site do much more harm to you than good in terms of search engine placement ranking and quality score. How is this possible, because search engines will evaluate the links to your site and score your site accordingly. Like your mom always said, who you associate with says a lot about you. Is your site hanging out with the wrong crowd?
A good search engine optimizer knows that relevant, well-heeled sites displaying a link to your site are the foundation to a solid link building strategy. If you are a dentist who has links from a local plumber, and a shoe store with a poorly converting site that has zero SEO best practices in place you can expect a low quality score and thus low search engine result placement. Better instead to have links from the American Dental Association, nationwide dental manufacturers carrying the latest in whitening products, and professional organizations for example. You can be sure the ADA will be a strong site with a high PageRank value, and the value that professional organizations and manufacturers with trendy products reinforces relevancy.
Although linking with the best sites is a major part of any solid link building strategy, there are also other factors that your SEO expert needs to evaluate and manage. Two of these factors are link anchor text and link position. Link anchor text is the actual text that is being used in the link back to your site. Simply using your website’s URL, or page URL won’t go very far in reinforcing the keywords that your site is focusing on for high search engine placement results. Using the dentist example above, if you are trying to outrank your competitors for “teeth whitening”, you’d want the anchor text on the link that the manufacturer is displaying to reinforce that keyword phrase. Link position is a bit trickier to manage – links placed on a web page are often scored differently. For instance, if your link placed in a list of links, you’ll want to be as close to the top as possible since those links are weighted higher than the ones closer to the footer of the page. Additionally, if your link is placed in the actual content of the page that position is weighted higher than those link lists. If the site referring your site places you highly on a list of links or within its content that speaks volumes for your site to search engines – it says that the people recommending your site also respect your site and your business.
NetSearch Direct SEO experts know that a site is only as strong as the sites that it associates with, and that link building really is all about establishing a relationship. Our team doesn’t build links with weak, non-relevant sites and we don’t sacrifice our client’s website quality scores and search engine placement results with poorly designed link strategies. We’d like to think your mother would be proud of the friends your site has.
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