Your Site is Only as Strong as its Weakest Link: The Elevator Course in Linking
Linking strategies are time consuming to manage and the best ones are put together with extreme attention and care to detail. The best SEOers know that linking strategies are an integral part of a successful SEO campaign and instrumental to getting a site ranking highly in search engines – they spend careful amounts of time crafting custom linking strategies for their clients. We’ve seen many websites perform poorly due to badly constructed and maintenance-free linking strategies, so to help your site avoid becoming a victim of poor linking strategies – or worse, no linking strategy - this month we’re putting together a simple primer on linking and we hope that it also removes the frustration around linking strategies.
Linking strategies are so important because the more a search engine “knows” about your site, the better indexed your site will be. What we mean here is that when you set out to create SEO-friendly URLs and website pages, consider where and what links you will be placing on other sites referring readers back to your site. These links speak loudly – they tell a reader, "I have something highly relevant to what you are currently reading here – click this link and jump over to my site." Be sure that if a reader is going to take the time to click that link that you’re serving them the information that they expect to see. Otherwise, posting irrelevant links on unrelated websites can get you penalized in the SERP and negate all SEO efforts.
In order to begin exploring linking strategies, you’re going to have to know what you’ve got and where you’ve got it. We recommend you perform this simple back link search on every search engine that you are interested in boosting your SERP ranking: link:http://www.[insert your domain name here].com. This search command will pull links to your site as they exist on other sites. What you should see here is a variety of links for every page of your website. If you see a variety homepage links, raise the red flag and start investigating the sites. Likely they are directory sites, and while your homepage is the gateway to your site, a solid linking strategy realizes the importance of every page of your site. Every site needs solid, natural, deep links.
Deep links are perhaps the most misunderstood and most important. These links are URLs to specific pages of your site. For example, if your dental practice drafts whitepapers about specific oral problems and blogs about the latest breakthroughs in dental technology you’ll need to make sure that those pages are being picked up by relevant websites. Search engine users want to see relevant information pertaining to their search term; deliver them your homepage and you’ll see frustrated searchers “back out” of your site and move on to your competition who has displayed exactly what they’re looking for. If that same site had a deep link set in place, the search engine would display the homepage as well as the relevant article or page as prompted by the search query. The more places your website appears in organic listings on the SERP, the more chances you have of turning potential customers into purchasing customers.
Once you get a handle on the links that you do have, be sure that you perform maintenance on the links to ensure that they’re all in place appropriately and still working. Nothing will get a searcher more frustrated than arriving at a 404 Error Page because the site’s Webmaster updated a link, moved a page, or deleted it entirely. Remember, your site is only as strong as its weakest link and regular audits of your existing links will be sure to keep your site climbing SERP rankings and outshining your competitors. If you have any questions about linking strategies, help questions about links – we invite you to call and request to speak to a member of our SEO production team today.