Want your website to rank highly in search engines? Well, for all you newcomers, you may find this series helpful!
So far, the following has been covered:
- Keyword Research – why it’s important & how to perform research effectively
- On-page SEO
- Part 1 – covers 4 key areas: title tag, meta description, headings & content
- Part 2 – looks at site maps and keyword density
Naturally, the next area to cover is off-page optimisation. This isn’t anything you can control on your website itself; it involves other factors that influence your rankings on SERP’s around the web.
If you’re going to remember anything about off-page optimisation, let it be this: Links, links, links!
You should also note; there are other factors involved in off-page optimisation, for example:
- Domain name
- Including keywords in domains also benefits you in two ways:
- Words searched are shown as bold in SERPS; more clicks
- Links to your domain automatically include anchor text
- Full URL
- Example: the CMS page on Senior site includes key words in its URL’s to drive traffic
- Other benefits same as domain
Primarily though, it’s all about getting links to your site.
This post will look at why links are so important and why you must take your link-building strategy seriously.
Why is link-building so important?
Here’s the classic example to demonstrate the true power of links to your site: Adobe.
Because the anchor text (words used as link text) used to link to the Adobe site is usually ‘click here’ & of course the fact that there are millions of links, Adobe come top of the SERP when searching for ‘click here’… And it doesn’t even have any relevance to their product or appear anywhere on their site! Amazing huh!?
This example highlights not only the importance of having links but the importance of the anchor text used for these links.
It’s not just the number of links that count; it’s what keywords people are pushing traffic to your site for. It acts as a signpost for search engines – in order words; it indicates how relevant your site is to searched words.
Google doesn’t just look for relevance in links though; it looks for value.
What is PageRank and why is it important?
Remember: All links don’t carry the same value. Some carry more than others, in the search engines eyes!
This value is determined through the linking website’s PageRank. This ranking is allocated to you by Google and is based on how much authority it believes this site to have. For fairness purposes, Google calculates this from the PageRank of pages linking to the site in question.
Because of the varying value of links, it’s important to ensure you have good quality links to your site from authority sites. Although these will be harder to get, they will be worth so much more!
So, what should I take away from this post…?
First; building up links to your site is important to your SEO… very, very important!
Google’s algorithm concentrates on 2 key areas of these links:
- Indicator of relevance: Anchor text
- Indicator of value: PageRank
Next time, focus will be put on how to start your link-building and where to actually get your links from…