July 23, 2005

Introduction to Link Building

Written by Brian Turner

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General tips on using targeted link building

Links can be very useful for ranking webpages in a very targeted way - and the more competitive a search term, often the more important it is to have links in volumes from a range of different sources, targeting your pages with your preferred keywords.

However, a big mistake (in my opinion) that a lot of webmasters make when seeking links, is to simply try and aim for just a couple of keyword strings.

The first point of note is that it’s been suggested since at least the Allegra this February, that Google implemented some form of in-house semantics processing not too dis-similar from LSI. The bottom line of this is that Google could devalue links where the anchor text shows an obivously unnatural semantic pattern.

In short, if you have thousands of links from different websites all for just one or two very keyworded achor text, then the danger is that these anchor text links may be devalued.

So naturalising your anchor text is definitely recommended.

For example, avoid setting links to your pages only as follows:

Instead, try to use more natural language in your anchor text where possible, while still using your keywords. For example:

Don’t make every link target your main keyword phrase - instead, consider your keyword phrase as a combination of keyword elements in a naturalised language style that you wish to associate your site/pages for.

Also, it’s worth mentioning a few little “secrets” about Google and search in general, that you won’t often be told:

Firstly, Google will often rank a site according to any combination of combined anchor text elements. So in the above natural link list, you should expect a fighting chance of ranking for:

4. (geo-location) widgets
5. Green widgets online
6. Buy green widgets in (geolocation)
7. Green blue widgets

… etc

None of these are the original anchor text, but all of them involve elements from them, recombined.

Taken on board, you can run a campaign based not on ranking single keyphrases, but instead on a much wider range of keyword elements and their numerous combinations - all formed from your preferred keyphrase base.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that ability to rank for these combinations is diminished with competition - but it’s also worth underlining that there’s a lot of longtail (high volume long keyworded searches) that you can aim to capture by this method.

Another point about Google that too many webmasters are ignorant about when link building, is that Google *does* take those little words into account for ranking purposes, such as “if”, “the”, “of”, etc.

This can be very important were good traffic can be captured from exact keyphrase searches.

So if you wanted to rank for an exact keyword phrase, such as:

“The best blue widgets in the UK”

then you *don’t* set your links with anchor text:

“Best Blue Widgets UK”

so as to avoid those “little words”. Google does count them when analysing links and pages for ranking purposes.

Instead, you set up good links for that exact keyphrase.

Now, the really clever thing about this is that when you target keyphrases, rather than keywords, the links you set up can be very inviting for human user clickthroughs as well.

So, overall, if you stop thinking of links as mere “link bombs”, but instead as a basis for assigning meaning to your pages, then not only can this targeted meaning be associated for search engines, but also for human users who surf the pages of your actual link placements.

Link building is works in an environment where assigning actual quantitative value to any individual link can be very difficult, and ascertaining the long-term value of that link is impossible.

The art of link building is therefore in working in a volume where you can attempt to make conversation to greatest effect to two very different worlds - that of search engines, and that of human users - in a way which delivers a wider range of traffic based on your targeted keywords.

Just a little Saturday afternoon pointer for those trying to learn to use links more effectively, especially outside of the most cut-throat environments.

Filed Under Marketing