In the world of SEO, links are a good way to improve your organic visibility. Many have heard about link building, but aren’t eager to follow through with the steps. However, link building doesn’t have to be a chore. In fact, it can actually be fun if looked at from the right perspective. Since Spring is upon us, let’s look at how your company can begin link building or tidy up and improve the links that are currently in place.
When many people think of links, they think of outbound links. Outbound links are links on your website that direct a visitor to another website. Some tend to think that outbound links will cause a site to lose visitors. On the other hand, if links are treated like Macy’s treated Gimbels on the movie “Miracle on 34th Street”, then the return of visitors may be greater than expected. One way to increase outbound links is to think of the current alliances and partnerships that your business possess. Reach out to contacts at those businesses and let them know that your company is sending outbound links their way. They may even be kind enough to return the favor and both companies win.
Another winning link strategy is internal links. Sometimes, internal links aren’t given the same hype as outbound and inbound links, but they are very efficient. Internal links can be used to direct visitors to more detailed pages within your site. For example: Let’s say your company sells vacation plans, and the special for the month is a discounted trip to Hawaii. On the company web site are blogs about different destinations and their benefits. It would be a good idea to have an internal link on the Hawaii vacation plan page that directs a visitor to the Hawaii blog. This way, the visitor is learning more about Hawaii and its pleasures and is more likely to purchase a Hawaii vacation plan from your company. One note that should be adhered to is that inbound links should make sense. Don’t just create an inbound link for the sake of having an inbound link; otherwise it could frustrate your visitors. Inbound links should be relevant to visitors, and at the same time provide quality SEO value to your web site.
Another valuable way to improve linking is to think outside of the box. Is your company having a Facebook contest or promotion? How about creating an outbound link that directs visitors to that contest or promotion? Also, take a look at what your competitors are doing. This isn’t a task that your company should do everyday, but rather every 6 months or so. Learn from your competitor’s accomplishments and avoid their downfalls.
Link building doesn’t have to be an arduous task. In fact, it may prove more entertaining and valuable than your company thought. Outbound links and internal links are a true benefit and can help your company’s SEO efforts. As your company looks to improve its site, remember the 3 “Linkability” tips above. To learn more about linking, read our white paper called “Link Building Made Easy: What to Do When You Run Out of Fresh Ideas.”
In the world of SEO, links are a good way to improve your organic visibility. Many have heard about link building, but aren’t eager to follow through with the steps. However, link building doesn’t have to be a chore. In fact, it can actually be fun if looked at from the right perspective. Since Spring is upon us, let’s look at how your company can begin link building or tidy up and improve the links that are currently in place.
When many people think of links, they think of outbound links. Outbound links are links on your website that direct a visitor to another website. Some tend to think that outbound links will cause a site to lose visitors. On the other hand, if links are treated like Macy’s treated Gimbels on the movie “Miracle on 34th Street”, then the return of visitors may be greater than expected. One way to increase outbound links is to think of the current alliances and partnerships that your business possess. Reach out to contacts at those businesses and let them know that your company is sending outbound links their way. They may even be kind enough to return the favor and both companies win.
Another winning link strategy is internal links. Sometimes, internal links aren’t given the same hype as outbound and inbound links, but they are very efficient. Internal links can be used to direct visitors to more detailed pages within your site. For example: Let’s say your company sells vacation plans, and the special for the month is a discounted trip to Hawaii. On the company web site are blogs about different destinations and their benefits. It would be a good idea to have an internal link on the Hawaii vacation plan page that directs a visitor to the Hawaii blog. This way, the visitor is learning more about Hawaii and its pleasures and is more likely to purchase a Hawaii vacation plan from your company. One note that should be adhered to is that inbound links should make sense. Don’t just create an inbound link for the sake of having an inbound link; otherwise it could frustrate your visitors. Inbound links should be relevant to visitors, and at the same time provide quality SEO value to your web site.
Another valuable way to improve linking is to think outside of the box. Is your company having a Facebook contest or promotion? How about creating an outbound link that directs visitors to that contest or promotion? Also, take a look at what your competitors are doing. This isn’t a task that your company should do everyday, but rather every 6 months or so. Learn from your competitor’s accomplishments and avoid their downfalls.
Link building doesn’t have to be an arduous task. In fact, it may prove more entertaining and valuable than your company thought. Outbound links and internal links are a true benefit and can help your company’s SEO efforts. As your company looks to improve its site, remember the 3 “Linkability” tips above. To learn more about linking, read our white paper called “Link Building Made Easy: What to Do When You Run Out of Fresh Ideas.”
Too many outbound links on a website can deplete a site’s own PageRank (the importance Google assigns to a page based on an automatic calculation that factors in the link structure of the web and many other variables). However, this may be more of a relative than an absolute statement; there are ways to externally link to relevant websites without reducing the importance of your own website.
In its simplest form, PageRank can be explained with this formula:
PR(A)= PR(B) + PR(C) + PR(D)
From the formula above, the sum of the PageRank of pages B, C and D is awarded to page A because all of their links are pointing to A. Basically, pages B, C and D are passing on some of their own “link juice” to Page A.
PageRank is assigned on a page by page basis in that the more outbound links one has on a particular page, the PageRank of the page itself is affected. An intelligent strategy is to create a page on the site that includes a collection of links to websites that your users will find helpful. This is a good idea as externally linking from an internal page on your site as opposed to the homepage will not have that much of an affect on the site as a whole. The homepage typically has the highest PageRank by virtue of the links pointing to it. That PageRank from the homepage flows to the internal pages on the site. So, to keep that healthy internal link structure intact, we’d essentially want to have outbound links coming from a lower level page.
However, all of this can be completely avoided with the nofollow attribute. A few years ago, Google put into action the nofollow attribute so webmasters could link to other websites without losing their own “link juice”. This is useful if a webmaster wants to provide links to other quality websites for their users and not lose their own PageRank status.
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