Link-Building

Link building is a fundamental element of any SEO campaign. Often complex, difficult, and confusing, link building is worth all of the effort invested. In order for a website to be highly visible to the search engines, several aspects must be properly completed and updated accordingly.

There are several things we consider when implementing a link building campaign:

Anchor text: nothing more than the text which links to a particular page or website. The anchor text is brief and needs to not only give information about the website it links to, but also should be appealing to potential visitors. Having an appealing or catchy anchor text can increase the chances of receiving successful hits to the website it is linked to. Anchor text should include keywords that searchers use to find your business.

Number of incoming links/ outbound links: the more links, the more possibility for a search engine to index the website, but the links need to be relevant to the original website.

Quality of incoming links/ outbound links: links from quality, trusted websites will better benefit a link building campaign as the search engine will be indexing them regularly and thus have more of a chance to find the original website. Think of it as a vote from a 3rd party.

Age of the site the link is to: a website that has been around for a while will more than likely have been indexed before and thus have frequent visits from search engine spiders, increasing the possibilities for discovery of sites linked to it.

The placement of the link on the page: search engines take a webpage and break it down into blocks. Certain blocks are more likely to be seen by visitors to the webpage, thus making links in these blocks is more likely to benefit a link building campaign.

Other Link Building Factors

As mentioned above and a point that needs to be restated again and again, NOT ALL LINKS ARE CREATED EQUAL! This is not a matter of quantity over quality; often one quality link can outweigh 100 poor links. There are many different factors that contribute to the value of a link, Azimuth wants the world to know that it is important not to get caught up on the sheer number of links but rather their value to your website. Factors such as the color or font of the link as it differs from other links, how many words are used in the anchor text for the link, whether the link text used is commercial or not, what the topic of the page is that the link appears upon and the topic of the page pointed to, and whether the search engines think that people will even consider following the link in relation to the web page that it is on are all important factors that link builders must consider.

Devaluation of Links

In the early days of Google the weight of links was shown as split equally amongst links pointing out from a page. As the algorithms have adapted, Google is speculated to have devalued low-quality links, links that are not natural, links that are heavily stuffed, etc. To continue to create such links would be doing a disservice to your website and something we strictly avoid as white-hat SEO consultants. Links don’t just exist for ranking, they exist to drive relevant traffic. The previous restated: LINKS GET DEVALUED DUE TO IRRELEVANCE. You can trust us not to advise you of this as we always base our consulting efforts off of research.

With a successful SEO campaign implemented, a website can benefit greatly from the hard work and attention to detail that was required to maximize its potential. Link building is a very effective SEO technique when properly implemented, since the popularity of a website is often gauged by the strength of its links. The more links to a website that exist, the more chances of it being found by potential clients or customers. That is not to say that a bunch of bad links are better than a few great links. More links should mean more potential traffic and the more traffic the higher the website will raise on the search engine rankings. Therefore, the effectiveness of a link building campaign is not judged solely on the number of links, but more on the quality of the links present on the page.

Understanding the process of link building is paramount to success and having a plan of attack beforehand will greatly improve the website’s chances for maximizing its link potential.