Search engine optimisation (SEO) should play an important part of any internet lead generation strategy, ranking well on page 1 of Google for a good phrase can bring you endless converting traffic and will usually be more cost effective over Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
Currently, the most important factor in SEO is building links to your website from other websites. These links are seen as ‘positive votes’ by the search engines and will help you rank for your keywords, but going out and buying 100 links for $30 apiece is not going to help you. It’s all about quality.
The key to quality link building is finding your link targets, then designing a strategy to get links from these websites. Below are some important metrics and points to consider for choosing these potential link targets.
Domain Trust
Links from trusted sites are extremely important, especially for new websites trying to break out of the Google sandbox. An example of a highly trusted website is Wikipedia, their pages rank really well for a lot of keywords due to the amount of trust Google places on the domain.
One part of the Trust algorithm is a domain’s age. A website that has been around since 1999, and held by the same owner, will have a lot more trust than a new website. You can look at a domain’s age with wayback machine, this great tool for exploring your potential link targets in your niche. See the video below for a better understanding of domain trust.
Domain Authority
Links from authority sites have more value and pass more ‘link equity’. The authority websites in a niche will be sites that are most referenced by the other sites in that niche. These authority websites will have attracted links to many of their pages, not just the home page. You can use Touchgraph for a quick look at the authority websites in your niche.
Every industry has websites that are seen as the authority websites by Google, these should be your link targets. You can also get an idea of measured domain authority from my tool ViralSPY, which gives you a domain’s authority as a figure out of 100.
Pagerank of the page
Pagerank is virtually an obsolete metric to measure a page’s strength, but you can get a rough guide of its importance. When we talk about Pagerank, we actually mean Google Toolbar Pagerank as displayed by your browser and measured between 1-10. If you are using Google Chrome, you can get this data from my PageRank chrome extension.
Pagerank can be misleading so the majority of professional SEOs are now using Mozrank as a standard measure of a page’s strength. Links from pages that pass the most mozrank will be you most valuable links.
Number of outbound links (OBLs)
If you get a link on a page, it will have more value if the number of other external and internal links are limited. If your link is on a page with 50 others (e.g. Yahoo! Directory listings) the link juice is spread amongst all those other websites, decreasing the link value to your website.
Along with the above metrics, you will also need to consider a couple of other things to help ensure quality link building.
Relevance
Google’s algorithm is now extremely good at matching link relevance. If your business is in packaging, links from other quality packaging websites are going to be your link targets. This factor should also be considered when building internal links between your pages, you need to consider relevant internal link mapping.
Anchor text
Anchor text is important, but not to be overused. Keep your best keyword anchor text for your highest quality link targets. The lower quality links can be mixed up with brand terms.
Ensure they are passing juice
Links need to be ‘dofolllow’ to pass link juice. You will need to look at the source code where your link is placed, rel=”nofollow” will mean the link juice will be blocked. You can also see my other article on optimising your links to ensure the webmaster is not taking you for a ride, there are many tricks used to stop a link passing juice.
Try and keep links country specific
If in the UK, .co.uk domain should be your primary link targets, but you should never turn down a quality link.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Domain Trust & Authority from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
