Hopefully you’ve heard of the power of link building for improving your search authority and rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). Most often, link building (also called inbound links or back-links) relates to having other, authoritative websites, blogs or directories link to your website and/or blog. One tactic, so-called submission is the subject of our next blog, Link-Building Advanced: Submission Tips and Tricks.
Before time-consuming and sometimes costly submission tactics, do implement a number of quick and easy LINK BUILDING BASICS including interlinking, proper link naming and coding, social profile linking, sharing and bookmarking, and reciprocal links.
Following is more detail and examples of the above Link Building Basics!
Interlinking is Easy!
What is interlinking? Interlinking, or the practice of building internal links, is taking various links from your web page or blog posts and incorporating them into your existing content. For example, the Construction Marketing Blog centers around various marketing best practices and news. In this blog post, we discuss relevance and value of content on your website. See how I interlinked the word content to an existing post on this blog devoted to content marketing? Not only does that signal to search engines another way to easily navigate through your site but also gives your readers a chance to gain more info on what they are currently reading. Continue reading to learn more about internal linking and how to name your links correctly.
Proper Link Naming and Coding
You see it all the time – “read more” or “click here.” Okay, that’s nice, but what does it tell me? What am I “reading more” of? How do I know that the “read more” will really send me to a legitimate page and educate me more on this topic? This is exactly why it is important to name your links correctly. Incorporate those links within the content of your site or blog post. For example, this link invites you to learn more about marketing best practices for AEC firms. Notice that the link is exactly what the post is all about once you click on it. And, if you hover over it, the alt text, or anchor text (picked up by search engines), indicates that it is indeed about those marketing best practices. Alt text can be added through your blog editor and also through your website editor. Be sure to ask your developer how to do this based on your blog and website platforms. With WordPress, for example, you can highlight text, click on the “link” logo and enter the alt text under “Title.”
Social Profiles and the Linking Influence
Think of it this way: connecting your social profiles, website and blog helps you pass the “background check”; the more information that search engines can find on you and the easier you make it for them to find, the quicker you become visible and gain authority. The Construction Marketing Association does this by linking our website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn. Having social buttons across the top of your website and blog templates, visible on each page, makes it easy for someone to click immediately to those pages. Likewise, having your Google+ profile, for example, have a link to your other social profiles, website and blog also helps. Checkout how CMA does this in the screenshots below:
Notice the Social Icons in the top Right of the Construction Marketing Association Site?
Notice that the Construction Marketing Association links to all of its sites here.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are great for indexing various blogs or web pages that you’ve created and helpful in generating more backlinks to your website or blog. The most popular social bookmarking sites include Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg. More recently, Digg has lost it’s flair for being a top bookmarking site and has actually declined in visitors, continuously, since 2010 according to an article from MIT, which references Wall Street Journal data and declares that Reddit is succeeding while Digg is failing.
If you are interested in learning about which other bookmarking sites are available to you, check out the Top 15 Most Popular Social Bookmarking Sites from ebizMBA – just updated this July 2012. It gives you an estimated number of monthly visitors and also various rankings from top website ranking companies, like Alexa.
Reciprocal Links
In addition to seeing that a website’s internal pages link together, search engines also look for links that people have shared from your site whether it be a recent blog post you wrote, a news story that you added to your website’s news room, a contest that you added to your home page, etc. A search engine will keep track of how recent your pages have been shared, which sites/Facebook accounts/Twitter accounts have shared those blog posts or pages, and include this in evaluating your site’s authority.
It is important to have blogroll located somewhere on your blog, typically the right side of the page. The blogroll serves as a directory for various resources that compliment your blog and relate to your content. This is a key place for building reciprocal links. A reciprocal link a website you link to, that also links back to your site. For instance, if I link to the American Marketing Association, I can request them to also link to the Construction Marketing Blog. When both links are set up this way on our sites, we’ve created a reciprocal link. It is true that reciprocal links take some work. You will need to contact various blog developers or associations if you wish to share a reciprocal link. If you are able to obtain reciprocal links from well known associations, blogs or companies, this will give you greater search authority.
In essence, all of this link building is suppose to make your site more visible to those searching for your content, and to also help search engines give you authority. It is important to keep two things in mind when link building: relevance and value. Are you creating relevant content that people can relate to you and your business? And, is the content you are creating providing value to them? Does the content help answer a question? Does it provide useful or valuable information to them? These are all important questions to ask as you follow these best practices of link building!
Additional Reading on Link Building:
What is Search Engine Ranking Authority?
Deep Dive into Internal Linking for SEO
10-Step Guide to Social Link Building
Please share this post with others working on link building within their website and blog, and comment below! How do you practice link building? Share your link building best practices with us via the comment tool below!
Love the ideas, love the tips, all I gotta say is, SEO Rocks! All-together though, good post on link building.
Thank you for your input Brandon! We appreciate the feedback!!