Acquiring links that point to your website can be one of the more complicated aspects of optimizing a website for search engine placement. The majority of the search engines on the market, big and small, value a site that has a number of quality links pointing to it. In fact, link building can be considered one of the most important portions of SEO.
Disucss Tips to follow for link building in WebProWorld
During the second day of the Search Engine Strategies Conference, a session was held discussing this very topic. Speakers from Ask Jeeves and Google, as well speakers from optimization companies were represented. These speakers offered a wealth of information about what tactics to employ when conducting a link building campaign. However, one speaker stood out with the amount of quality tips and ideas for concerning this subject, and his name was Greg Boser.
For those who don’t know, Greg is the founder and president of WebGuerrilla.com, a well-known SEO company. He is also a moderator at WebmasterWorld’s keyword research discussion forum.
During the discussion, Greg’s presentation offered an absolute goldmine of valuable information to consider when embarking on a link building campaign. The first point he offered was to develop a link building structure that will build strong organic listings. Again, this is playing into the hands of what the search engines and their ranking algorithms value: the more relevant links pointing to your site, the easier it can be to achieve a higher organic position.
Greg also placed a great deal of emphasis on the development of content syndication feeds (RSS feeds). If you are considering creating an RSS feed for your site, it is important to embed a link to your homepage. Doing this can be extremely valuable to your site ranking because when sites that display your feed are crawled by a search engine, the syndicated content containing your link will be scanned, and you will be given credit for having a link pointing to your site.
However, there is one thing to keep in mind when developing an RSS feed for your site that was also pointed out by Greg. He said that to use PHP when creating content syndication because engine bots do not parse JavaScript. This means that if you developed your feed using JavaScript, your headlines and links will not be viewed by the crawler and therefore, you won’t receive any search engine ranking benefits.
Another tip that Greg offered was the distribution of press releases. He recommended that sites do press releases on a regular basis and distribute these to the various Internet news wires. When doing a press release, ensure that a link to your homepage is present, and be sure to include it in your RSS feed as well. This will add to the amount of sites pointing to you via links, and can only help improve your site’s organic listings.
If you are website that develops software applications, Greg also has tips to help with link building. He suggests creating web tools like search toolbars that contain a “powered by” link back to your homepage. Also, try and develop applications that can be featured on software download sites like WebmasterFree.com or Download.com. Greg stated that search engines love links that come from software download sites. Just ensure that the software has a link to your homepage.
Greg also gave suggestions about things to avoid during a link building campaign. First off, he was adamant about not buying links just to boost PageRank. However, if you are going to do this anyway, he suggested that buy links from sites that match your current PR. If you have a PR of 4 and you buy a link from a non-relevant site with a PR of 9, you can be flagged by the search engines and penalized for it. He also mentioned that reciprocal linking was something to avoid.
All in all, Greg’s presentation on link building was the best I’ve seen since the conference started. He is definitely a wealth of information, and he doesn’t mind sharing it. If you or the company you are employed with were thinking about launching a link building campaign, you would do well to heed, or at least acknowledge his advice. There will be a second part to this article that will contain the information that the Google and Ask Jeeves representatives bestowed on the session. Stay tuned.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.