How Link Building Affects Search Engine Ranking - By: Gen Federico

When designing your link building campaign, you want your links to point to pages of interest not just your home page. Having a number of links deep inside your site hierarchy signals to search engines that your site is comprehensive and relevant on a number of topics. Having many links pointing to your homepage suggests to the search engines that these links are probably synthetic and may even penalize your site because of attempted manipulation.

Backlinks One way you can advertise your site is through paying advertising services like AdWords or Microsoft Advertising, but if you prefer the cheaper way, you can build your site's rank through the use of backlinks. If your page or site appears in the front page of a search engine result, you will have a large amount of traffic coming in. Backlinks, in its simplest form, is just another link from another site to your own site. These backlinks are the source of the so-called organic results from search engines, as they are an implicit endorsement of the initiating page to the destination page.

Some search engine optimization consultants attempt to manipulate search engine rankings through the creation of different website domains and creating interlinking pages, thus giving the target site a huge amount of backlinks. While this technique may have fooled the search engine algorithms in the early days of the Internet, this technique will backfire now if it is attempted. Search engine algorithms now place a high value on the relevance and authority of the initiating link when computing the destination page's search rank. When you hear the term high-quality backlinks, it means that these backlinks are from pages that are already high up in the search rankings and lend their “score” to the pages they refer to.

Since most of the different domain websites were created from scratch, they will have a low value and a bad score. Even if you increase the volume of backlinks, if the sources of these backlinks are of low quality, your site's search rankings will not go up. In fact, if abused, search engines may even penalize your site for participation in artificially manipulating data.

Deep link ratio When analyzing how link structures can affect your search engine ranking, you cannot avoid discussing the deep link ratio. The deep link ratio, put simply, is the number of backlinks (also called inbound links) that are not pointing to your home page, but rather to pages deep inside your hierarchy. The theory behind the ratio is that a higher ratio will typically indicate a more natural and organic link profile than otherwise.

Many search engine optimization consultants use Yahoo to analyze a site's deep link ratio because they have learned from their experience that Yahoo will share the linkage data more than that of Bing or Google. As mentioned previously, you generally would want a higher deep link ratio than a low one because your link popularity tends to look more natural. However, you should also compare your deep link ratio to that of your own competitors in the same industry; a deep link ratio that is too high for an industry that only has average ratios may send a warning flag to search engine algorithms and they might conclude that your site is trying to artificially inflate link popularity.

For example, sites like Amazon.com and the like will tend to have lower deep link ratios compared to Wikipedia and other content-based sites. This is because normal users of Amazon will link to the home page when talking about the website, whereas people who will link to Wikipedia are often interested in talking about a particular topic page.

Creating quality backlinks Search engine optimization experts consider three primary things that build up a link: the anchor text, the link intention, and the link location.

·Anchor text. These are the words for the link. Bad examples include “click here” and the like. It is recommended that the anchor text be descriptive.

·Link intention. The destination of the link. The destination is the page your user will end up with when he or she clicks the link.

·Link location. Where the link is situated compared to the rest of the page elements. Links near the first few sentences of content weigh more than navigation links or links at the very bottom.

A high quality link has all three elements relevant to each other. For example, if the link's anchor text pertains to hair loss, the link intention or its destination must point towards a page that is relevant to hair loss and the link's location on your own site must be near content that pertains to hair loss.

Much of the time you will see very bad-quality backlinks from some very weak search engine optimization campaigns. For example, there are many comments, more often than not considered as spam that will just nitpick a blog post for some irrelevant idea, while including a link that has no relation at all to the rest of the page content.

Consistency is key Many shoddy search engine optimization consultants will just do an initial optimization, and then charge their clients a huge amount for simply running ranking reports. Most of the time, they are really unaware or choose to be and think that the initial optimization they did would bring home most of the desired results. Others are more unscrupulous and know they are cheating their clients but since they are already paid they will just repeat these techniques on other unsuspecting clients.

Link building takes a lot of work, resources and even money. Having an ongoing campaign will cost a lot. Great effort must be taken to source high-quality backlinks and ensure that your site has a good deep link ratio. However, many clients get daunted by the amount of money they have to spend to get quality results and will try to find companies willing to give a discount. Unfortunately, these are the same companies that are more likely to cheat their clients.

When hiring a search engine optimization consultant, be on guard and monitor if they really are doing any work, especially link building. As a client, you are not paying them to run search ranking results. You can do that yourself by doing a search on your keywords. You are paying them to consistently upgrade your search rankings throughout the contracted period.

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