Toronto SEO Blog

Link Building is the core of how search engines rank websites, SEO, it creates order out of the ciaos that is the web.

How? All search engines use the number & quality of links pointing to a particular website as part of their algorithm to rank websites in their search results.

Search engines then further refine this portion of the algo by looking at the following:

• The text used in the link itself – called “Anchor Text”
• The quality or reputation of the site that’s doing the linking – done by looking at how many links the site has
• The topic of both sites to determine if the two sites share topics
• How many other links are present on the page that’s doing the linking – the more links the page has, the less important the link to your site is
• The content on the page that contains the link

Link Quantity or Link Quality?

First we should qualify Quality.  Quality links mean they come from “trusted” sites with healthy and established link profiles of their own.  Take a site like CNN.com versus Bobsnewsonline.com.  CNN will have a massive back link profile (over 13,000,000 to be exact), because people link to it all the time – bobsnews on the other hand will have a fraction of the link count.  This means that a link from CNN will carry more weight then a link from Bobsnews, making it a “quality” link.

If you sell computers you’ll want links from technology related sites, but in the natural world of links, you’ll also wind up with links from completely unrelated sites.  Unrelated links still help your rankings, albeit you’ll need more of them.

So How many Back Links do you Have?

There are a few tools that you can use to determine this.  Google provides a section in their WebMasterTools, but this only shows you a portion of the actual links your site has and it doesn’t allow you to look at competitor sites.  For comparison reporting you’ll need to signup and pay for it – companies such as SEOMOZ (OpenSiteExplorer), and MajesticSEO are a couple good tools that provide fairly accurate reports.

By looking at and monitoring your link profile, you’ll be able to see how many links your site needs to be competitive, as well as how much traction you’re getting from your link campaigns.

So Where Do you get Links From?

You can get links from two primary methods – naturally or buying them.

Natural Links

Natural links happen when people visit your site, find it useful and share it on their site or in a blog or forum.  You can’t control natural links (think anchor text), you’ll need an absolute killer site to give people a reason to want to link to you on their own, and they take years to happen.  Because of these factors, natural links don’t tend to play a large role in SEO Services Toronto.

Social Links

Use Google+, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and deal oriented websites as a source for links.

Create interesting content and promote sales and events, contests, new product announcements, reviews and videos with social channels as they have the potential to go viral and create natural, free links.

While you can’t control anchor text and other details the same way as you can with paid links, they are a vital component to keeping your overall link profile looking as natural as possible (not to mention they can provide a significant revenue source).

Paid Links

There are three primary types of paid links:

1.) Text links

Much has changed over the last year with respect to what you can and can’t do with paid links. Most of you are probably aware of JC Penny, Overstock, Forbes and other large organizations being publicly “busted” for buying links.

In the case of text link ads – AKA sponsored links – they typically appear in main navigation areas, making them particularly easy to spot as being “paid” links.  Because of this, the only way to use them now is for branding related terms (www.domain.com, Your Brand Name, etc…).  Using keyword rich anchor text for text links is a sure way to wind up with a search engine penalty – either by auto detection, or by one of your competitors filling out a spam report and a search engine representative manually reviewing your link profile.

2.) Social Blog links

This is my favorite link building method as when done properly, can be impossible to detect as being paid. Areas to avoid include writing the posts in promotional or review oriented styles and using “Sponsored by” text.  You still need to carefully plan the campaign, using a healthy mix of keyword rich and brand related anchor text, several different landing pages and a percentage of no-follow posts.

Blog links are found in posts on a wide variety of sites. Typically they don’t carry the same impact as text links as these tend to be on the homepage, where as blog links are usually on a sub-page within the site.  The best thing about blog links is that you pay once for it and it’s there for months – text links on the other hand are charged on a monthly basis.

Make sure that you receive reporting on post life span at least once every quarter.  This will show you how many of the posts are still live and how many are dead.  If more than 50% go dead, you need to discuss this with your link provider and have them address the issue.

3.) In-content/Article links

These are a blending of text links with healthy amounts of related content.  They provide good performance because of this content surrounding the link.  These tend to have a slower impact on rankings, because the page is specially created for you – but in the long term the impact can be greater (once the new page has been crawled and indexed), because of the focus of the content being so related to your product or service.   The content helps search engines know what the link is about.

Making Paid Links look Natural

Planning, Implementation & Reporting - You can get links anywhere, but what you can’t get anywhere is experienced planning and implementation.  This is the single most important aspect of link building and one area where Web Marketing Toronto’s Link Building Services excel.

Poor link planning can not only result in reduced performance, but can also wind up getting your site banned if it’s reviewed by a human at one of the search engines.

If you’re having a SEO Toronto company manage your link campaigns, make sure you are involved in the planning stage – before anything goes live.  By pre-approving things you can make sure they aren’t doing anything stupid that could result in getting your site banned.

For both externally and internally managed link campaigns, make sure you’re getting full reports on link campaigns. Reports must include details such as anchor text used, landing pages used, keywords, no-follow details, and how many links were created for the previous month.

Best Practices – When you’re building links you don’t want to be used link text like “click here” or “www.mysite.com”. You want to use your keywords. The text used has much to do with what you wind up ranking for. You can have 100 generic non-keyword links and 10 blue widget links, and the later will provide the biggest impact every time.

While you want optimize your anchor text, it needs to be balanced with non-keyword versions to create a natural looking back link profile. Excessive use of keyword rich anchor text can result in a flag being raised with search engines and a subsequent ban of your site.

In addition to watching excessive use of keyword rich anchor text, you also want to make sure you’re diversifying the landing pages being used.  Use at least 2 different landing pages for each term.

Follow versus no-follow.  Make sure that your link campaign includes a percentage of no-follow links, as having 100% of your links passing page rank can look unnatural.  While this may seem stupid, to pay for a no-follow – search engines still look at these links even though they may claim they don’t.  And using a portion of your links as no-follow keeps your link profile looking natural.

Link Building Costs

Good link building isn’t cheap. Not if you want links that’ll never get your tossed out of Google that is.  Link campaign pricing can range from as little as $300/mth for non-competitive categories and upwards of $30,000/mth for ultra competitive categories.

The costs aren’t just for the links themselves, but also includes the most important part of any link campaign, the planning and reporting.  In addition, our links provide you with control over the writing style, even making edits if required.

We’ve been using these types of links for years and know that they are worth every penny as they provide extremely posititive results in ANY vertical.

Summary & Other Tidbits

Build your links carefully and slowly and be a control freak where linking is concerned.  Don’t ever allow anyone to just do whatever they want with your link campaign.  Be involved in approving plans and review monthly link reports with careful dilligence.

Don’t build links too quickly.  Going from no links to hundreds or thousands in a couple weeks is just plain dangerous.  Have a long term strategy, and spread link building out over months not weeks to keep your profile natural.  Make sure the sites being used are all unique and aren’t all part of the same network (IP classes/ranges should always be unique).  Use a combination of techniques – blog, static, social, content and other methods, again to keep your profile as natural as possible.

Stay away from crappy directories and dodgy cross linking schemes. If you have a network of your own sites, resist the urge to cross link them all – you’ll wind up getting them all tossed out of the index.

Remember this simple rule for link building: If it doesn’t pass a human evaluation, don’t do it.  All it takes to get your site banned is for a single link to be traced back to you as being paid.  So be involved and be careful.

Contact us if you need help getting started on your link building campaign!