Some companies want to rank for diferent things and certain links and strategies achieve different results. That’s the end of link building for beginners month on the Hobo site – hope you found it useful.
I’d thought I’d close mentioning you really should have a specific goal every time you start linkbuilding.
What do you want to rank no1 in Google for anyways?
- your company name or brand? Not only do you want to rank for it, you want to control every mention of your company name in Google, easily done by social media participation and using the authority of other sites to rank for your brand. Very easy to achieve with just on page optimisation and a few incoming low-quality links (sometimes, not even).
- Your service, in your area? – again, fairly easy. Done with on-page optimisation (geographic mentions in the title and in the text for instance), and generally speaking some low-quality links
- Your service in your country? - slightly more difficult than above, but can be handled with plenty of low quality links from even low quality, unrelated sites in some cases
- Your service? – difficult depending on the niche – you’re going to need some decent links or at least the same amount of crap links your competitors have. Crap anchor text links outweigh unfocused poor anchor text links from even relatively authority sites.
- Your products? – generally speaking, very difficult, especially if your products can be bought in a 1000 other places. You’re going to UNIQUE CONTENT, need links that pass pagerank, anchor text and trust ie ranking ability. You’re going to need a few trusted sites to link to you to rank all those products. The more pages on your site, the more pagerank you will need. To get pr, you need incoming links.
A weight of crap links built over time can beat even a relatively trusted site in Google in 2009 – still. However, it’s these links Google have a lot of brainy people working on attempting to nullify, so why swim against the tide?
ESPECIALLY considering just a few links from one site can transfer instant ranking ability and trust to a new site, or one link from one PR5 page can transfer enough pagerank to heat up an entire 200 page website with no other links. Finding those sites can be a full time occupation though.
Deciding what you want to rank for and how you want to do it are at the core of link building strategy.
For my own site I’d go for lots of longtails from posts – if I had the time available to churn out the number of posts you do :P The best enquiries I have had via Google are all super-longtails – people looking for info and then converting. I found web design/SEO enquiries from SERPs to be too low quality in general to be worth going after. As for Google wanting to change the way they handle links, I would have thought they could do this quite easily by placing less emphasis on link text and more on link equity. There are plenty of web design companies, for example, that are PR6-7 who rank well below a bunch of PR3 keyword-rich linked sites. It is a lot easier to get lots of low quality keyword-rich links than it is to get a handful of high PR links. Maybe its not that simple, but personally I think the SERPs would be a lot harder to manipulate if Google was more trusting of the page content of high PR sites and less trusting of link text in general.
well i am obessed and one day I thought it would be cool to rank no1 or therabouts for everything related to seo in the uk….. proper KD, keyword stuffing, anchor text, so I had to write this stuff although DaveN (I think he’s tryin to dump that) ;) obviously is the only site long tail seo wise to keep me in 2nd place a lot of the time – which is nice for him ) – Interesting amount of domain authority on display.
That sorta is a good side affect of my otherwise pointless obsession. Anyway I am trying to build sort of brand, which is more important than anything else.