Stronger Link Building I – Jose Uzcategui From Snaptech – Vancovuer SEM Meteup

Last Meetup was my turn to present at the Vancouver SEM Meetup. I chose link building as the topic because a couple of interesting projects we’re undertaking at Snaptech.

First  let me thank Snaptech Marketing, the Vancouver web design and Internet marketing company where I work, for sponsoring the Meetup. It’s great to have industry support in these things.

The Link Building Series

Trying to keep my Meetup presentation to 35 minutes was a bit of a challenge, there are so many things we can talk about link building…

I don’t want to rush the information on the blog so I’ll break my presentation into a series of 3 or four more digestible posts.

This post is the first of three posts about link building.

The Most Important Parts of Link Building Is…

…knowing why you’re embarking on a link building effort and how.  If you’re reading this, you probably know links are important. But how important? Very.

Links decide ranking order in the search results. Generally, sites that have a stronger linking profile rank better.

Links, of course, bring about more traffic, exposure, and other very important things. But not as important as the influence they have on rankings – for me anyway.

Two SEO Linking Basics

When search engines see and follow a link they gather a whole whack of information that gives context to the site being linked as well as the site that is providing the link. The two particular things I recommend people to focus on are: the anchor text and the “noFollow” attribute.

1. The Anchor Text is the clickable part of the link. Search engines pay a lot of attention to it, make sure you leverage it.

For example, one of my recent posts was about an ironic SEO search result I found. Regardless of the page being on a different or my own site the search engines are going to see the link and interpret the anchor text. I could go with:

a. Take a look at my last post where I show a “failed SEO campaign” (http://bit.ly/adArjU)

b. Take a look at my last post where I show a “failed SEO campaign”

c. Click here and read my last post where I show a “failed SEO campaign”

The anchor text of “b” is the most useful to the search engines in making an association between the pages and assuming what the linked page is about.

If you’re only going to remember one thing with regards to link building, this is it. Not only it helps your SEO, but it also help us, the users, make the association.

2. The “noFollow” attribute is a piece of code, invisible to the users search engines implemented to prevent spam a while back. This particular piece of code disassociates the two linked pages and it looks like this when you look at the code:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/your-linked-page/”>Your Anchor Text</a>

Knowing if the link you’re going after is noFollow or not directly impacts your SEO efforts. If you’re spending lots of time and effort to get a bunch of noFollow links that are not going to count in the eyes of the search engines from an SEO perspective, then you should be aware of that.

Blogs, social sites and other user-generated content sites typically have noFollow attributes. This discourages spammers flooding blog posts comments, forums, and other communities vulnerable to spam.

Two Internal Link Building Musts

Links within a site dictate which pages are more important. Imagine your site is a micro-version of the Internet. The previously mentioned effect from the amount of links, anchor text, and noFollow all apply.

Internal linking is also an ample subject, but here are my two most recommended points.

1. Keep your site flat. For most sites, you should be able to get to most pages within 3 clicks.

Pages that are closest to the homepage are the most important. So structure your site with that in mind.

2. Use appropriate anchor text on the first link. By “the first link” I mean the first link on a page pointing to another page.

In other words, if you have 3 links from page A to page B only the first one of those links will count. What’s it’s anchor text?

Say the first one is an image with an “ALT=”menu1” and the other link is later in the page with a good anchor text, search engiens will only pay attention to the first one.

End of The First Part

Not to worry, the next posts will be shorter. In those I’ll share some thoughts on 3 different tactics of getting links.

I’m curious though, what would be your basic recommendations with regards to link building?