Inbound Linking for Traffic
Having quality relevant inbound links can have a massive impact, not only
to your rankings but also to the actual traffic to your web site. Having a
link on a relevant site normally means that the visitors of that site may be
interested in your products or services.
Consider ourselves, we can’t realistically target other SEO web sites
but we can look at other internet related sites such as design communities
and maybe even web design agencies and the visitors to these sites may be interested
in our SEO services. This type of referral traffic is more likely to convert
into a lead as it is highly targeted traffic, much in the same way that a long
tail search, or brand name search in a search engine will.
Inbound Linking for Rankings
When looking at an inbound linking strategy to aid rankings, the important
issue here is again the quality and relevancy, but also the anchor text. If
you want be ranking for the term ‘ SEO’, then there is no point
in your inbound links having the anchor text of ‘XYZ Corp’. Also,
you should vary the anchor text (if possible) to include other keywords so
across 5 sites you would have 5 different anchor texts containing 5 of your
keywords.
We have seen that using keywords in inbound links we can rank sites for terms
that don’t appear in either their content or their keywords. Such is
the power of inbound links.
Inbound Linking for Page Rank
Page Rank is a direct reflection of your inbound links. It is not a reflection
of your website; it reflects the authority of your site. It is also important
to note that a low page rank site CAN rank above a high page rank site, and
that page rank is not a live figure (it’s updated roughly every 3 months).
Page Rank is passed from inbound links from other sites, and is diluted by
the number of outbound links on the other site. If you have a link on a Page
Rank 7 page and you are the only outbound link on that page then around about
80 % of that page rank is passed directly to your site, now consider that you
have a link on the same Page Rank 7 page but it now has 100 links you now have
that same 80% being split 100 ways (0.8%).
What to Look For In Inbound Links
There are a number of factors that make up a good quality inbound link;
- Authority of referring page (Page Rank).
- Anchor text – getting keywords in.
- Number of outbound links on the page.
- Relevance of the page
(i.e. Nursery Furniture linking to Car Sales is not considered relevant) - Neighbourhood of site – if the site is in a bad neighbourhood then
you may be associated with this site, and be penalised by Google.
The above list is not definitive and should only be used as a rough guide,
but in most cases using good business sense will help making decisions on
your inbound linking strategy.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and SEO is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
