Visibility

Link building is the process of building domain and web page trust by growing the number of websites that point or link to you. In the past 5 years, link building has evolved to say the least. Gone are the days where submitting a site across 100+ directories would get you top rankings on SERPs. Before we get in to what’s changed, let’s familiarize ourselves with link building jargon!

External Links: The number of links pointing to your from sites that are not part of your domain or subdomain.

Page Rank: A numeric value from 0-10 that tells us how important a webpage is. This algorithm was named after Larry Page and at one point the most important factor for ranking pages. With time, there are a number of different factors/signals that have started to weigh in.

Page & Domain Authority: A numeric value from 0-100 devised by SEOMoz – this element, according to me sheds more light in to the trust and weight of a webpage.

Anchor Text: Search engines weigh this element with a lot of importance. Both quality and quantity of anchor text links pointing to your site will influence your rankings on SERPs.

Example: <a href=”http://www.adlift.com/”>AdLift – SEO Company</a>

Do-Follow/No-Follow: Links can be characterized as do-follow or no-follow. Websites that have links that are do-follow, pass a vote of confidence/link juice to the webpage they are linking to. Links that are no-follow do not pass link juice to the site they are linking to. This infamous tag was the heart of many SEO debates and gave rise to page rank sculpting – until Google changed the way they counted these links.

Now that we’ve covered the basics – let’s dive into a couple of important factors that are essential for successful link development.  

1)    The More is not the Merrier – Contradictory to popular belief, more is not always merrier. Stay away from 1400 links for $12.99 “deals” – there are most likely going to decrease your page trust and hurt your rankings. Quantity is important but not at the cost of quality. Building one link with high domain authority is better than building 100 with no domain value to trust.
2)    Avoid Anchor Text Spamming – Anchor texts are important. Maintaining a natural link graph is even more important. With the recent change in Google’s algorithm http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/ - Google is clamping down on spam. Blekko recently announced they have banned content farms. I think this all points to adding content that’s useful to the users and not with the sole purpose of ranking higher. You can always argue – well who defines “useful” – we would need to leave that conversation for another article!
3)    Site Placement - Links that are part of the content are more valuable than footer links or blogroll links. Links on the left well are more influential than right well links. This SEOMoz article provides some great insight in to “not all links are treated equal” - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
4)    Maintain Link graph – I believe this is going to become more and more important as Google clamps down on spam. An obviously spiky link graph (like the one below) will most likely set off alarms. I’d suggest spending sometime on Majestic SEO’s Backlink history tool to learn more about your link graph.
 
Source: Majestic SEO

5)    Tools & Tracking – Although, there are a plethora of tools out there for tracking link development metrics – I highly recommend getting yourself acclimated with the Google Webmaster Tool,  SEOMoz’s OpenSiteExplorer.org and BrightEdge SEO Platform

I.    Google Webmaster Tool

The Google webmaster tool has come a long way since it started – it now gives you day by day updates on your sites health, internal and external links, keyword ranking, visits and click thru data. This is extremely powerful data for all SEOs. Some of the most useful features are –

a.    Monitor internal links
b.    Monitor external links
c.    Evaluate site performance
d.    Project traffic/revenue based on search query analysis
e.    Track duplicate Title/Meta Tags
f.    Track crawl errors
g.    Submit sitemaps

Out the features above, my most favorite is the Search Query Analysis – you can use this tool to predict the effect of increasing a keywords rank on your traffic and revenue.

II.    OpenSiteExplorer.org

Here’s are two important metrics you can track using OpenSiteExplorer -

a.    Link Graph: You can plot your very own link graph by tracking changes on Opensiteexplorer’s “external followed links”. By plotting the number of links that point to you each week you can keep a close watch on your link graph.

b.    Anchor Text Distribution: This metric helps with competitive sizing. You can compare the amount of keyword specific anchor texts that are pointing to your competitor versus your own site. Although anchor text volume is not the only ranking factor, it helps benchmark yourself against the competition.

III.    BrightEdge’s SEO Platform
Another tool I’d recommend using is BrightEdge’s SEO platform - (It’s not free though). You can – track rankings, analyze the competitive landscape – it even pin points potential linking opportunities.

In the past 8 years, 2010 has been the year with the majority of big algorithm changes tuned to weed out players that game the system. What was termed “advanced link building” a few years ago very basic today and SEOs will need to adapt and innovate.