By Joe Simpson
Google rates links very highly and apparently it rates related links even more highly. Many SEO experts urge you to seek out unreciprocated one-way links from related web sites. Sounds simple – well no it doesn’t and it isn’t.
As Jonathan Ledger states in his excellent blog below – the days when links are given out to worthy web sites are disappearing fast – content may be king but a one way link to a web site in the same sector is effectively a vote against yourself.
This situation can only get worse especially in sectors which have any commercial value and lets face it that’s just about anything nowadays. After we do all the easy SEO stuff on-page optimisation, rewriting our content, sorting out url structure – any webmaster in a reasonably competitive market will then need to seek out these one way links in order to boost their rankings.
Sometimes they can be gained by complimentary sites, suppliers, customers – related sites but not direct competitors. Again though there is a reticence to link to other sites partly due to the unknown effect on their own rankings. As Jonathan rightly points out years ago we all happily added lots of links to all sorts of related sites from our web pages simply to help our readers – this simply doesn’t happen on the same scale anymore.
But all is not lost – the rules apply to all of us and it’s still relatively easy to acquire ‘off theme’ links to help boost your page rankings. These do really work and can be seen by improvement for ranking of any web site. Two things to remember acquiring these links -
1) Always take care in providing proper anchor text for your link – usually including the keyword or a variant of your keyword. Try to vary this on theme – make sure your anchor text is not identical for thousands of links. This looks way too artificial and could possibly cause problems in the future (although there is little current evidence that this causes a problem.)
2) Stay away from obvious link farms or paid link pages. These are Googles ‘bad neighbourhoods of the web’ – try and avoid these sort of sites. The ideal sites to approach for links would be complimentary but not direct competition – webmasters may add your links to help improve the content of their own web sites.
Of course SEO is an ever changing world and the rules are constantly changing – the general rule is to try and avoid anything that looks like your obviously trying to boost the rankings of your website by artificial means. Yes I know that is confusing because that is exactly what we are trying to do ! Try and build your links in an organic manner – slowly build them up as you add content to your site. In fact adding good quality content which you think could gain you links is a positive tactic – hence the popularity of lists and ‘top ten’ pages listed on the web – these are often linked to casually from web sites and blogs. In the end a page is much more likely to be linked if it contains useful, interesting or even controversial material – more food for thought.
It is unfortunate that links and SEO practices control web page rankings currently – if you look at highly ranked sites in competitive keyword areas – you can see that it is not the best content that you will usually find at the top – but the pages will always be constructed with high SEO awareness and usually have many inbound links to support the page.
Links both on and off theme are tremendously powerful in boosting your search engine rankings so make sure you take that side of your marketing seriously.
Good luck in your link building.
Joe Simpson Internet and SEO Specialist [http://www.ngbconsult.co.uk/contact.htm]Search Engine Rankings
Jonathans Blogg http://jonathanleger.com/why-is-it-so-hard-to-get-on-theme-links
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