Link Strategy Optimization

A free, simple guide to the basics of optimizing a linking strategy for your website.

Optimizing Your Linking

Links to your site are much like votes for your site. The more votes you get, the more popular a search engine perceives your site to be.

Further, the quality of the page linking to you can affect how much value a search engine spider may place on that link.

A very relevant or highly authorities website linking to you would be more effective than an unrelated or brand new website linking to you.

Anchor Text

Anchor text, the verbiage used in a text link, helps search engine spiders establish relevancy for the pages they are traveling to will be about.

A keyphrase link will be viewed as a vote for your site regarding content related to that keyphrase. A link with relevant anchor text would be much more valuable than “click here”.

Incoming Anchor Text Ratio

While you do want to concentrate on obtaining links to your website that contain highly relevant keyphrases, you also want to avoid obtaining too many links, too quickly, with the same link text.

This looks unnatural and could be a ‘red flag’ to search engines who frown on link manipulation.

As a webmaster you should be actively obtaining links to your website from other relevant websites, partners, activities & events you sponsor, merchants, fans, friends & family etc.

In doing so make sure to vary your anchor text while concentrating a majority on your most valuable target phrases (Primary).

Anchor Text Ratio Details

• 50% - Primary Keyphrases*

• 25% - Primary Keyphrase with +word*
  “XYZ Keyphrase” or “Arizona Keyphrase”

• 15% - Secondary Keyphrases*

• 10% - Secondary Keyphrases with +word*
  “XYZ Keyphrase” or “Arizona Keyphrase”

* Vary your keyphrase link text - including word order, interrupted phrase, partial phrase etc Similar to integrating keywords into copy.

Internal Linking

Links from your own site do help your pages by sharing link popularity, PageRank and relevancy.

Your website should have a comprehensive navigation that appears site-wide, this will not only help visitors to navigate from page to page on your site, but will assist the search engine spiders in finding all of your pages and indexing them regularly.

As with external links you should use anchor text that includes keyphrases relevant to the content of the page you are linking to.

Outbound Links

Sites with tons of inbound links and very few outbound links look suspicious to the spiders… keep that in mind.

Avoid mass link exchanges, but build linking relationships with quality sites that have content that is complimentary to your own. Use relevant anchor text to link to relevant, authoritive sites.

Linking optimization tips

• Obtain links from a variety of relevant sources
• Avoid mass link exchanges, paid link advertising on non-relevant websites and other such techniques
• Use relevant anchor text whenever possible
• Don’t get stuck on a sites PageRank - Relevancy out-rates PageRank any day
• Links from authority TLD’s such as .edu, .gov are weighted very heavily - pursue them when relevant
• Links from authorative sites are weighted very heavily - older sites, high rankng sites, etc

Optimized Linking examples

Bad Linking/Anchor Text:
“click here”
“read more”

Better Linking/Anchor Text:
“SEO Article”

Best Linking/Anchor Text:
“Free SEO Guide - Optimized Linking”