Sugarcaned

I've been asked by my friend James, who runs Health & Wellbeing Magazine Inside Out Health, to write about link building. So I'm going to summarise in three parts the very basics of link building. First, let's recap about the anatomy of a good link.

A good link is more than just an arrow pointing to your site, it can tell the person or search engine robot trawling the link what they will find at the other end. This is done with anchor text. Anchor text is the text written as the link. So, rather than just putting http://www.personaltravelgroup.com, which tells the search engines nothing, we could put something like home travel business, which gives the search engine a good idea of what's at the other end. So:

The Anatomy of a Good Link, Part II

• The link is nicely placed on a page with content relevant to your site.
  
• The anchor text is one or more of your keywords (which of course are in the title and h1 tag on the destination page.)
  
• The link is on a page with a good PageRank.
  
• There are few or no other outbound links on the page.
  
• The page linking to you ranks well in SERPs relating to your field.
  

I would like to add more to this. Firstly, it really isn't so good having every link pointing to your site with the same anchor text. Google likes variation. Any website should really have at least 3 keywords that you're targeting, and you should use these, and variations of them, in your anchor text. For example, if your site is for weightloss, you could use:

1. Losing Weight
   
2. Weightloss
   
3. Dieting
   
4. Diet Techniques
   
5. Diet Advice
   
6. Losing weight Advice
   

That gives Google a well-rounded idea as to the content of your site. Ok, that's part one of link building. Tomorrow I'll write about the first places you should get your links from. Then in part III we'll look at further link building techniques.

Happy SEOing.