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.

It's hot today - our office is like a furnace I'm sweating like crazy. Only reptiles belong in these kinds of temperatures. This always makes me sleepy after lunch, so I thought I'd try and wake myself up with a post about beginning OffPage SEO.

Firstly, you should always have Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools installed on your site. They are the best way to keep your eye on traffic, where your traffic is coming from as well as any errors in your site structure and titles, plus you can monitor your inbound links. That last one is perhaps the most important. This is because of the importance of inbound links, which are the cornerstone of good OffPage SEO. And good OffPage SEO is more important than OnPage. A lot more important. So, verify your site with webmaster tools and install Google Analytics whilst you're there.

Let's imagine your site is brand new and not on Google at all at this point. Everytime I have installed Google Analytics on a site, it is indexed within a week, rather than the potential 3 months with the 'submit a site' feature. Never use the submit form to get Google to check out your site, always go straight to the analytics. If anyone says it doesn't make a difference, they are lying - my experience with several sites in the past tells me otherwise.

Once you have these installed and your site enters the Google index, you can now really start to see what is working for your site and what isn't. If you've followed the OnPage SEO advice on previous posts, you're well on your way. If you make your site Google frendly, Google will want to rank it highly, but it won't do so until it considers it an important website. And for Google to consider your site important, you need inbound links, preferably with good anchor text.

So first, before we start looking at how to get inbound links, lets look at Anchor Text.

Anchor Text let's Google know what is at the other end of the link. Whenever you have control over the anchor text you should always select your top keywords for the link. For example; if your site is for weightloss - your top keywords might be weightloss, diet, lose weight. When you can control your anchor text, your code might look like this: Weightloss

Obviously it isn't always possible as you often don't have control of that. But when you can do that, it makes the link very important as Google has a very good understanding of what the page is about.

The anatomy of a great inbound link would be:

• The link is nicely placed on a page with content relevant to your site.
  
• The anchor text is one 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.
  

To get links that match all of the above criteria is nigh-on impossible at first, but with time it can happen. Right now, we'll settle for just one of those.

In Google's webmaster tools, you can check your progress on your link building efforts by checking two areas: Firstly, you can measure the quantity of links by going to: links > pages with external links. This gives you a good overview of the links you've gained. Then you can check the anchor text by going to statistics > what googlebot sees. This will give you a list of the anchor text used to link to your site. What you are aiming for is for your keywords to be as close to the top of the list as possible - this will make you rank better for those words. You get them closer to the top by making them the most common anchor text. So try and get as many of your links with good anchor text as possible. We'll go into how to do that next time. At first, expect to see perhaps just your company name and or URL at the top, especially if you've only go into directories so far, but next time we'll go through how you can change all that.