Written by Honcho | Jan 14, 2013 12:00:08 PM
How does link building work to get your website ranking higher in Google? Well, it’s surprisingly simple. Here we break it down into 3 easy steps. We start by doing extensive keyword research for our client’s website, based around their products or services and whatever else is popular in their industry. Once we have our list of search terms, we identify which (if any) of their pages already rank for them and whether they need to create any new pages or use any existing pages to rank for these terms. When we have the target search terms and target pages, link building can begin. Before we dive in, I should also mention that while you can optimise and perfect your website until the cows come home, at the end of the day it’s links which will have the biggest impact on your website ranking higher in the search engine results. So here is how we do it and why it works so well…
STEP 1: Optimise pages for target search terms
We optimise the Title Tag and Meta Description of the target page for our target search term. Often this is crafted in such a way to target 5 closely related search terms. Google Bot reads from left to right, just like a human, so we can carefully place the right words in the right order to optimise the Title Tag for a greater number of search terms. The Meta Description doesn’t help rankings, but does encourage a better click through rate, which is why it’s often used to display a marketing message or top level information about the page. That said, any target search terms in the Meta Description will appear in Bold, drawing the user’s eye to your page. So it’s worth optimising your Meta Description while including key information. If your page is rich with content, you can use H Tags to break up your content and optimise it further. If your web page is particularly strong, it may naturally rank higher in Google for your target search terms as a result of optimising the Title Tag. Once the Title Tag and Meta Description are optimised, the page is ready for link building…
STEP 2: Create anchor text links to target pages
If your target page isn’t optimised, you will find it much harder to get it up in the Google rankings. Now you need to build links to your target page using the anchor text for the search term you want it to rank for. For example, if you had a page about “walking boots”, you would create as many links to it as possible with the anchor text “walking boots”. It’s always worth throwing some variation in to make it look natural to Google Bot. So you could have anchor text links like “best walking boots”, “cheap walking boots” “waterproof walking boots” and “leather walking boots” to mix things up. If you optimised the Title Tag of your Walking Boots Page for all of these closely related search terms, you should be able to increase its ranking for all of these search terms in Google.
What kind of links can you get? Here are just a few of the different types of places you can build links from. • Directory Submissions • Bookmarks • Blog Comments • Article Submissions • Forum Posts • Social Profiles • Blog Posts • Blogger Outreach • Content Marketing • Press Releases It’s always best to get links from as many niche relevant places as possible as well.
STEP 3: Search engine rankings increase for target search terms
Now you’ve optimised your target page and built anchor text links, you should start seeing your web page ranking higher in Google for your target search terms. Just remember that you’re competing against everyone else in the space, so it will take a number of months to get to the top of the Google for your target search term.
SUMMARY
Overall, link building is pretty straightforward. You find your keywords and optimise your page for search terms. You build lots of links from a wide range of good quality sources. Your web page goes up in the Google rankings. Obviously, it gets a lot more involved than this, with precise keyword optimisation of Title Tags and then there’s the actual act of link building itself, which is incredibly involved and a lot of hard work. But in essence, that’s how it works. On a final note: It’s also worth mentioning that if you go ahead and do all this link building without optimising your target pages, they will be much harder to rank in Google. But if you throw so many links at a page that it does rank without being optimised, it may be subject to dramatic fluctuations in rankings. I had a client once who wouldn’t let me change the Title Tags and this was the result. So optimising Title Tag helps to effectively ‘pin’ the page in place so that Google always knows what that page is about, rather than needing thousands of back links to tell it what the page is for.