Getting to Grips with Google Part IV – Link Building & Promotion
If OnPage SEO is all about getting Google to understand the contents of your web pages, then OffPage SEO, link building, is all about giving Google a good reason to put your website high up in the search results.
The success of Google in the Search Engine arena is down to its highly accurate search results.
These are due to its primary ranking system – PageRank. Now, while there is much debate as to how important PageRank actually is these days, there’s no escaping that it’s still one of the major factors in generating Google’s SERPs.
The idea of PageRank is a simple and thoroughly democratic one. The theory goes that in a network of interlinked documents, such as the World Wide Web, the pages with the most inbound links to them are going to be the most important, and most authoritative pages.
In simple terms a link from another web page to yours is considered a vote, a vote approving your content and recommending it to others. It is this “voting” system that is the key to Google’s results generation.
Essentially, the more votes you get, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your PageRank, the higher you will appear in the search results for keywords relating to your content.
There are other factors involved, such as the authority of the page that has the link on it, but for the purposes of this article we’ll be looking at the basic principle of a link equals a vote.
Firstly, let’s have a look at what the anatomy of a perfect inbound link would be:
- Keyword/phrases in link Anchor Text
- The link is on a page with good PageRank
- The link is on a page with relevant content
- There are few other links on the page
- The link is nestled within some relevant content
Now going back to our Rattan Furniture example, an ideal link for that site would come from a page about Rattan Furniture, or at least furniture of some description, the anchor text will be something like: Rattan Furniture Suppliers and will be one of few outbound links on that particular page and the page would have a high PR.
Realistically, a link that ticks all of these boxes will be difficult to attain at first. We’re going to start with a realistic link building campaign that will get us started, and get Google noticing our site.
We’re going to start building up a good amount of links that whilst not being great scoring links, will increase our PR slowly.
We are also going to bear in mind that getting links aren’t just useful for SEO purposes, but they are also promotional tools. Links bring people to your site, and hopefully a percentage of them will spend money with you.
So where should we start our campaign? We are going to start by building a good foundation of easily attainable links. So for this we’ll start with forums.
There are web forums for pretty much every topic and niche you could imagine. What we need to think about is the kind of forums where our potential customers might be using.
This would help promoting the site to future customers as well as bringing some backlinks from pages with relevant content.
For our Rattan Furniture example, we could target forums for realtors, interior designers, house wives and so forth.
Once we’ve searched in Google and found some relevant forums, we join them and make a signature for ourselves.
This will appear at the bottom of every post we make and can contain a link to our site.
We want this link to contain our keywords, and have some related text around it, and we also want to use slightly different variations for all the forums we post it.
For a start, we’ll aim for 5 or so forums, and our signatures could be as follows:
- Order Quality Rattan Furniture Online
- The Best Rattan Patio Furniture available online
- We supply Rattan Furniture at Trade prices
- Enjoy the outdoors in comfort with our Rattan Garden Furniture
- Rattan Furniture Suppliers
The anchor text in these links gives Google a good idea what content the landing page is going to contain and is also punchy enough to catch people’s eye in the hopes they visit our site and become a customer.
Now if you think back to our anatomy of a perfect inbound link, these signature links tick 2 of our criteria: our keywords are in the anchor text and it’s on a page with relevant content.
To get the most benefit from the forums it’s important to remember to join in the discussions and post frequently.
Don’t simply post advertising SPAM, this will get you banned very quickly. Join in debates, answer people’s questions and enjoy it – forums are social places and can be a lot of fun, and they can be a good way to get direct to your customers.
Don’t pressure-sell or just post a promotional link. Always remember to make all of your posts meaningful and helpful, and always respect the rules of each forum.
If you get involved it’s reasonable to expect to that a daily visit between your forums could bring in 2000 inbound links within a few months. 2000 low-grade links, from my experience, should be enough to get you a PR of 2.
This isn’t set in stone of course, but its good target to aim for. These links, provided they’re placed in relevant forums, should also bring in some traffic, and help promote your product or service to the right people.
Next time we’ll continue looking into building a good foundation of inbound links through blogs, directories and portals. Until then, get into those forums and get link building!
Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.
He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.
He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.
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