SEO Toronto

Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to your web. In search engine optimization (SEO), ‘off page’ factors have become more and more important as they relate to rankings.

A back link footprint is the process of creating quality inbound links that benefit your web or low quality inbound links that do not benefit your web. A backlink footprint would be considered the end results of you link campaign

Use anchor text – Anchor text is merely keyword text that describes a link.  Here is the anchor text for my main keyword SEO Toronto. One thing you should not do is overload your main keyword using anchor text. What I really mean is that you want to progress naturally and having %90 of your anchor text as SEO Toronto looks odd. Since this is my foremost keyword I would naturally have the highest percent of my anchor text as this keyword. The trick here is to assimilate. I’m sure everyone who reads this will have more than one keyword and SEO Toronto suggests you use them more frequently.

Use links from related pages – Most people know that getting a link from a site that deals with a similar subject is beneficial. Have you ever thought about why the search engines adopted this policy? SEO Toronto believes this is due to cause and effect from link spammers. I try to think like a Google employee to see the bigger SEO Picture. Recently Google has put much emphasis grading your website. I think that it would be safe to assume that Google now has the technological means to identify a link that is part of the spamming process. At this time I would advise my clients to continue to obtain links from relative sites but to also look for a little variety in your back links. Now you must remember to follow the basic guidelines of link building if you want your footprint to be effective. I continually see people on my own sites as well as sites across the internet filling their documents with as many links as possible. If it looks abnormal to the naked eye then imagine how the search engines feel. Under most cases you should only require 1 link to your main page. You should place a link in your paragraphs to an internal article on your site if it helps to clarify the point you are making.

Choose different locations on the linking pages – I see many people leaving a bunch of links at the end of the document and I wonder what SEO consultant gave them that idea. It’s so wrong it’s comical from an SEO point of view. This is one of those areas where you want to stand out from the crowd. Let’s say you have 3 documents you want to publish on your favourite social media site. On document 1 place the link at the top of the document. On document # 2, place the same link in the paragraph where it makes most sense to do so. On document # 3 place the same link at the bottom of the page. Now that you have learned this; try and be as random as possible placing the link where it is relevant. Try to add different combinations by including a link to an internal page on your site that is relative to what the document is saying. There really shouldn’t be any reason for you to have more than 3 links pointing back to you from any given online resource. I’ve seen people place a link for almost every article they have ever written on one document. That particular SEO trick is well over 5 years old and is no longer relevant anywhere.

Try to gradually and naturally increase links – Again try to blend in with the heard here. Try to follow your medium link ratio and you will never go wrong. Simply stated you will look like a wounded animal ready for the lions if you average 10 new links a day and then all of sudden you achieved a couple hundred links in one day from a link farm. It’s not just about the amount of links you have. Sure having the most links should help you but keep in mind every-link will eventually go through Google’s Quality control and will be weighted based on what they consider to be good business practices.  So buying those 100 links may have just cost you not only the price for the links but the time and resources required to fix the damage they caused.

Try not to link from spam sites or link from a bad neighbourhood – Sites that deal with porn, offensive language / behaviour, selling of online drugs, even affiliate sites should be considered as a link from a bad neighbourhood. It’s also important to know if the server itself is involved with other sites that could be considered a bad idea for your link building footprint. Sites that appear to be mainly consisting of links that really don’t seem to belong there should also be avoided. There are many servers around the world that are listed as spam servers and these should be avoided like the plague. I kid you not an online drug spammer from Russia cost me a 10 position drop because he got a link on one of my new forums that did not have a spam guard installed yet. 10 points people, from one guy who is in every spam report list in the world. Now consider what you are doing to yourself when you buy links from one of his landing pages or even someone hosting on the same server as him.

Link to internal pages not just your home page – If you have a website then you should have a Google account. Using Google Webmaster Tools or the tools from any search engine will let you view how many links are coming in. Its looks odd when 99 of your 100 links all point to the index page. You do want to have most of the links going to the main page but again you need to spice things up every now and then and acquire links that point to the other pages on your web. You should also know that deep pages may not be optimizable so pages that are buried way back in your web structure are nothing more than a waste of your time. The directory structure of your website is very important to your optimization. Meaning you should not have a structure that goes deeper than 5 folders to begin with. Try to keep it simple and each folder you create should have a natural progression from the last. Try to think like a directory when you’re creating pages and folder structure. Think of it this way; pretend for a moment that your website is called www.theworld.com. The next level of a naturally progressing website structure would be to have all the countries pages reside in a country folder like this www.theworld.com/country/Canada.html. Now you would not want to start placing documents that deal with rivers at the root level of your domain structure.

Free General directories may be hurting your link strategy. – Do you remember in school when they informed you about the 5 food groups? This was an essential part of your learning because the end result is a balanced diet that acquired essential nutrients from each of the 5 major food groups. The exact same thing is applied here. Would you like to eat potatoes and only potatoes for the rest of your life? Google is looking for a taste from the major food groups. If you have nothing but free general directories then you are slowly starving your website to death and you should be ashamed of yourself.

The age of your back links is important – Just like the age of your website the age of your back links is also very important to your linking footprint.

Paid linking footprints will devalue your backlinks – In order for Google to maintain a level playing field this statement has to be true. The day is fast approaching when SEO consultants will be advising you to De-link from all the link farms you paid to host your backlinks.

Have your links coming from totally different sites (C-class IPs) – The easiest way for you to accomplish this is if you have more than 1 website then you can use 2 different hosting services. You could also do a who is web report and determine what servers you are looking to host on. Most reports actually have an “also listed on this server section” that will tell you some of the main websites the hosting server has. This could be very time consuming so to ensure you are creating the backlink footprint you want you can follow some simple rules. If the website looks to have items that seem too good to be true it probably is. Are links in there commenting sections pointing to bad neighbourhoods? Is the website structure valid for the pages in the site? Does it seem relevant for you to place a link there? Will the link remain active or will it be deleted after a period of time.

Tread lightly my friends and create a balanced and optimized backlink footprint.

Richard Kemp

SEO Toronto