5 Factors You Must Consider for Your One Way Link Building Strategy
One way link building is critical to the success of your website. Here’s why…
Let’s assume that you and your competitor both have websites filled with search engine optimized quality content that is ranked completely equally in the “eyes” of Google. Who gets the top spot for your keywords? The website that did the best job of one way link building. It’s a popularity contest. One way, incoming links are seen as “votes” and the more “votes” your site has, the more “popular” you are and the higher you rank.
Of course, the one way links to your website are also rated. That’s why you want to engage in one way link building rather than link-swapping. Link-swapping, or building two-way links, is not very valuable – and may even be considered as link-spam by the search engines. Your one way link building strategy needs to take into account how those links are valued by Google. Here is how Google values your one way links…
1) One way links on the Home page of a website are rated higher than those from interior pages. Why? Because the Home page is the page that pretty much “says it all” for what the site is about. It is prime Internet real estate so anything on that page is very important. Home page keywords are the umbrella keywords or theme for the entire site.
2) Text links are rated higher than url links. A text link is when words are given a hyperlink such as Internet marketing company linking to a URL rather than the URL itself. Internet marketing company and www.Meta-Bee.com both link to my home page but the link, Internet marketing company, will receive more value than simply using www.Meta-Bee.com. Why? Because if the link is comprised of the words in your content, it is ABOUT your content – and therefore it is “relevant.” The most effective one way link building strategy uses text links in the content body.
3) Text links that include your keywords will rank higher than text links that don’t include your keywords because they reinforce the keyword theme you are trying to rank for. If your website is all about pet grooming and you have an incoming text link with the words, “brownie recipe” the web bots will essentially get confused regarding what your site is all about. That particular text link is not “relevant” to the theme of your site. The search engine bots create a network of connected themes much like the neurons in your brain create a network of pathways to all the information stored there. The more you think about a certain thought or memory the more connections your brain builds and the stronger those connections get. Same with the search engine bots. It’s pretty ingenious, really.
4) One way links on relevant sites are better than those on sites that are not relevant for the same reasons regarding relevancy that we’ve already mentioned. Using the pet grooming example again – a link from a website selling pet grooming tools will have more value than a link from a website full of cooking recipes. Your one way link building strategy needs to include links from RELEVANT sites.
5) Links on more popular, highly trafficked relevant sites have more value than links on relevant sites that are less popular and have less traffic. You can compare the Alexa ranking of various websites to see how popular they are. One way link building focused on building links from relevant sites in the top 100,000 on Alexa would be a very difficult but very valuable one way link building effort! A link from a site with an Alexa rating of 14,000,000 will have little value no matter how relevant it is.
6) Permanent links are FAR more valuable than temporary links. Temporary links generally come from ads that appear for a specified period of time only. That is why you don’t want to buy ads to get one way links unless those ads are permanently archived on the Internet somewhere.
To summarize, the most effective one way link building strategy will focus on one way link building of text links in the content body of the home or top level pages of highly relevant popular sites. I’ll go over some excellent strategies for getting those types of links in a future post.
