Alongside other fundamentals link building is commonly accepted by Search Engine Optimisation and Search Marketing professionals to be one of the critical ways to secure and to protect search engine rankings. In fact, many search marketing experts now believe that the right linking strategy is indispensable when targeting search rankings.

The questions that search engines will ask themselves will include …

• Who recommends (links to) this website?
• Do we trust them and is the link relevant and justified?
• What is the actual anchor text of that link and how will it influence our (the search engines) view of that site?
• Does the link profile seem natural and hold more weight than that of the competing sites?

For more information or for an informal discussion about how link building can help your website, please contact us.

Proprietary software

At The Search Marketing Group we have spent several years constantly fine tuning and continuing to develop software that will help us and our clients maintain a tactical advantage in our markets.

One of these pieces of software is, in our opinion, one of the best link analysis tools to have been developed. It enables us to not only stay ahead of the competition but to monitor changes in how the search engines are weighting links within a community. For example, Page Rank being by default out dated, we have assigned an SMG score for in bound links based upon not only their profile but that of their neighbourhoods also. This involves many thousands of computations in a very short period of time and gives us a “real time” view of the link profile.

Types of links

The reality is that you should use links and specific styles of anchor text for different reasons. In fact, there are 6 types of links that are regularly used, each with a different purpose in mind:

• Inbound (one way) referral links: These are links that pass a referral or recommendation from one site to another - they are non-reciprocal and pass “link strength”.
• Sales Links: These are used as calls to action – for example the BUY NOW button on retail sites.
• Helpful Resource Links: You could argue that every link is helpful in its own way, but Helpful Resource Links are those that you use to provide your audience with additional, in-depth information for example on one of our articles pages you will find an outbound link to Google Webmaster Central Blog, this gives our clients extra information and backs up what we have said on that page.
• Friendly Links: We link to a number of people on a regular basis, if they have good quality content that our clients will find interesting then this is the right thing to do, we have outbound links in our site to some of our clients; for example on our client testimonials page.
• Notice Me Links: Websites and particularly blogs spend a lot of time trying to get and keep people’s attention. This is a crucial part of internet marketing and reduces bounce rate. They’re either used to target a specific blogger, or reach out to a slew of them and build attention.
• Internal Links: You should link to your own websites and blog posts on a regular basis. This is a good way to pass page rank between pages of your site.

For more information on our Link Building methodologies or to have an informal chat, please contact us today.