Turbocharge your links with a little link optimisation
Posted by Malcolm Slade on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 in Google, SEO
Search engine optimisation is a two pronged attack. Working on the site architecture will ensure your pages are indexable, your content is understandable and guarantee your site some search engine love. Working on your backlink profile will increase the power flowing in to your site and the relevance of particular pages for specific terms. Link building is an uphill struggle – anyone can build low quality links all day every day but gaining important trusted links that bring both power and traffic to your site takes time, patience and sometimes pure luck. The effort that goes into gaining these more powerful links means they need to be as good as they can be – bring on Link Optimisation!
Five things really matter when it comes to links. The power passed by the links from the host page to the destination, the trust of the host domain, the anchor text used, the relevance of the host page compared to the destination page and the overall spread of links into the site.
The power passed by the host page to the destination can be gauged in its simplest form by finding the PageRank of the page and counting the number of internal and external links on that page. Dividing the PageRank by the number of links will give you a very basic metric of how much value is in each link. PageRank 0 pages can be a problem here but as a general rule, I would consider the fact that the page is indexed in Google (if it is) enough to upgrade it to a 1.
The trust of the host domain is a little harder to ascertain and requires a bit of common sense. Key considerations should be taken into account – does the host domain have many powerful links pointing to it? Does it have a high PageRank? Does it rank for important keywords in your industry? Do you trust it as an authority in the particular industry?
Anchor text has always been an important part of linking. Generally, a link will pass power into the site and in doing so strengthen all terms targeted within the sites copy and architecture. A link with targeted anchor text will pass the same power but will directly reinforce the power on that particular term.
The relevancy of the host page to the destination site is fairly easy to gauge. Basically, if the page discusses something that relates to the page of your site and most of the page is relevant, this will improve your link optimisation.
The overall spread of links into the site refers to variety of destination landing pages and the variety of anchor text. Not something you can easily see but with a bit of effort you can grasp where your links are pointing and the overall mix of anchors used. Firstly you will need a list of the host pages that have links pointing to your site. This information can be found by using Google Webmaster Tools under the Link -> ‘Pages with External Links’ navigation as shown below, or by using Yahoo Site Explorer to see the links that Yahoo deems to point to your site.
Now you need to review each link and list the anchor it uses, the PageRank of the host page, the number of links on the host page and the destination page. There are free tools available that can do some of this work for you such as Bulk PageRank Checkers, with a bit of programming knowledge you can even code something to extract this data automatically. In the end you should have is a spreadsheet with a list of URLs, anchors, PRs, Page links, relevancy, destination pages and any other metric you deem relevant.
With this information we can now look to optimise our links.
Ideally, what you want is a spread of links into your site weighted towards the homepage and main landing pages that you aim to rank with. On top of this you need a spread of anchors to ensure your backlink profile conforms to some sort of normality. As an example, a page talking about mortgages might have anchors including mortgages, mortgage, UK mortgages, mortgage loans, click here, your URL, your company name. This anchor spread (no pun intended) should be subjective to your main terms for the particular pages but should not be exclusive. A site with 100% of its links using one anchor pointing to the same page is doomed to be seen as unnatural by search engines and likely to incur penalties or filtering.
To optimise your existing link profile you need to look at how to improve each link. You may find a link that sits on a poor page; a pleasant email to the site owner with recommending a more appropriate page might be enough to get this moved. Upgrading a listing within a strong directory might elevate your link from a page buried in the category to the PageRank 4 root of that category. You may have a relationship with certain sites through sponsorship, a shared passion for a subject or sheer friendship. This can be leveraged to allow you to control the anchor text used and the page your link sits on.
Of course, you won’t be able to optimise every single link. There will be plenty you have no control over or have less value than the effort of optimising them (hence the need to form metrics to gauge where to stop). This exercise is definitely worthwhile and should certainly form part of your link strategy. You can achieve outstanding results just by being creative with your existing links, having the time to analyse what could be improved upon and having the nerve to ask for change.
I’m afraid there is no holy grail for link optimisation or even link building but I hope this has given you some insight into the value of reviewing your existing links as part of your ongoing link building campaign. To further push this home I will provide a couple of examples of my own past successes. Names have been removed to protect the innocent.
I had a client whose site was awful. It was built on an archaic platform with zero flexibility and had an inability to implement even the simplest SEO recommendation. The site domain was very old and had enough links etc. to gain a PageRank of 6. Results for any term not targeted towards the homepage seemed impossible.
So I took some time to analyse their existing backlinks. This was a long process as they had a lot but the task was ultimately rewarding. Eventually I found a single link from an article on the Telegraph website. When looking at the link I discovered that the client had several banners on the page and on further investigation, I found that the client had banners through a whole section of the Telegraph website. I queried this with the client who then challenged this himself and found that he sponsored a section of the Telegraph site, allowing him to have banners in return for business insight, opinion and regular content. After a few conversations with the client and the telegraph I was able to replace one of the skyscraper banners with a stylised block of service descriptions and links through to the client’s site. There were five in total covering the five main service areas (and keywords) for the client’s site. Within two weeks of putting this new block in place, the client ranked on the first page of Google for all five of the used anchors and several other variants.
Upon analysing a different client’s backlinks, I found that they had a large number of links from a number of sites all using their brand logo as the anchor. Armed with a list and a visual mock of how I would prefer these sites to link I approached the client to discuss my strategy. They informed me that to sell their product line the other sites were supposed to link to them using the logo but they had no way of auditing this. We concluded that a push to enforce this rule and to implement the new linking style that I devised was the way forward. Over the following months we contacted every supplier and talked them through the changes, helping were necessary with code, implementation etc. The result was not only an increased number of links (a large number of sites were simply not linking to the client) but also top 3 rankings for the phrases used as anchors, oh and a very happy client.
So, if you carry out this exercise and gain nothing from it then I am sorry, if nothing else you now have a better understanding of your backlink profile. But for those who find an opportunity within their existing links I am glad to have brought this to your attention.
Best of luck
