In my days as a SEO consultant I’ve seen too much people making the same mistakes and I’ve decided to write down a few guidelines you should follow when doing search engine optimization or link building for your website. Here are 4 ideas to get you started:
1. Don’t Throw Away Your Links
A very common problem for many webmasters is that 70% of their incoming links point to www.yourwebsite.com and 30% of their incoming links point to yourwebsite.com. Search engines think that these are 2 completely different pages on your website, therefore the content on www.yourwebsite.com gets only 70% of the “link love” it actually deserves. How to fix that? You need to make a 301 Redirect from one page to the other and your problems are gone. Look into the folder with index.htm, index.php or whatever your website is using. There should be a .htaccess file – if there isn’t one, simply create it with any text editor. Once you have a .htaccess file, add those lines to it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %HTTP_HOST ^yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
2. Deep Linking
Don’t spend all your efforts on building links only to your homepage (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com). Having lots of links pointing to other pages on your website tells search engines that there is good content to be found all over your website. Pointing all your links to your homepage is a sign for search engines that your website is shallow and doesn’t provide as much value to the visitor as it should.
3. Secret: A Great Way to Get Free High-PR Links!!!
This is an idea we haven’t shared with anyone so far, but our registered members really deserve to know about it. There is a way for you to obtain highly relevant High-PR links for free! How to do that? Take a look at some quality, trusted directories (such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva) and find the category that is closely related to your niche. Click on the websites listed there and you will see that quite many of them are dead! Now use a query on Google such as “link:www.somedeadwebsite.com” to see who is linking to those websites. Inform administrators of the websites, linking to dead pages, that they have a broken link on their website and in a large majority of cases they will be happy to replace their broken link with a free link to your website. Yes, it’s as easy as that!
4. Use Smart Anchor Text
Linking to your website with the words “Click here!” isn’t nearly as helpful as linking to it with something related to your niche, e.g. “used car parts” if you are in this business. However, you should get the right natural looking mixture of the anchor text throughout your incoming links! Rule of thumb: use various keyword phrases in 70% of your incoming links, your URL in 20% and various “click here” variations in the remaining 10%.
Following these 4 guidelines your link building will be way more efficient and your website will appear much higher in search engine results pages, bringing you larger amounts of free traffic and free traffic is what you really want!