NOLA SEO

A large part of search engine optimization - or SEO - is link building. In fact, it’s the bread-and-butter of SEO. I don’t care what else you hear: the two most important factors that will influence the value (and hence the rank) of a site in the eyes of the search engines are the following:

1. The number of backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links) to a site
2. The quality of backlinks to a site

The “number” means just that - the total number of links that exist that point to a specific site that have been found and indexed by a search engine (SE). The “quality”, however, is a bit more involved. By quality of backlink I mean the quality of the place giving the link, the relevancy of that site to the subject matter of the site getting the link, and what the anchor text says.

Plus, there are a couple of other things that can come into play. So let me show you how to make a really great backlink to another site.

Let’s say you have a website, and the website is a site about blues music. Your site talks about styles of blues music, the difference eras of blues and what happened during each time, blues instruments, blues record labels, and of course a listing of blues musicians. You got it all. A really great blues portal. In the course of making your blues site, you meet other blues fans on the net, and one guy has a particularly cool site all about Guitar Slim. So one day he emails you and asks if you’ll link to his site from your site. “Sure!” you say, “anything to educate the masses about Guitar Slim.”

So how do you make him the perfect link (one that will benefit the linking power of your site, for your friend)? Here are some things to consider. Heck - here’s what to do exactly, step-by-step, to create an optimized link to a site…

• Link (if possible) from an internal page on your site on which the subject is primarily “Guitar Slim”. So, if you had the choice between linking to him from a short paragraph on your index page about Guitar Slim or from a page dedicated to the blues musician (i.e. “guitarslim.html”), you should pick the dedicated page to link from.
• Place the link within the content. Not as a separate link on top. Not as a long link, hanging out at the bottom of the content…no, a link right within the content. Preferable an occurrence of the name “Guitar Slim” within a paragraph all about the man.
• Target the anchor text with really great keywords. Guitar Slim would be an obvious choice for anchor text, but maybe “Guitar Slim biography” would be good too. But “click here to read more” would not be good anchor text.
• Make no more than a couple of links to the site on the same page. One or two is fine. No more. And vary the anchor text if doing more than one…
• Try to make the link appear in bold one time, and regular text the other time.
• If at all possible, make as few links to other sites on the page. The less links on a page, the more valuable each link is.
• On each link, utilize the “title” attribute of the “a” tag. The “a” tag is the tag you use to make a link. Most of the time, people just use the “href” attribute to show where the link is going…and then they stop. What you’re gonna do is put one more attribute in there - “title”. So your link will be <a href=”http://mylink.com” title=”my anchor text or another keyword”>, instead of wasting the opportunity to optimize further.

If you do all that, your friend will have the perfect link (or damn close at least!) to his site. You will get a high five. And Guitar Slim’s bio on his site will get all the possible link love from your site that it deserves…