Links are vital to driving traffic to your website. They allow people to find your site, and discover your content, services and products – and they can even boost your SEO. Google’s search engine algorithms monitor the quantity and quality of your website links. Their analysis directly influences how well your website ranks in Google – so link building is crucial for SEO.

Google Penguin influences the value of link building

In order to maximize the value of link building, you need to understand Penguin – one of Google’s most recent algorithm updates. It was bought in to penalize websites that manipulated their back links. Unfortunately, Penguin also penalizes any website that shows signs of link manipulation, whether or not it was intentional. In order to conform to the latest Penguin rules, there are 2 best-practices that your site should follow.

1. Publish more content, with more internal links

User experience is a big focus of Google’s latest changes. As links within your website play an important part in user experience, they directly influence your SEO. Pages with lots of helpful internal links are more likely to rank well; and they’ll help your site to convert its visitors.

To benefit from this, publish new content on a regular basis. Include natural, helpful links to external content, alongside links to your own content. This is a free and legitimate way to improve the value of link building for SEO; as long as you diversify your anchor text.

2. Boost the value of your link building with diverse anchor text

Anchor text refers to the word or phrase that contains the hyperlink to your site – like this. It used to be common practice to fill anchor text with keywords, but Google’s Penguin update rendered this practice dangerous. Websites with an obviously spam-ridden selection of anchor text are likely to get penalized, and drop down the rankings.

In order to maximize the benefit of your links, you should diversify your anchor text. Avoid too many keywords, and instead opt for:

• ‘Naked’ URLs

  Anchor text that exactly mirrors the URL of your link: http://paramountbusinesscoach.com/

• Brand names –

  Your business or brand name: Paramount Business Coach

• Personal names

  The names of you or your employees: Yoon Cannon

• Page titles

  The title or heading of the page you’re linking to: The Success Mindset

• Non-descriptive anchor text

  Text with no relation to your business or brand – the sort of anchor text you’d naturally find in an article or blog post: Click here to read more

Key Takeaways

In order to maximize the value of link building, you need to abide by Penguin’s latest rules. Thankfully, they’re pretty easy to follow, and they could boost your site’s SEO in no time.

• – Post quality content in a regular basis.
• – Include helpful links to your own content, as well as external sources.
• – Diversify your anchor text, and avoid keyword stuffing.

What techniques do you use to build links? Let me know in the comments!

Value link building: 3.5%

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