Brief Description Of Link Profile
A prospect calls up and asks you to “do this search engine optimization thing” for their website. After checking their website against identified keywords and the competition, you check their link profile, only to find no links (or very few of them).
For whatever reason – whether it’s due to the website being brand new or having never been marketed – these guys are starting from scratch. But they want rankings now and SEO is the hot topic for the CEO/owner/whoever.
The best advice you can give these people is to slow down and be prudent.
In this process, Google – especially – has put quite a bit of emphasis on trying to rank “big brand” websites. There’s a lot of debate on how this is determined, exactly, but one major factor is a website’s link profile.
A link profile is made up of:
- The types of links to your website (sources such as directories, forums, news articles, press releases, social, etc. ).
- How these links were acquired (all at once, or slowly/steadily over time).
- The anchor text (words used) in those links (perhaps the most important piece).
For any website just beginning to build its link profile – sites with no/few backlinks – it’s important to establish a sound foundation of links.
Another way to get things off the ground is to send press releases with links to their website and use their company name in the anchor text of these links.
Above all, especially for a new website, it’s important to create great content that is link worthy, says link building specialist David McBee.
Too often, companies simply don’t have the patience to wait things out and let things “naturally” build. For example, this Warrior Forum post is from someone who was nailed for “unnatural” link building because he built links a bit too quickly.
Websites, especially recently, are being hit for being aggressive with their anchor text use for their backlinks. As with many things in SEO, opinions will vary, but many would tell you that you would want a minimum of 35 percent of your backlinks to be links using your domain name/URL or some other “branded” link text. In fact, you might find that many of the top performing websites contain 50-80 percent “branded” anchor text.
McBee notes that it’s important to take your time and grow your links a “reasonable” percentage month after month after month.
Paid links still work. However, this doesn’t mean you should go out tomorrow and buy 20,000 links.That’s not natural. And, chances are, if you’re buying links, you’re going to get too aggressive on your anchor text.
If you want to do well in Google today (and I dare say, in the future), you need to have a “natural” looking link profile, with loads of branded anchor text links, from many sources, linking to your home page and to deeper pages (blog posts? ), built up over time.
Once your website is established as a “big brand” in the eyes of the search engines (a deep website with loads of pages filled with unique/good content and lots of branded links), then you can consider adding some keyword-rich anchor text links pointing to your home page or specific pages to get a top position on otherwise competitive keywords.
Truth told, they are a decent result (they do sell all of these products) but without a little SEO/link building help, they wouldn’t be in these positions. They earned it by building a big brand, and taking advantage of that big brand to sprinkle in just enough keyword-rich links to earn these positions.
Home Depot: More Linking, More Ranking
You can see a copy of this email here.
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking partners and/or vendors to link to your website, and even to encourage them to link in a certain manner – I might suggest that you’d want to mix up the anchor text use and, depending on the amount of authority (links) that you have built up, you may want to continue to use branded anchor text.
- Linking to The Home Depot website will benefit our business partners by increasing the page authority of your website.
You should never hide a link.
My point in sharing this is that even those authoritative websites are working on anchor-text-rich, deep linking, because they have earned the authority that allows them to do this, more than most. Don’t know why they focused specifically on this page…Home Depot ranks No.
Everyone’s link building plan should be unique to a website’s individual situation. For example, a website may already have the authority needed, so perhaps internal linking would be a bigger priority. For a website starting from scratch (just bought the domain last week), it’s important to lay a sound foundation (branded links from quality sources, spread out over time).