Why Leak Link Juice?

I've written several times on this blog and the Cinnamon Edge blog about the importance of link juice for your websites and blogs.

Getting inbound links from respected and relevant sites is really helpful in boosting your own sites in the search engine results, and you can create some of these yourself by setting up blogs like this one.

There are some SEO 'experts' who say that you shouldn't put outbound links on your websites because they 'leak' the very link juice you've been getting from elsewhere with your inbound links. But it isn't quite that simple.

If it was, authority sites would have no authority, because all their link juice would leak away through all the miriad links to other sites. In fact, outbound links help your website, too, and they do it in two ways:

1. Google likes websites to be helpful and to give a good experience to their visitors. Links to useful information on other sites is one very easy but effective way of being useful. You don't have to rewrite the useful information on your own site and you can never be accused of plagiarising another site's content.


2. Your website's visitors will have an enjoyable and helpful experience when they visit your site so they're more likely to come back, suggest it to friends, and so on. They'll probably forget that a lot of what they learned was actually on another site entirely!

There are a couple of things you must do to make outbound links work for you.

1. Make sure you get any links to open in a new page or new tab so your visitor never actually leaves your site unless they actively decide to. When they close the new website (that you linked to) your website will still be showing.


2. Use the relevant anchor text in your outbound links, just as you would in your inbound ones. This tells Google that you're giving people a clear path to relevant information.

Finally, another benefit of linking to other people's sites is that they're much more likely to link to yours or find other ways to tell people about your site.

It's not quite clear how powerful outbound links are compared to inbound ones, and Google isn't going to tell us, but there's no doubt they do contribute.

And being a good citizen by giving your visitors the best possible experience can only help your business in the long run.

I'll talk about the myths and mysteries of 'no-follow' and 'do-follow' links and their possible impact on SEO another time!

Roy

Online Marketing 5 - Optimised Listings

In our experiment for online marketing in Bury St Edmunds we spent a lot of time researching directories and building links as we went. It paid off, as you probably know.

We found that there are probably hundreds of directories and similar sites where you can list your company or service, so obviously I can't go into detail about exactly what to put in each field on every one of them!

What I can do here is give you some general advice and a few tips on the finer points of using directories to build backlinks to your site.

First of all, a directory that doesn't let you include backlinks is probably a waste of your time. A few of them might have enough traffic to justify listing your company with them, because they might bring some customers to your site, but generally, if you can't include a backlink, move on.

Secondly, a 'deep link' to the optimised page on your site is worth more than a link to your index page, unless they are one and the same. That should really only happen if you have a one-page site (or maybe one content page and some about us info on another page). So if you can add a deep link, always do so. Some directories even allow you several links, and you should definitely take full advantage of those.

Where you can include embedded links in your company description, use anchor text (the actual words highlighted as a link) that includes your target key phrase. Where you can add tags or labels, use your key phrase there as well. Use the key phrase in the rest of your description and heading if there is one.

Link building should be a continuing process. Adding loads of links very quickly is probably worse than adding the same number over a week or two. Worse still is adding plenty of links and then just stopping as though your work is done. This gives the wrong kind of signal to the search engines. In fact it's a sure sign you were trying to work the system, so you need to be consistent and keep adding or getting links to make your list-building look as natural and 'organic' as possible.

There are plenty of sites you can link from, so there's no reason to stop, even if you just add one link a week from now on. Keep at it and you should be able to keep your website where it belongs!

Incidentally, there's some new research just out that shows the relative importance of various factors in optimisation, especially in relation to Google. There are a few surprises and maybe a bit of controversy, too, and I'll look at that next time.

Roy

Online Marketing 4 - More Backlinks

So far in this online marketing course, we've covered keyword research, on site optimisation for your key phrase and building your first SEO backlinks by starting a blog.

There are lots of other ways of building backlinks, and also increasing your online presence. Ultimately, you could even take over most of page one of Google for your target key phrase, but that looks a lot more impressive if your website is number one. For that you need more backlinks from high ranking websites.

The easiest places to get high ranking links are directories and social media sites. Two directories we've had excellent results with are Free Index and Touch Local. While the easiest social media site yet invented has to be Twitter. We've also had good and very rapid results with free ads posted on Gumtree and Craigslist.

Facebook may not be free for much longer, but it's also worth using for driving traffic to your site and for SEO backlinks.

You can get a free listing on almost all directory websites, and most of those will give you at least one backlink. Some will only allow you to link to your website's front (index) page, but you should link to your optimised page, like this one to our online marketing Bury St Edmunds page if you can.

With some directories it might be worth paying for an enhanced listing, but there are so many free ones that you probably don't need to. Of course, you may get a few calls from directory owners trying to persuade you otherwise!

With social media, you can include a backlink in every post if you want, as well as the link to your website that you'll include in your profile. One of the benefits of posting links on social media sites is that they actually bring you traffic, not just search engine spiders, and traffic itself helps to improve your website's ranking, as well as bringing you potential customers, of course!

You can easily get ten good backlinks leading to your optimised webpage, or at least to your site, just by spending an hour or so adding yourself to directories and social media sites.

With some sites, that will be a very basic listing, but others allow you to optimise your listing quite a lot, too, and we'll look at that next time.

Until then, get linking!

Roy

Cinnamon Edge - Online Marketing and SEO in Bury St Edmunds