Creative Writing on the Web

3 Tips for Quality Links in Your SEO Copywriting

Linking is one of the most important facets of search engine optimization. As you are probably aware, having high quality inbound links to your site can help you increase your page rank and climb the search results. In this current age of blogging, you can’t just expect to receive inbound links without occasionally giving love to other websites. But if you are new to SEO, you may not realize what all goes into a link. It’s not enough to just create a simple link saying “click here.” Creating a quality link takes careful planning. Follow these steps to ensure you are following the proper linking protocol.

  1. Enhance Your Reader’s Knowledge- To earn a loyal reader base, you have to provide a quality, educational experience for your users. In addition to creating relevant, unique content, you should consider linking out to informative resources for the sake of enhancing the overall user experience. Accordingly, you want to ensure you aren’t linking to websites your users won’t like. Most importantly, you should never link to websites trying to sell them something. This will make your visitors think you are trying to con them into buying. If you provide low rate links, they will begin to ignore your links and, even worse, they might start to ignore you.
  2. You’re Only as Good as Your Weakest Link- The search engines take note of who you are linking to. There is an old saying that goes “a chain is only as strong as its’ weakest link.” The same goes for your website. In the eyes of Google, you are only as good as the worst website you link to. In other words, if you link to websites with little trust and low page rank, the search engines will classify your website as one not worth of their trust. To get the most out of your links, you should try to link to established, reputable websites. By linking to quality sources, the search engines will begin to give more trust to your own page.
  3. For both your users and the search engines, you should create descriptive, keyword rich anchor text whenever you link out to another website. Your users will appreciate it because a descriptive link gives them a much better idea of the page’s content than simply saying “click here.” Search engines appreciate the links for the same reason. It gives them a better indication of what the targeted page is about, and it helps it rank it better for relevant terms. Additionally, the owner of the website you link to will appreciate the optimized link, and they may decide to reward you in return.
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4 comments

1 James Bridges { 07.21.08 at 8:23 am }

I like the 3 points, but I think people should be careful to item #2. If you follow that advice too literally then new sites that have a creative edge may never get the notice from Google. I would say link with moderation, but the whole point of linking, even in Google’s eyes, is to demonstrate a vote for content that you feel should be noticed by others.

2 Joseph Cardwell { 07.23.08 at 5:38 pm }

Ummm….WHAT? Are you talking about bad neighborhoods in #2, or just links to low ranking sites. Please tell me your talking about bad neighborhoods.

Outbound links have no effect on a pages ranking. If you link to a bad neighborhood or link farm -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm,
then yeah, you can get banned.

The only effect that outbound links have is that a page’s ability to spread link love is apportioned among its links. The more links, the less love each link gets. This applies to internal links too.

3 Eric Brantner { 07.25.08 at 11:51 am }

@James- agreed. moderation is defnitely the key to linking.

Joseph- To say that outbound linking has absolutely no effect on SEO seems a little dangerous to me. many experts believe your outbound links play at least some role in your ranking/trust with Google. I’m not just talking about linking to link farms. If you’re linking to irrelevant, low rent websites who are spammers associated with linking sites, I dont think it reflects well on your site at all. Perhaps I oversimplified it a bit for the sake of brevity, but I think you and I can both agree, you dont have much to gain from linking to low quality sites.

4 Singapore SEO { 08.03.08 at 10:07 am }

Linking out to reputable authority sites is one important step to take note.

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