Mediarun Search Marketing News

Effective linking is essential for successful SEO

April 7th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Links are one of the most important factors when it comes to successfully optimising a business blog or website.

According to Yahoo Media technical marketing director Laura Lippay, search engine optimisation is a lot easier for firms if their site contains high-quality external links, is being linked to by their users or their online content is being shared.

Citing a recent poll from SEOmoz, Ms Lippay highlighted the top five factors that influence marketing professionals' SEO (search engine optimisation) campaigns.

These were good use of keyword-focused anchor text, ensuring a high quantity and quality of external linking, increasing the diversity of link sources, including keywords in a business blog's title tag and maintaining a trustworthy domain reputation based on link distance from other trusted domains.

She noted that all but one of the top five factors outlined by SEOmoz were related to linking in some way.

Ms Lippay suggested getting quality links onto a business website by manually linking to relevant sources - although she noted that this can be time consuming and costly, especially if a site has a large amount of un-optimised legacy content.

She also suggested encouraging visitors to share a website's own content via links contained on their own blogs, websites and social media accounts.

"A great site will do this naturally. Sites like Wikipedia, IMDB and others launched were wildly popular before their on-page SEO was completely implemented. They gained gobs of links from relevant pages and dominated search results because their sites had buzz. Buzz is in-link gold," Ms Lippay said.

She claimed that ensuring that content is easy to share and geared towards a firm's target audience is the best way to bolster an SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign.

"By doing these things, you're not only implementing natural link-building assets into your site, you're also providing your visitors with tools to share your content and create more overall visibility for your brand," she concluded.

Recently, Robin Collyer, regional director for UK & International at Aprimo, claimed that while marketers rate blogging poorly in terms of return-on-investment, it can be a powerful search engine optimisation tool if it is used to its full potential.

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