Link Building Strategies for Internet Marketing
If you ever wondered how to measure results for SEO link building, here is one of many tactics that provides insight to how rankings are acquired as a result of a keyword acquisition & keyword sniping.
Relevance is the basis of rankings, you either have it or you don’t. Relevance is determined by the type of content you place on your website, the words you use to describe your business, the types of terms and jargon that BELONG to certain industries, etc. If your site lacks it, the good news is, you have control over the content, so if your existing site is off topic, then create new on topic content or create a new site using a highly relevant domain name, populate it with themed site architecture and content and start building links.
For example, if search engine user agents (spiders) are crawling your pages and they come across a high grouping of certain buzzwords within a particular proximity and consistency then they can parse the text and determine that your page has a high concentration of terms akin to one particular industry. If you are taking about percentages, deductions, W-2 forms and the like, they are smart enough to deduce through phrase rank, that the page is about accounting.
But just having this information (on-page) is not enough, you need to build links in order to stake your claim and plant the seed in search engines that not only is such information on your pages, but you would like your site to be classified, indexed and ranked highly for a specific subset of keywords when people use them in search engine queries.
One way to accomplish this is:
Use the words in unison when link building until your allinanchor position rises high enough to oust the next competitor from the position of having the highest relevance for those terms.
Now it may be that some websites rank higher for the exact match form of keywords for very particular reasons.
1) That they only focused on developing a narrow series of keywords such as 5-10 phrases (which will occur naturally over time as search engines glean the context of the pages). Or
2) That other’s linked to them using those narrow series of keywords (hence increasing their relevance for those search terms).
The less competitive the term, the easier it is to gain a higher position for the allinanchor (a term that means that out of the top 1,000 pages for that keyword, is at the top of the list). To check the position of the allinanchor (which is often a near exact result of just performing a common search, you can use the search command allinanchor:add keyword here. The colon is important after the command, with no space with the keyword following immediately.
Not to digress from the point, the allinanchor relevance factor ideally should be escalated over time using a base of your main keywords and then as a result your pages appear higher and higher in search results.
To keep it simple, if I wanted to rank for the term internet marketing I would perform the search and use the search command allinanchor:internet marketing. From there try to find your website and see how many pages away from the top 10 you are. Then you know, just how much link building you have to do.
If you have a top 10 or top 20 allinanchor ranking for any of the three terms, then you will rank accordingly when any one of those keywords is used in a search vs. other websites who are not link building.
Just imagine that everyone starts at zero, as you build links your allinanchor ranking makes your site more relevant, and the more keywords you use along the way, the higher you will rank when those keywords hit their plateau.
Now that I see that the TBPR Export is over and Google has reindexed the web. A few weeks ago, the bottom literally feel out from thousands of search terms instead of the lofty 62 million results we now see, it was a sparse figure (less than 50,000) competing pages, refer to this post for more information.
The idea is to use overlapping keywords when building links, for such a competitive term it’s always best to get in before the keyword becomes a buzzword, but just in case you can, you have to think about quality of links vs. quantity.
It will take several months to acquire such a keyword (6-9 months easily if not a year) since as you build links, you competitors who started before you are building theirs as well, which can be quite challenging if you are using a tit for tat mentality.
Most keywords only take 2-3 months if their are moderately competitive, but you have to use them in your tags, use them frequently in multiple forms to really cement them within your on page SEO and when you build links using variations, the search engines will respond and rank your pages accordingly.
The objective here is to build quality links and acquire as many variations as possible (internet marketing, marketing solutions, services for marketing on the internet, etc) as insulation for the crowning achievement of the two word term (internet marketing).
One way to do accelerate this is to socially bookmark your links are when you develop them, this way they stay afloat in search engines and by building links to your links, you pass more juice to your site as a result.
If I build links for a site for example using the anchor text SEO Internet marketing company, then I receive the benefit for (SEO Company, SEO Marketing, Internet Marketing Company, Marketing Company, etc.) all of the keywords (get a lift) and based on the prominent placement and chronological order of the words.
Likewise the idea here is to mix it up and use overlapping keywords that have semantic relevance in order to drive home the theme of your pages. Pages have the ability to rank independently, so just because one page in the site is general, a more specific page (with links built using a variety of anchor text) has the ability to rise up in the search engine result pages and rank like a champ.
However, it is better if you use the entire site to bring up select keywords at a time (through the process of link development), then once you have a foothold for the most prominent terms, then zero in and start picking off keywords with the greatest of ease.
I may have mentioned this several times in other tutorials, but just encasing the search term in “quotes” in Google for example, has the ability to show you the competitiveness for the keywords in question. When you see 1 of 10 of 239,000 for example, this is a competitive keyword, if you saw a result like 1 of 10 of 15,000 it’s as good as yours in a few weeks to a month, depending on how many variations you wanted to lay claim to.
Generally results of 50K or less are nice targets for keyword acquisition a.k.a. keyword sniping. Depending on the authority of your site, the number of back links you have and the topical relevance you have to the keywords each search engine responds a bit differently, but I have found that MSN live, has a very accurate search algorithm which essentially ranks the highest allinanchor pages the highest.
So, if you manage to hit the top 10 for MSN, you should also be ranking well in Yahoo. Google has it’s own unique set of criteria and oftentimes the results take longer to settle as their ranking algorithm is the most evolved and has filters to omit exaggeration of one method of another. As indicated, they use phrase rank, page rank and trust rank to determine relevance which is not gained overnight.
In essence, the sooner you start the better, also, it is better to build links gradually and not have tremendous spikes in increases or decreases in link velocity (the rate at which you acquire or lose links). So many times people give up before they hit the mark and breakthrough the top 30 results, which gives way to the top 20, top 10, top 5 and then #1 position for keywords as a result of steady link development.
Sometimes the pages that you point the links at don’t always get the boost, you may find that your home page takes the role of the catch all, or another page which has a lower keyword density starts popping up in search results instead of the page you anticipated.
This is a good thing and we can discuss that at a later time, but for the record that is the preview of allinanchor dominance which is sure to come as a result of consistent acquisition of links form a variety of sources (blogs, articles, references, social media sites and social bookmarks, .edu links, etc.).
But without relevance all the link building would miss it’s target as the on page and off page factors must align to realize the maximum benefit of your efforts.
