[ =Linkbuilding_1]

During this 7 course series, we’ll be discussing the power of link building, what it is, and why you need to do it. Doing on page optimization of your keyword phrases, title tags, keeping your keyword density between 3-6% and having good inner site linking structure can really go a long way in ranking on page 1 of Google for long tail keywords. But if you are in a competitive niche with competitive keywords, you’ll need to go much farther than just on page optimization.

The answer is actually quite simple, and very powerful. The sites that get ranked the highest are those that have “authority” in Google’s eyes for a specific keyword. Authority is granted to sites based upon Keyword Authority, and Page Rank. These factors are determined by the quality and quantity of incoming links pointing to a website ? we will refer to it as building “backlinks”.

A backlink is a link that exists on another website, that points in to your homepage or one of the internal pages on your site.

Google has created a ranking factor called Page Rank, a number between 0-10 which is determined by how many links point to a specific page on your site. It also factors in the quality of those incoming links. For example, if www.mycoolsite.com has 500 outgoing links on its homepage, the value of each of those links is going to be much less than if it only had 10 outgoing links on the homepage. Page Rank takes that link “quality” into account, as well as the authority of the pages that link to your site when calculating your site’s Page Rank. Every “page” on a website will have its own pagerank. So while your homepage might be a Pagerank 4 (PR4 as its often called), your internal category or product pages might be a PR0 or PR1. Your goal is to attain backlinks from pages with the highest Page Rank possible.

Whenever a page links to another webpage, a portion of the PageRank from the originating site passes to the site that it is linking to (unless a “nofollow” tag is use within the link). A link from a page with a PR0 won’t do a whole lot to boost a web page’s Page Rank (although keep in mind if the link remains on this site and their PageRank goes up, you will benefit from that increase!). A link from a site with a Page Rank of 4 or 5 however would increase the value of that web page’s Page Rank.

Our Link Building Mastery course will be focusing on obtaining external backlinks from other webpages in order to increase the Page Rank of a specific web page of yours, and hence boost its rankings. You can get a rough idea of a page’s Page Rank by using the Google Toolbar, downloadable here: http://toolbar.google.com. Use this tool cautiously though as the accuracy of “toolbar pagerank” (that is the pagerank that the toolbar displays for a particular webpage) is widely disputed. Most agree there is a discrepancy between what Google actually uses for a page’s PageRank, and what is displayed on a toolbar. But it an be helpful as a guide.

Keyword Authority is a second major ranking factor and is determined by two main things:

1. Your Keyword research and optimization efforts

2. Relevance of your backlinks

Keyword research is the process by which you determine the most relevant and highly converting keywords and keyword phrases for the product or niche you want to sell into. Keyword Authority then builds on that by assessing the relevance of your incoming links (or backlinks). Anchor text is the “clickable” part of a link (the words or phrases that are often underlined). These words are what Google uses to assess the relevance of the link. Highly relevant incoming links (links that point to your site using keywords that are also found on your website) will give you more Keyword Authority. Additionally, the relevance of the site that is linking to your site, will also boost Keyword Authority, the overall value of the incoming link, hence boost your PageRank and give you higher rankings for that keyword.

Lets say for example, you have a link to your web page from a site about Healthy Eating, and your site was selling Dog Beds. The relevance of the link from the Healthy Eating site wouldn’t be much at all since it is not related to Dog Beds. You would get some PageRank from the link assuming the Healthy Eating site had a decent PageRank, but you would get minimal Keyword Authority from the link.

So how does Google and the other search engines determine whether a backlink is “relevant” for the purposes of increasing Keyword Authority?

1. The keyword research and optimization of the linking webpage

2. The keyword authority of the website that is linking to you

3. The anchor text of the link

1. The keyword research and optimization of the linking webpage

If the page that is linking to your page has been optimized with keywords that are similar or relevant to the keywords that you have optimized your site for, and that you are trying to rank for, then the link coming from that site will carry higher Keyword Authority. So for example, if your site is about wedding favors and you obtain a link from another site that has optimized their page for party favor ideas and tips, then the incoming link to your site will boost your keyword authority. However if you get a link from a page that has been optimized for the phrase “buy car insurance”, that link would not add much to your Keyword Authority since the keyword optimization for the site that is linking to you is not relevant to the keywords you are trying to rank for. It is important to try to gain links from sites that are relevant or thematically similar to the phrases you are trying to optimize for.

2. The Keyword Authority of the website that is linking to you

As it is important for you to build Keyword Authority for what you want to rank for, you also want to have links from sites that also have good Keyword Authority. That is, sites that link to you, that have many incoming links to their site, that are relevant and quality. Sites that rank towards the top of the search engines for their niche must have a good amount of Keyword Authority for their main keyword phrases that they have optimized for. So to obtain a link from one of those sites to yours (assuming it is in the same niche or related topic), would be very powerful. This can obviously be hard to do as many of these might be your competitors who obviously aren’t going to just give you a link, but if you can find websites that are relevant and related to your keyword, but are more informational in nature, or a blog that discusses your niche that you could obtain a link from, you would have some powerful links for building your own Keyword Authority. It is important to try to obtain links from high quality sites, that have high Keyword Authority for phrases that are similar or relevant to what you want to rank for.

As given in the previous example, if you have a link from a site about Healthy Eating and you were selling Dog Beds, the link would not give you much, if any, Keyword Authority. This is because the site about Healthy Eating has nothing to do with Dog Beds, and likely does not have any incoming links to their site relating to Dog Beds. Therefore Google will recognize that the linking site is not “authoritative” in any way about Dog Beds and as a result, the Keyword Authority from that link will not be much. If however you somehow were able to get a link from Petsmart.com pointing to your site (which likely has many links coming into its site about Dog Beds and dog related items), this link would be incredibly relevant and would give you much more Keyword Authority for Dog Beds.

3. The Anchor Text of the link

Anchor text is probably the easiest of these topics to understand, and is also the most critical step of the process. Anchor text is the part of a link that is “clickable”, usually underlined and often in blue. It is a word or set of words that have been linked to your site. Those words are what Google and the other search engines use to determine the relevance of the link to the site it is pointing to. Think of it like a “vote”. Like the example above, if a site that Google thinks is an authority on Dog Beds and pet related products like Petsmart.com links to you using the term “Dog Beds” as the clickable anchor text, it is akin to a powerful person in that industry telling Google “hey, this site really IS about Dog Beds ” and as a result has a strong impact on your rankings for that term.

A very common mistake that new marketers and website owners will make, is to try and get links from sites in the format of “www.mysite.com” as the anchor text. This will give you Keyword Authority under the keyword phrase of “http://www.mysite.com“. Unless you have a STRONG brand (we’re talking like if you are Coca Cola or McDonalds) then that might be ok, but we are wanting to rank well for words people are actually searching for to find our products. If your website is www.janeshomemadegifts.com and you are trying to sell really cool knit scarves, its not going to help you much that your site is #1 on google for www.janeshomemadegifts.com. You want to rank for phrases people are using (this is where your keyword research comes in again), but you want to try to get links with the anchor text “knit scarf” or “handknit scarves”, etc.

It is debatable amongst internet marketers as to whether or not having your keywords in your domain is beneficial or not. This is however one area where it will help you, hands down. As you build a customer and traffic base, you will naturally gain links from other sites who find you and might blog about you or post a link without you asking for it. In those cases you cannot control what the anchor text that is used will be, but if the site links to you using your domain, and your domain happens to have some of your keywords in it, then that will give you a boost in your Keyword Authority! Our recommendation is whenever possible, to look at domains that contain one or a few of your keywords (without it being a keyword “stuffed” domain which is not good).

So how do you create a link in HTML containing a keyword phrase as opposed to the actual URL of the link? You simply amend the anchor text, as follows -

This is a good link that will give you Keyword Authority for the keyword phrase “knit scarves” (if that is what your keyword research has shown you want to link for).

You don’t want your incoming links to look like this:

As you can see, your website is already being listed within the “a href” tag. There’s no need to then go on and insert the same website in the actual anchor text, as this has nothing to do with where the link will point.

Keyword Authority ? Maximize your ranking potential

So for the best impact on growing your Keyword Authority for each of your webpages, you’ll want to have link from other web pages that fits into the same category as the topic you’re discussing on your web page. Keep in mind what we are saying here refers to each individual page on your site, not just your homepage. You’ll want to pick 2 or 3 keyword phrases for each page of your site that are your primary keyword targets for that page. If you have an ecommerce site selling diapers, you’ll want to gain links to your homepage with more general phrases, maybe things like “buy diapers online”, “discount diapers”, etc. Then you’ll want to gain links to your internal pages using different anchor text, relating to each page on your site. If you have a page selling Pampers diapers, you’ll want links coming into that page to use the anchor text that might look like “discount pampers diapers” or “buy pampers online”, etc. You’ll want each of those links to come from a web page that contains optimized content for a similar keyword phrase. Lastly, you’ll want the actual link itself to be in the form of the keyword phrase, perhaps with a few words added to it so that it doesn’t look too obvious.

One thing to always keep in mind, is that it is possible to “over optimize”. The goal is for the link building to look natural and normal. You don’t want to gain links to quickly, or in unnaturally high numbers, or you could be penalized. You also usually don’t want more than 60% of the links coming into a page to have exactly the same anchor text. Mix it up and add in filler words to make it look like a natural link. If you are trying to build links for a page about belt buckles, then vary your anchor text on some of the links slightly using phrases like “buy belt buckles” or “quality belt buckles” or “belt buckles on sale”, etc.

What happens if a site contains only one of the above three things, or only two of them? That’s ok, the link will still carry “some” value, it just means you won’t gain as much Keyword Authority as if you got a site that contains all three relevant things to link to you.

If you received a good anchor text link from an irrelevant site with a high Page Rank, it would usually give you more Keyword Authority than if you received a link from a highly targeted site that had all of the above three things, but had little or no Page Rank. The algorithm for ranking and assessing these values is a highly complicated mathematical formula so its nearly impossible to assign our own value, the goal is to strive to obtain links from quality, authoritative sites, that are relevant to the page you are building links for, and that have as high Page Rank as possible.

Course 1 Homework – Keyword and Niche Research

Prior to the next lesson, your assignment is to make sure you have done thorough keyword analysis and competitive analysis on your site and your niche, so that you know which keywords you will be targeting as you begin your link building campaigns. If you have an existing site, this is a great time to review your current keyword campaigns and mak sure they are still the most relevant and highly converting keywords that you can. Here are guides to help you with your keyword and niche research:

• Keyword Research
• Niche Research
• Competitive Analysis

Link Building Master – Lesson 2 >>

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