We all want good SEO. We want to be ranked and seen. However, anyone who hires an SEO expert or is reading blogs and articles on SEO is looking for great SEO. SEO that drives traffic and influences search engine placement, as Debra Mastaler writes in her article “Smart Links Can Make Your SEO Sing”.

According to Mastaler, the two most important way to build links that will result in great SEO are to “use keywords as anchor text (also known as link text) and to point links to pages which have been optimized for the keyword terms you’re looking for in your anchors.” Although all working links contribute to your SEO strategy, smart linking will increase your visibility and drive your traffic even better than before.

I’ve been thinking about it this way: if you were shopping for a pair of shoes, you’d be unlikely to go into the hardware store and search for shoes there. Think about link building in the same way: your links need to be optimized to pages that have relevancy to your own products or services. Even Bing’s Webmaster Blog recognizes says, “when seeking an endorsement with an external, inbound link, the theme of the site you want to link to yours should be relevant to your site’s theme”.

One of the most powerful components of link popularity is called anchor text (the clickable links inside the text you are reading). Google and Bing both recognize anchored text and how it defines the themes of your pages and influences how your site ranks when search results are determined. So, including well-researched links that point to your sight will increase your rankings, and inevitably the number of visitors who can find you as a result of those rankings. As Mastaler summarizes, “Your keyword anchors help influence how you rank for a particular phrase. If a lot of sites are hosting your keyword rich links and the engine can determine those links were not injected to manipulate the search results, your target page is on it’s way to ranking well.”

Including keywords as anchor text and developing optimized links is not an easy task. However, it is worth the time and effort to build a website for your business that relies on first-rate content, which will result in great SEO results. Great SEO strategy will get you great rankings.

Link building can seem like a long process. With a myriad of articles and books on the subject, it can feel like the research alone takes forever, let alone actually going through the process. Some online marketing gurus specialize in just this aspect of the business and they guide us through the process and provide much-needed shortcuts. Garrett French, who wrote the article “How to Build Links Faster: 5 Tips for Faster Link Qualification”, is one of those gurus.

French’s 5 suggested tips for faster link qualification are as follows:

1. Align link prospecting methods with linkable assets: your linkable assets need to line up with your link prospecting methods, so that they are pre-qualified as link prospects. Doing this will shortening the time it takes to decide whether or not to add them to what French calls your “outreach list”.
2. Check the tool-based URL quality scores: there are link prospect sources, such as Linkscape and MajesticSEO, which provide a scoring method that estimates the value or trust that given pages have earned. This information allows you to weed through your prospects and focus on the ones that give the best returns. French recommends saving it all though, as “today’s trash could be tomorrow’s treasure when you create and launch new linkable assets!”
3. Count URL, hostname occurrences in SERPs and competitor backlinks: “The number of times a URL and/or hostname appears can be a vital signal of quality. If you’re using queries for your link prospecting, we highly recommend running them through the URL and Hostname Counter Tool and the process outlined in Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities. If you use link building queries in place of your targeted SEO keywords, you will more-quickly discover larger numbers of qualified prospects.” The key to this approach is focusing on a single linkable asset and working through each one. This is not a time for multi-tasking.
4. Remove duplicate hostname occurrences from big lists: use the “Remove URLs with Duplicate Hosts” tool to ensure a concise list of hostnames. This way you will get the top URLs from each website, rather than an overload of the same URLs over and over again. Think of this as your big weeding out stage.
5. Make quicker visits to each URL for final decision making: the first steps have been about removing the excess and getting a list of quality URLs. Now the tedious part of qualifying each URL by hand comes in. There are a few steps that can make it faster, including disabling the imaged in your browses, using something like the “URL Reviewer” to open a list of URLs in new tabs in your browser, and then running through them individually.

Once you’ve built your list of links, remember to also make a list of prospects that you don’t want, so you can avoid those URLs in the future. Link building is still not an instant process, but following these tips will help streamline it and make it a little less overwhelming.